Marketing Your House
- Make sure your home is well-marketed on the Internet. This is your real estate agent’s responsibility, but you should make sure that it gets done. More than 80 percent of house hunters start their home search on the Web. So your listing should be on all of the top real estate listing sites like FrontDoor.com, Yahoo, Craigslist and Realtor.com. Internet marketing is virtually free; if your real estate agent posts your home on five sites, it costs you nothing but time to post it on 10 more. Some sites will actually syndicate your virtual flier to dozens of other sites.
- There is no such thing as too many pictures. Property listings that have no pictures are skipped over by the majority of buyers. The more photos of your home are associated with the listing, the longer time buyers will spend looking, and they will be more likely to come see your home.
- Condition, condition, condition. Clean it up, spruce it up, fix it up, but don’t spend too much. If you are facing foreclosure you probably can’t afford the time or the money it would take to do major work. Focus on the things that are inexpensive, but make a major cosmetic difference, like paint and carpet. Have your real estate agent refer you to a handyman who can caulk cracks in the tile, fix minor leaks, and patch scrapes and holes in the walls. These things are cheap to fix and make a negative impression if you don’t fix them. Make sure your place is immaculate every time a buyer steps inside. Piles, messes and odors are extremely distracting to buyers and can even cost you a sale.
- Offer creative concessions and/or financing perks. Some house hunters who want to buy your house might have a hard time doing so. Help them out! Offer such concessions as assuming your mortgage (with the lender’s consent), a lease with option to buy, or closing cost credits that will help the buyer defray closing costs or buy down the interest rate.
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