Whether you are planning to sell your home in the next few months or just studying up for that eventuality, there’™s no time like now to prepare. If buying a house seems complicated, selling involves even more responsibilities and expenses.

Here are some common steps to selling your home:

1. Prepare Your Home for Sale

Well before you are ready to plant that For Sale sign in your front yard, there is work to be done to prepare your home for sale.

Remember how keen your eye was to every small detail and defect in the houses you saw as a buyer? Now that door to your bedroom that never quite closed properly or that leaky faucet that you never got around to fixing will be seen by a potential buyer with that same keen eye.

Start making the obvious repairs today even if you don’t plan to sell until a year from now. These repairs can cost money and take time. Plus fixing it now will allow you to enjoy the results before it’s time to move out.

If you plan on doing some improvements before the sale, the best place to start is where the buyers start: at your curb. Potential buyers base a large part of their decision on a property’s curb appeal, so make yours say something positive. That means a tidy front yard, a house with well-painted trim, a tidy driveway and a clear, welcoming entryway.

Inside, the biggest return on your investment continues to be improvements to the kitchen, followed closely by improvements to the bathrooms. If you a™re making these improvements shortly before selling the house, consider painting and decorating the rooms in neutral colors, the most appealing choice to the greatest number of potential buyers.

Inside and outside, start reducing the clutter. When it comes time to show your home, less will mean more. Potential buyers don’t want to see how your closets overflow with clothes, how every room feels cramped with furniture, or how the yard is difficult to maneuver with that rusty swing set in the way. So downsize now; it not only will make the preparation for showing your home easier, it also will make packing for your move faster.

2. Find a Real Estate Professional

That’s where our combined 75+ years of experience selling real estate makes us the desired choice for selling your home. We are here with an abundance of experience and expertise to be your only real estate professional of choice

3. Get Your Paperwork Together
After you sign the Listing Agreement with us we will need a lot of documents to prepare your home for sale. Among the things we will need and order from the appropriate sources:

  • Pay-off Notice: Escrow will contact your current mortgage holder for a pay-off amount
  • We will order a Preliminary Title Report to assure your home is free of assessments, easements or liens.
  • Property Taxes: Proof of property taxes paid will be included in the Preliminary Title Report
  • Trust: If the property is in a trust we will need copies of whom is able to sign for the sale of the property.
  • Order a Pest Report so any hidden costs are known upfront
You will want to make it clear now which items in the home you want to take with you the heirloom chandelier in the dining room, the washer and dryer set you just bought last month and which can stay behind as part of the home sale. We can help show you which items you should put away or replace before your house goes on the market.

4. Price Your Home

There are a number of factors that will affect the success of your home sale. They include: location of the home, interest rates, economic conditions, time of year, condition of the home, marketing the home, terms of the sale and accessibility to the home.

Some of these are not within your or my control: location of the home, interest rates, economic conditions. The other factors are items you should discuss with us to determine what would benefit the sale of this property most.

For example, marketing your property in more innovative ways, such as on an Internet site like this one, may broaden the pool of potential buyers. Social media is a focus we take serioudly when marketing a home (facebook, twitter, linkedin and instagram). Anytime is a good time to sell in the Santa Barbara area. And pricing the home properly can make a huge difference in whether a house is snapped up within the first several weeks of listing or sits on the market for an extended period of time.

To price a home properly, you and I will have to study the local market, research comparable properties and consider current market conditions. This is called a Comparable Market Analysis.

  • Your competition: Are there many properties just like yours for sale in your area right now?
  • Listing prices: What are other properties like yours listing for?
  • Selling prices: What are other properties like yours selling for?
Based on these findings, We have the experience to help you price your property at the right price for a sale that benefits you.

Contact us now:

JoAnn Pomatto-Gomez 805.705.3798 or joann@pcresb.com

Thank you for the email, we'll get back to you shortly

Sorry, we are unable to send your message at the moment. Please try again later.