First time home seller's guide : Rooftop Views

Rooftop Views

First time home seller's guide

Kinan Beck of One Source Realty in Austin, TX, has some Real Estate 101 to pass along to first time home sellers.

When it comes time to sell your home, you will likely have a number of questions racing through your head all at once. First, you will be concerned about what you need to do in order to increase your chances of finding someone to buy your home. Second, you will likely feel a bit overwhelmed when selecting your agent. By following a few simple steps, however, you will find that it can actually be quite easy to sell a home for the first time.

Making Your Home Into a House

One of the most important steps you will need to take in order to sell your home is to de-personalize it. When you are shopping to buy a home, you want to find a piece of property you can picture yourself living in. The same holds true for your prospective buyers. Therefore, you don't want them to see the house and you have personalized it. Rather, you want to remove personal items so your potential buyer can see himself living in the home.

In order to de-personalize your house, you should remove knick-knacks and other items of a personal nature. In addition, if you have transformed a bedroom into a music studio, a pet room or something else, you should change it back into a bedroom. Otherwise, potential buyers may have a difficult time seeing the room as something other than what you have turned it into.

Adding Curb Appeal to Your Real Estate

In order to improve your chances of selling your home in a short period of time, you need to take steps to improve the curb appeal. Curb appeal refers to the way the home looks when the person first sees it from the road. In order to improve curb appeal, you might need to invest a bit of cash. But, the investment will be well worth it. Some simple ways to improve curb appeal include:

add flowers or other landscaping elements to the front of the house,
apply a fresh coat of exterior paint,
add shutters, window boxes or other decorative elements to the outside of the house and
repair any broken windows, hanging address numbers or other noticeable problems.

Each of these improvements are simple and cost less than a few hundred dollars. Yet, taking these steps can increase your profits while also helping you sell the real estate faster.

Picking the Best Real Estate Agent

Your agent is going to play a major role when it comes to selling your home. As such, you want to take care in selecting the agent to work with you. To that end, it is best to interview a few different real estate agents. Don't be suckered into going with the agent who appraises your home at the highest value. Although this may seem as though the agent has your best interest in mind, some will use this tactic in order to win over new clients and will later talk them into lowering their price. Rather, go with the agent who seems to be the most honest and you are the most comfortable with. By taking steps to improve the appearance of your home and by selecting the right real estate agent, it shouldn't take you long at all to sell your house and move into a new place you can now call home