5 Tips for the Homeowner Who Needs to Offload a Property Fast

Maybe you’re trying to move to a new city so you can start your job. Maybe you’re in a tough financial situation. Maybe you just want to get the process over with as soon as possible. In any case, you want your home to sell quickly, and just hoping you’ve timed the market correctly isn’t going to cut it.

Instead, there are multiple proactive strategies you can use to push your home through the seller’s market faster and get the cash and closure you need to move on with your life. Best of all, these strategies aren’t exactly time-intensive, so you can manage them even while you’re trying to make accommodations for your new situation.

5 Steps to Sell Your Home Faster

These are some of the easiest and best steps to take if you want your home to sell faster.

1. Pick a selling price to move.

After figuring out the approximate value of your home, you’ll want to figure out an asking price to keep your house moving. Ordinarily, you’ll take the projected value of your home and inflate it, so even with negotiations, you’re able to strike a profit. However, this usually draws out the sales process, dissuading potential buyers. If you price your home at or slightly lower than its true value, you might take a monetary hit, but you’ll certainly offload the house much faster.

2. Improve the curb appeal.

You can also increase the interest of potential buyers simply by boosting your home’s curb appeal. Small changes, such as a fresh coat of exterior paint, a clean driveway, and some beautiful flowers out front, can instantly form a better first impression for interested buyers. This may not be the sole selling point for your home, but it will certainly invite more prospects in to see the rest of what you’re offering—and more prospects mean a faster sale.

3. Invest in online marketing.

The majority of prospective home buyers now start their searches online, so make sure you invest time in creating and executing an online marketing plan. Each new listing will take only minutes to create, so ensure your house is listed on as many online real estate platforms as possible. Beyond that, you may want to invest some extra money in an online advertising strategy; pay-per-click (PPC) ads and boosted listings won’t cost you much money, won’t take much time to set up, but will forward tons of new traffic your way.

4. Depersonalize the interior.

You may love the unique furniture you selected for the living room and the family pictures going up the staircase, but prospective home buyers don’t care about who came before them. There are many different tastes and viewpoints to consider, so your best bet for a fast sale is to entirely depersonalize the interior. Try to keep things as neutral as possible, with plain wall colors, basic furniture that highlights how the room is supposed to be used, absent pets, and a lack of personal additions (such as photos and art).

5. Use high-quality photos.

Finally, when listing your home online, make sure you take and upload lots of high-quality photos. Show off multiple angles of every room in your home, with good lighting, using a high-quality camera capable of showing fine detail. Your goal is to make your online prospects feel like they can see every corner of your house as it truly exists. For this reason, it may be worth hiring a photographer or at least trying to learn the basics of photography before proceeding.

Working With an Agent

If you want the process to go even faster, make sure you hire a real estate agent. They’ll be able to help you implement the above strategies and point you in the right direction in terms of pricing, marketing, and placement. Though sell prices always vary, you can usually count on an increase in price when listing with a real estate agent; it should more than makeup for their commission fees. Even if that doesn’t pan out, it will be worth the extra percentage of your home sale to get the home sold at a faster rate.

Any tips you’d add to this list?

Leave your comments below!

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.