How to Prepare to Sell Your House

There are a lot of reasons to sell a house. Maybe you want an upgrade. Maybe you want less house to manage. Maybe you need to move for any number of personal or professional reasons. Regardless of why, when it comes to selling the house, there are things you need to know.

Selling a house is a major undertaking, so it helps to know how to prepare to sell your house on the open market. Fortunately, you can get a clear idea from just three simple tips. When you’re ready to sell, why not give We Buy House Birmingham a call.

Research Prices

If you’re going to sell a house, one of the most important preparations is to know how much the property is really worth. This requires homework, and you shouldn’t skimp on it. If you overvalue your house, you’ll never sell it. If you undervalue it, you’ll lose out on money you could have made. 

You can start with light research. You can use online resources like a Zestimate or other estimating tools, but keep in mind that this is just a starting point. It’s not a perfect evaluation of the home.

The estimates will give you a ballpark figure. From there, you can do deeper research to see if your house is worth more or less than others in the neighborhood. You’re going to want to think about how modern the house is. What is the square footage? Do you have more bedrooms and bathrooms or fewer than other houses in the area? Is it in good repair?

Ultimately, if you want a precise estimate of the value of your house, you can consider an appraisal, but those cost money. Ultimately, getting a real estate expert to look at the home can help you understand what might be lowering or raising the value when you compare it to other homes in the area.

Weigh the Value of Home Improvements

Once you have an idea of how much your home is worth, you have to start making decisions. If you were hoping to get more for the home, you might want to make some upgrades to push up the sale value. Conversely, if the house is worth more than you realized, it might be easier to sell it as is. But if you’re going to hire a realtor and go through that sales process, then you still want to consider small improvements that help a house sell faster.

So consider what you can do to improve the house. Get estimates on how much those changes will cost and then compare them to how much they change the value of the home. For the most part, bathroom and kitchen upgrades tend to pay for themselves (especially when you modernize old styles). Other improvements don’t put more money in your pocket.

But anything that makes the house more attractive is likely to help it sell faster. So you also need to weigh the cost of improvements against how long you can wait to sell the house.

Learn About Different Options for Selling

Then again, you can take a completely different approach. There are plenty of tactics that you can use to sell your house, and sometimes, they are very good for your bottom line.

The traditional way to sell a house is to hire a realtor. They’ll list and show the house and make sure you get through all of the paperwork just fine. This is usually the slowest way to sell a house, and it often requires you to do a lot of prep work to stage the house and make it attractive for buyers.

Instead, you could sell to a cash home buyer. This is an industry expert who buys houses in order to flip them, rent them, or otherwise turn a profit. Cash home buyers buy houses for cash and as is. This means you don’t have to make a single change to the house. You get what it’s currently worth, and the entire thing can be done in as little time as a few days. It’s definitely the best way to sell your house fast.

If that sounds enticing at all, then contact We Buy Houses Birmingham today. As the name suggests, we buy houses in the area all the time. Fill out our contact form, and we’ll get in touch. We will give you a cash offer on your home with no obligation on your part. You’ll see that this is very much as easy as it sounds.