It's time to sell

Updates and maintenance are huge factors to consider when listing your home for sale, over the years you have owned/lived in it, you have gone through renovations, or maybe lots of potential issues. Disclosing all of these things will be important to your agent or if you are venturing off on your own with the sale, highlighting these key things.

Now it's time to do some research, also this part has a lot to do with knowing the current local and national market well. But in the end, it comes down to taking a look at houses/condos/multiunits that have sold and are comparable to your home within the last year or two. You can compare things such as square footage, garage, bedrooms, baths, and garage stalls. Including appliances is huge for a sale as well, and additional amenities can make your home stand out! Pricing your home right will play a major role in how quickly your home may sell. Other times, sellers are ok with it being on the market for a while and may overprice the home. Real estate agents can advise, but not dictate what that price should be.

This is the big day when your home goes live, nowadays it's all online. If you decide to hire a real estate agent, he or she will have access to the powerful tool known as the multiple listing service (MLS), there it will be pushed out and available to all other agents in the area, as well as their many buyers. You can utilize flat fee MLS services, where they will list the home for you as well. Or you can also use sites such as Facebook marketplace, Craigslist, and other for sale by owner websites. Some are free and others cost money or a percent of the sale price. 

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Note: You can also offer the home to a wholesale company, those companies are usually connected will with investors/cash buyers that can and almost always would be willing to offer you, a quick cash offer, that will be lower than market value, they do this because that can fix it and make a profit, or hand it off to a different investor, or even utilize the MLS to sell it themselves. This is a great option for some people that don't want to wait the usual 60 days minimum for a financing contingent offer, the sellers that choose this option prefer a quick 2-3 week almost always guarenteed closing.

At this point you or your agent will explore many ways and formats of marketing your listing, some examples are postcards, social media campaigns, videos, and more. Over time, once buyers are interested, they will want to see the home for themselves, you or your agent will handle this process, and get people touring your home to see if they can see themselves living and investing in it.

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Note: Upon listing (discussed in the last step), you or your agent will take pictures/videos of the home that will be used for marketing and more. Some sellers will sell as is or clear out the home, or maybe cut down on what they have, also moving things around can help with the staging of the home, and this can be done as many times as one chooses.

Depending on the market, location, and more, your home will start to receive offers from excited buyers. These offers will have a price they are offering, the format of that funding, possible contingencies, earnest money deposit, terms of closing, title terms, tax terms, and a whole lot of other negotiation pieces. You can compare these and with the help of an agent make sense of all of them, and then with his or her advise select the one that best suits you and your situation.

At this point, there will be a lot of parties coming together to make the transaction possible, even if you choose to not use a realtor, the other party may be using one. Let's say you do, the total number of parties involved includes but is not limited to; the buyers, the sellers, their respective agents, both those agent's firms, the title company that will be used, the lender, and let's say there is an appraiser and an inspector, also don't forget that the lender, has their own appraiser and lender, so just there, we have 12 different parties, all working together to make it a possibility to sell your home.

After all due diligence is done, the lender loans the money, the buyer and seller both sign the closing docs, and everything else has been cleared and is ready to go. You my friend will receive a handsome amount of money in your bank account, the buyer, the keys to his or her's new property. Depending on who else is involved, everyone gets paid their respective amount and all walk away from the closing table to continue on the path we call life.