The ultimate list to help you sell your home.

Selling your home is a massive decision, and it shouldn’t be underestimated. And with large decisions can come stress. Therefore, being as organised as possible is essential to get the best money for your home, and to ensure that stress levels stay well under control. Today we present the To-Do list you must use in order to sell your home.

1. Establish your motivations: The first thing you need to do is establish how motivated you are to sell. If you aren’t exceptionally motivated, selling will remain a pipeline dream with no action. Discuss the reasons why you want to sell and what it is you expect to gain out of selling. Once you are certain this is something you want to do, cross this off the list.

2. Engage your ‘Local Expert’ agent: It’s all too simple to just pick an agent that is a friend or knows something about real estate. You do however, need to find a local agent that has a proven track record. Looking at their ‘Local Expert’ points and reviews of the agent can help establish who really knows your area.

3. Establish budgets: Before you go and spruce the home up, establish what it is you want to get out of the sale. Find comparable sales and get a ballpark figure in mind. Once you know what you want and think is reasonable, you can then be guided on how much you can and want to spend on presentation. Also ask your agent where your budget is best spent.

4. Establish terms: Once you know roughly how much you want to achieve for your sale, establish the sales terms you want. This is just as important as the price. Would a quicker settlement be worth an extra $20,000 to you? Be very transparent to your agent and also explain your motivations for the sale here.

5. Choose between an Auction, Private Sale, Expressions of Interest: There are multiple ways to sell your home. Each option provides a unique offering to the vendor. Private Sales and Expressions of Interest afford you and your family more privacy during the process. An auction may get you more traffic, however a lot more of this will be irrelevant traffic with people wanting to stickybeak. Weigh up what your property is more suited to and the privacy you want to uphold during the process.

6. Write your conditional prices: A lot of people just write down one figure and expect a sale to end when they achieve that price or more. However as a vendor you need to be more innovative than that and look at as many different ways you can sell your property. One way to do this is to write different prices relative to settlement terms. If you have to move out quicker as the new purchaser needs the property, maybe that requires the top end of your budget. On the contrary, a slower settlement, that provides you more time at home and less time renting or having delays in moving in to your next home may be worth a lot more and make you more willing to taking figures off the end of your sale price.

7. Get your campaign underway: Getting exposure for your property is the best way to boost the final sales price. Engaging multiple platforms of exposure in both on and offline is the best way to get the best price come auction day. Make sure you have thought of the following things:

• Signboards
• Brochures
• Online ads
• Printed letterbox drops

All of these will help increase the exposure for your home and bring in locals and neighbours who may be interested or know someone interested to your place.

8. Set benchmarks before the campaign to test before auction day: A lot of people get to auction day and don’t get the result they wanted and then ask why? The signs are generally in the inspections and consumer interest. The auction should be a representation of the consumer interest. It’s very rare a home has no traffic through it, no contracts given out, and then goes and sells for 50% over reserve. Set the KPI’s you want to see / should see for success and ask how you can change strategies if the level of interest isn’t high enough.

9. Go to auction: On auction day, your hard work has been done. You will be nervous but there isn’t more you can do. Simple establish the figure you NEED to see in order for the property be on the market. Let the agent work their magic and explain that you need to see that figure to sell. Adapt as the auction goes and measure if your expectations seem realistic as it goes.

10. Put it on the market, or hold out: In your mind keep that figure you NEED to see. If that figure goes over, great, your decision is made, it’s on the market. If it doesn’t ask yourself how far off it you are. Deduct the amount you have spent and ask if the cost of spending this all again would be worth it to achieve a better price. A lot of people don’t realise that if the campaign has cost you $30,000 and you don’t sell and try again in two months, it now owes you $60,000 to make up the first campaign. Will you be adding more than that $30,000 on the second time around?

What else do you think you need to establish before you sell your home? Give us a shoutout on Twitter!