I Want To Sell My Home Before 2022. Where Do I Start?

With only a couple months left in the year, there is no better time than now to meet a few of your 2021 goals before 2022 begins.

If one of them includes selling your home, then you’ve come to the right place. Selling your home in a brief time can seem overwhelming, especially when you're juggling many other responsibilities in your life. After all, it involves clearing out and staging your home, gathering necessary paperwork, and getting your home ready to show for potential buyers.

Hiring a professional, a real estate agent, will help you do all of that and keep you in high spirits during the process.

Keep reading to learn the critical steps to getting your home ready for sale!

1. Decluttering and Staging

The first (and biggest) step to preparing your home for sale is to declutter and stage your house. This can be time-consuming, so make sure you have plenty of hands to help!

Begin decluttering one room at a time, starting with the room you use the least and working your way up to the room you use the most. Do the same in the garden or yard. During this process, you may notice some fencing that needs repairs, or part of an exterior that needs re-painting, so make sure you note these and get working on them as soon as possible,  hiring professionals ahead of time if necessary.

Look out for any signs of mold, as this can be a deal-breaker for potential buyers. You'll want to do this earlier on in the process, as it can take weeks for the house to be completely clear of it.

The house may need a professional cleaning service, and your real estate agent will guide you on this, but leave this as the last thing you do before you put your home up for sale.

By the end of the cleaning and decluttering stage, your house should not just look show-ready, it should smell like it too. Fresh flowers and plants can certainly help if this is an issue. But even if it isn't, flowers will definitely add some liveliness and freshness to your property, which will go a long way towards a successful sale!

Staging your home may include tidying up the garden bed in the front yard, adding decor to the interior, and/or rearranging furniture. A well-staged home can raise the sale price by 5-10 percent, so take your time to do it properly. Your real estate may offer staging as a service or be able to make recommendations here as well.

A real estate agent can help with all of this and give you a non-biased opinion of improvements to better the look and feel of your home.

2. Pricing the Home to Sell

So now that you've prepared your home to go on the market, you need to come up with a price. This is when you need a real estate agent. They have the experience, knowledge, and expertise to help sell your home for the best potential profit.

Real estate agents can also help with:

• Marketing your home - this is an absolutely necessary part of achieving a profitable sale. Without proper marketing, your home will not get the right type of attention from the right buyers. A real estate agent is an expert in knowing the ins and outs of what makes a successful sale through marketing and can help you receive the money you rightfully deserve.
• Navigating paperwork - ah, paperwork, the least exciting part of the entire process! Luckily, a real estate agent can take care of this, look out for disclosure laws that could otherwise lead to fraud, and get it done 10 times faster than if you were to attempt it all alone.
• Selling your home for the best price in the shortest amount of time - let's be honest, selling your home can be an emotional event. You are more prone to making mistakes based on fear of loss and other negative emotions. During the valuation process, a real estate agent can help you find the best potential value for your property as well as help you feel optimistic and calm along the way.

3. Keeping Your Home Show-Ready

Preparing your home so that it is show-ready is one big milestone in selling your home, but keeping it that way is also equally important. Ensure that the weeks and days leading up to putting your home on the market that you treat it as if it's already someone else's. Maintenance and regular check-ups of different rooms and areas of your house should be one of your top priorities before putting it up for sale.

4. Hiring a Real Estate Agent

The benefits of hiring a real estate agent are limitless. Hiring a real estate agent will take an enormous weight off your shoulders and allow you to sleep peacefully at night, knowing that expert opinion and advice is going into listing your home. Real estate agents are professionals, rightfully so, but they are also leaders in market knowledge and specialized information that isn't available to the naked eye.

When you decide to enlist the help of a real estate agent, they may be able to go through your home and point out other changes and modifications that can be made to raise the value of your property.