Selling Your Home in Raleigh, NC

Selling Your Home in Raleigh?

Here are some things you should know.

Yes, it's a seller's market, but there's a catch.

The catch is that you might be led to believe "seller's market" means "easy money." We've all read the articles saying how hot the Raleigh market is right now, but the truth is this: if you don't know how to properly tap into that heat, you could be left out in the cold.

Here's the trap that many sellers are falling into currently: in a hot market, it's easy to think you can overprice your home while under-delivering on value and still cash out with a quick sale. And sure, in the price points under $200,000, homes are getting snatched up with lightning speed. But elsewhere, this is just not the case. Let's look at the average days on market for homes in Raleigh at different price points.

See how much that increases when the price point gets over $326,000? That price point is where the majority of homes are listed, and within that range, things get much more competitive.

Buyers in 2018 are smarter, savvier, more empowered and more demanding than ever before. Zillow and Realtor.com gave that power to them. In Raleigh and the surrounding areas, buyers are flooding into the market looking for homes, and the inventory of available properties is just not keeping up. That's what is creating the heat in the market for sellers, but what they're not telling you is that your home needs to be marketed properly or all those buyers may walk right on by.

Here are the keys to selling your home faster and for more money.

A better home selling experience starts with a combination of a few important skills: market knowledge; marketing ability; and negotiation.

The first one is obvious. Market knowledge is key for anyone looking to sell a home, because the market will dictate what the correct list price for a home will be. Picking an amount of money that you want to make from the sale of your home and running with that as a list price is not the best course of action. To find a price that buyers will be willing to pay, you'll need a detailed analysis of the market in your specific neighborhood. No matter what condition a home is in or where it is located, every home has a buyer. But that buyer is only going to pay a price that he or she finds attractive, and selecting that price is a valuable skill.

The next thing you'll need if you want to sell your home is marketing capabilities. And we're not just talking about putting a sign in the yard and posting your home on Zillow and your Facebook page. Remember earlier when we said today's buyers are extremely smart and savvy? Well if you want to sell a home for top dollar, you need to be smarter and savvier with marketing. Getting in front of agents and buyers is a complicated process, but when you get an interested party to view your listing, you want them to be impressed right from the start. That means staging your home, taking high quality photography, producing videos and virtual tours, writing accurate and appealing descriptions, and more. If you want buyers to notice your home, you'll need to give them something that makes your listing stand out among the hundreds of other homes for sale and get them off your Zillow listing and into your front door for a showing.

If you've done those first two steps properly, then you're sure to get some offers. That is where the negotiations begin. Chances are, you want to sell your home for top dollar. You are human, right? Well that puts you at direct odds with every single buyer out there, because they want your home, but they want it as cheap as they can get it. Knowing when to reject a lowball offer or how to negotiate in a multiple offer situation is very important in the process of selling a home. After all, there could potentially be thousands of dollars on the line. And those are thousands of dollars you want in your pocket, not someone else's.

It starts with enlisting the right help.

Having all the skills and expertise I've described so far is no easy task, and that's why it's so critical to enlist the right help if you want to get the most out of selling your home. Yes I'm a real estate agent, so you may find this statement biased, but your first step in the process should be to identify and select a strong agent to help you sell your home. In 2016, the average For Sale By Owner home sold for $190,000 whereas homes sold with the assistance of an agent sold for an average of $249,000 (source here). And when you do select an agent, don't settle for just anyone. You need someone who is going to go above and beyond to get your home in front of buyers, because you don't deserve anything less than the extra mile.

Now that you know what it takes to sell a home in Raleigh, I hope you'll reach out to me for a free marketing assessment of your home. Just fill out the form below and I'll get in touch with you within 24 hours. You have no obligation to work with me after I give you my assessment, and I'm providing the work for you completely free of cost. So find out what your home could sell for and how quickly it might sell now!

Get Your Free Home Marketability Assessment!

Find out:

> A likely price range for your home

> Info on comps sold in your area

> How long homes in your price range typically take to sell

> Much more!

And it's free!

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Corey Crossman is a real estate agent/Realtor® serving Raleigh, North Carolina. Corey brings his years of expertise from owning a marketing agency to the real estate world to help sellers impress buyers with their homes and get properties sold faster.