Selling your home can be a harrowing experience, especially as you want to sell it for the highest price possible. There is a major element of psychology and strategy. In order to sell your home for the most money and as quickly as possible, you must put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and do your research.

Ultimately, there is no mathematical formula for pricing your home, and even your best efforts can fail to the whims of supply and demand. But the right steps can increase your odds of walking away from your home feeling satisfied.

Fix your Home up

This is an obvious first step, but it is an absolutely critical one. You do not need to radically renovate your home, but you want to show that your home is the best one available in its price range. That means it is time to clean every last inch, make your yard beautiful with the help of the Pheonix Turf Experts, and make little small repairs which show buyers what a good home this is. Pretend to be a buyer who has no emotional attachment to your home, walk through your house, and note potential objections. 

Smart Asset has some excellent tips on how to boost your home’s value quickly and cheaply like getting rid of clutter and upgrading your bathroom fixtures. A small investment here can pay off immensely soon.

Figure out your Listing Range

You may look at your home and how much you have sunk into it for the years, but the buyer does not care about that. The buyer is going to compare your home to the other homes for sale in the area, which means that you have to do the same thing.

A big mistake which many house sellers do is that they try to compare apples to oranges. They compare their homes with a similar-sized home in the neighborhood, but miss that the second home is closer to a school or was built 10 years later. Only compare your home to one which is a similar size and is one mile away at most, and check your active listings. Finding an appropriate price range for your home will take plenty of homework.

Don’t price too high

Everyone knows that home prices have some wiggle room, and so home owners often price their homes at the high end in hopes that the seller and buyer will negotiate down to what the seller really wants. This is especially so since we are currently in a seller’s market.

But contrary to what people think, there are real downsides in asking for an excessive price. Supply and demand still exists, and if you price too high, no one will buy. If you form an LLC and end up slashing prices, buyers will still stay away either because they believe that the price slashing means something is wrong with the home, or out of hoping that the price will be slashed further. Realtor lists other reasons why owners try to price their homes for too much, and how it leads to problems.

I am not necessarily saying that you should price your house at the low end, though that is not necessarily bad as it can spark a bidding war. But a fair price is the best price.

Price it for Searches

We search for everything online these days, and home buyers and realtors are no different. You want your home to appear in as many searches as possible and so should set the price accordingly.

For example, some home sellers would try to sell a home for $399,000 using the classic logic of using 9’s to trick sellers into thinking the price is much lower than it really is. But by selling it at $399,000, you may miss out on anyone searching for a house worth $400,000 or more. By pricing it at $400,000, you thus can attract a wider variety of searches.

This example shows that contrary to what is commonly assumed, there is nothing wrong with using many 0’s in your price. In fact, avoid unusual prices which contain no 0’s at all such as $399,999. That can attract suspicion and drive customers away.

Use a Real Estate Agent

You can read plenty of guides on how to sell a home, but that does not make you a realtor any more than spending time on WebMD makes you a doctor. As Time points out, a good real estate agent can aggressively market your home, vet buyers so you only deal with serious prospects, and handle paperwork.

Picking the right agent can be tricky, especially since the single worst thing you can do selling a home is to instantly grab the agent who promises the highest listing price. They may be overpromising because they are desperate to get the listing, and will thus almost certainly under deliver. Check for credentials, ask for references, and do your due diligence.