How to shorten the selling period of your home

You often hear real estate agents talk about the three Ps:

• presentation
• promotion
• price.

If your property has been on the market for a while and hasn’t sold, it’s worth taking a look at each of the Ps to see if there’s something you can tweak.

Presentation

First impressions are everything, so consider how your house is presenting to someone seeing it for the first time.

Sight

Sometimes there’s a glaring problem with how the property looks. For example, you might have a lime green kitchen, a 70s-orange bathroom, or gothic blue and black walls.

You must remove these glaring problems if you want to sell your house quickly. 

This may involve resurfacing the problem areas with paint, tile paint, Laminex or new tiles. At Bourkes, we did have a property with a bright lime green kitchen that wasn’t selling. We had it industrially painted and it sold the following weekend!

Smell

Your house may have a smell that you don’t notice because you live there. For example, you may have dogs or smokers in your home.

If dogs usually live the home, they have to be banished outside during the marketing period. You may need to treat the internals with a non-smell agent.

Sound

If your house is near a busy highway or road, this may be upsetting buyers. Explore the costs of double or triple glazing on the front of the home to eliminate the noise.

Damage

Potential buyers may be seeing some damage in the home that is putting them off. For example, damp walls or cracks in walls. These may be small cracks or more serious structural cracks. Either way, these should be fixed before you try to sell your property.

Promotion

Spend

You may have a great house but that’s not much good if no one knows about it. The larger your marketing budget, the wider you’ll cast your net to attract more buyers. 

So you may need to increase your marketing spend to increase your potential buyers. Talk about this with your agent.

Pricing strategy and timeframe

If you’ve been marketing with a price, perhaps change to no-price marketing. If you haven’t provided a price, perhaps move to an ‘indication of price’ (e.g. ‘Will suit buyers in the mid-$600s’. 

Or you could try putting a deadline on results, such as an auction or a set date when offers will close.

Photos

Have a serious look at your property photos. Are they good enough? Are they showing the best aspects of the house that would attract buyers?

Price

You may be receiving messages from buyers, such as ‘The kitchen is too old’ or ‘There’s not enough room’ or ‘We don’t like the colours’. Generally, what they mean is that the price is too high or wrong – they just don’t want to admit it.

A change in price will usually overcome all these complaints. Often, the moment you reduce the price, you get an offer very close to the new price. If a campaign has stalled, we find that a price adjustment will start things up again.

Your agent

Unfortunately, if your presentation and promotion are good, your price is fair and you’ve been getting offers, it’s probably your agent. Consider whether it’s time to find a new one.

Find the most successful agents in the area and interview them to take over the marketing once the authority has finished with the current agent. Analyse all the factors in this article again once you’ve chosen the right agent. It might make all the difference.

If you’re struggling to sell your property quickly and would like assistance with your sale, contact Alan Bourke or anyone from Bourkes on (08) 9474 2000.