The days of high house price growth across the country are history, at least for the foreseeable future. Selling a home is now even harder than it already was.
The promise of easy profit when buying a home made the protracted pain of purchasing worth it. Buyers put up with a lot of hassle for what they (often mistakenly) think is low risk, easy money. But even so, selling was slow, risky and often resulted in wasted costs on failed sales.
So, if selling a home is painful even when the market is rising you can see why selling a home in a flat market is even harder.
In fact it isn’t harder, provided you accept the reality of the changes in the housing market. Done correctly, you will get at least three different buyers offering on your home within 28 days of launching, even in a flat market.
Any and every home will sell in any market, with multiple buyers bidding so you can be sure you’ve got the best price in the current market, provided you choose an agent who knows how to create a market for every home they sell.
The challenge for sellers is that these agents are vanishingly rare, but they do exist. And even if you can’t find one, provided you make your chosen agent follow these instructions (and they are required to follow your instructions unless they decline to sell your home), then you can still achieve a swift sale of your home with the confidence you haven’t sold it cheap.
Adopt the ‘Market Mindset’
Most sellers, especially first timers, have almost no idea about the complexities of the wild beast that is the housing market, and how to approach it without being chewed up and spat out. Inexperienced sellers usually make the following assumptions, all of which are completely wrong:
Incorrect assumption number one: “My home is worth the same no matter which agent sells it.”
Whilst this is an understandable assumption, it is completely wrong. The price your home sells for is determined not by the condition or specification of your home, but by the number of buyers who compete over it, the ability of the selling agent to anticipate and defend against unfair last minute renegotiations, whether or not you have to find somewhere to buy before you can move out, and the transparency of material information on your property provided early in the process.
What you must tell yourself is “It’s impossible to sell our home for more than someone will pay for it, and no one will pay more than they have to, so we must get competing buyers if we want to be sure we’ve got the best price the market will pay.”
Incorrect assumption number two: “We know what our home is worth.”
No, you don’t. No one does. Not your agent, and not even the professional registered valuer who will come and do an assessment on behalf of the buyers mortgage lender. They are all guesses with various degrees of education and can be surprisingly wrong.
Unless you can read the minds and know the detailed financial and life circumstances of all the strangers who would end up bidding on your home, you cannot know what your home is worth.
It doesn’t matter what you paid for it, or when. It doesn’t matter how many “record house price” headlines you’ve seen. It doesn’t matter how much you have spent on doing it up. The market for your home doesn’t know of or care about any of these things. The market for your home is determined by a set of actions that make all those things
Even if your neighbour just sold their identical home a week ago at a price you know, it doesn’t mean anything, because your home will not sell for at least a few months, your buyer will be different and your circumstances (and therefore your motivation to sell) are different from your neighbours.
What you must instead tell yourself is “No one knows what our home is worth, and the only way to find out is to bring it to the market in a way that gets competing buyers. Then and only then will we know what it’s worth.”
Incorrect assumption number three: “As long as it’s on the internet, buyers will find it.”
The fastest way to rid yourself of this dangerously mistaken assumption is to go and look on the internet at just how many hundreds of thousands of homes are sitting, unsold, gathering dust, despite being ‘on the internet’.
Your goal is to get at least 12 to 15 qualified, proceedable buyers through the door, within 7 days of each other. Just being ‘on the internet’ doesn’t achieve that, it takes real knowledge, skill, experience and wisdom, because markets are fickle, people are people, and as agents always say “buyers are liars”.
There is a critical process to be followed which involves how your home is presented, how well prepared for sale it is from a legal perspective, how it is described, how well it is presented to your agents’ pre-registered and qualified buyers before it goes ‘on the internet’ (only very good agents will have these at the ready).
Then there is the skill required to fend off the time wasters, the tyre kickers and the tricksters who are out there in abundance and are very effective at spotting naive sellers and or agents, because the time wasters will kill your sale by pretending to be your buyer so you cancel all the other viewings, then later dropping the price they promised. It’s an old trick but there’s one born every minute who falls for it.
To actually achieve 12, 15 or even 20 qualified buyers with confirmed viewing appointments in the diary takes preparation and a lot of work. Any agent shouting about their cheap fee is guaranteed not to deliver these results as they won’t have the budget to cover the work involved.
What you must tell yourself instead is “We must choose an agent who can demonstrate a clear process to deliver multiple viewings, which doesn’t simply rely on being ‘on the internet’, and an agent who can show us a consistent track record of delivering multiple viewings and offers every time.”
Incorrect assumption number four: “Agents know what’s happening in the market so they’ll know what our home is worth.”
It’s another reasonable assumption to make if you’re a first time seller, but it simply isn’t true. But worse than that, most agents will knowingly exaggerate the value of your home, in order to flatter you into choosing them. But this only serves to put buyers off and reduce the number of viewings you get booked when you launch.
The only truthful answer an agent can give if you ask them what they think your home is worth is “We don’t know, and neither to any other agents. But if we do our job well, you’ll know for certain what it’s worth within a few weeks of launching, and you can then proceed with your moving plans with confidence.”
What you must tell yourself instead is “We mustn’t ask agents what they think our home is worth, we must ask them exactly how they deliver at least 12 viewings from qualified buyers. We must talk to as many agents as possible to be sure we don’t miss the right one.”
The final incorrect assumption: “We only need to talk to three agents”.
This is possibly the most damaging mistake. No one wants to have to talk to more people than necessary, but when you think about the importance of the outcome of this decision, and the difference between a good and a bad one, you’ll soon see that it makes sense to speak to as many agents as necessary, even if it’s is as many as 8 or 9, to be sure you’ve got it right.
Selling your home is a gauntlet that no one enjoys, but it’s one of the most important steps you take in life. People spend months or years on the planning of a single day for their wedding, when it could be argued that the ability to move home when you need to is even more important than the font you used on your table place names on the big day.
If you follow these steps, in any market, you’ll have a very high chance of a swift and successful outcome in most cases. Avoid buyers in chains if you can, and be prepared to move out of the home you’re selling if necessary, even if you haven’t found your next one, if that option is available to you. It often results in a faster overall move.
Above all, choose your agent like your future depends on it, because it actually does.