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Drama-Free RE: Top 10 Ways to Sell a Home Without All the Drama

By Tara-Nicholle Nelson, FrontDoor.com | Published: 4/14/2009

If your home has been languishing on the market, a price reduction or two could result in multiple offers and a higher sale price than your asking price.

If your home has been languishing on the market, a price reduction or two could result in multiple offers and a higher sale price than your asking price.

#7: Jumpstart your stalled listing by evolving your sales strategy.

You primped and spruced your house beyond recognition, analyzed every recent sale within a mile to come up with a price and interviewed four different Realtors before entrusting one with your listing. And after all that work, your house has been on the market 90 days with not one single offer! Every day that goes by just deepens your sense of ominous dread that you might never get an offer and the panicky feeling that you might be trapped. So what now?

Stay engaged. See, putting your home up for sale is not a set-it-and-forget-it type exercise -- you cannot put it on autopilot. Your job is to stay actively engaged and listen to what the market is telling you. When you have had no offers for a long period of time, there's really no need to ask buyers' brokers for feedback. They are giving you their feedback loud and clear! The market is telling you that your home is priced too high, and it may take extraordinary measures to re-ignite the interest in your property.

Find your home's pricing sweet spot. I've seen it time and time again -- a property languishes on the market for months, then has a price reduction or two and voila! -- they end up with multiple offers and get more than their asking price. To find your home's sweet spot, start reducing the price, and I'm not talking about a few hundred dollars. You want your reduction to make a big splash, get some new attention and put every buyer in town on notice that you are serious about selling.

If you can bring your price just below a $25,000, $50,000 or $100,000 price point break, you'll get your home into the searches of buyers in a totally new price range, folks who haven't seen your place before. So, instead of going from $250,000 to $235,000, reduce the price to $224,999. Then you'll expose your house to buyers who enter an upper price range limit of $225,000 in their web property searches -- people who might never have seen your home before.

Put every Realtor in town on the case. Believe it or not, if your home is languishing on the market, your Realtor may be losing just as much sleep as you! If you want to create a veritable sales force of agents, though, light a fire under the local Realtor community by creating some incentives for them to show -- and sell -- your home. You can offer a higher than normal commission to galvanize folks. I've seen commissions as high as 5 percent for a low-priced home! Also, offering a few thousand bucks in a bonus to the buyer's broker that closes the deal definitely makes a tough-to-sell home a more compelling listing for buyer's reps to show.

NEXT: #6: Pick a Realtor that can manage the market and you >>

GO TO: Drama-Free Home Selling Main Page


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