When selling your home it is imperative to fully understand and learn from the avoidable mistakes people have been making for years. Let me share what I know about the most common and most costly errors that sellers make, the property market ‘booby traps’ people most frequently fall into. Keep reading and don’t despair! Over the next few weeks I will blog about the 10 most common mistakes and then provide you with the solutions…
Mistake no. 1 – Price too high
We are all afraid of selling our home for too little. So what do we do? We ask for a figure higher than we really want or need, and expect to ‘negotiate’ down from there. And what happens? The buyers who do come to look, based on the asking price, quickly realize the property is overpriced and they can buy a better house for the same amount. And they move on.
Meanwhile the true buyer, the one who might fall madly in love with this home and who can afford it, doesn’t come to look because the asking price is too high. So the property stays on the market for too long, the home owner instructs more and more agents to sell it, the price keeps coming down and they either eventually sell it for less than it might have, had it been correctly priced, or it is taken off the market by the unhappy owner.
A recent survey carry out by Rightmove found that if a property is overpriced 68% of buyers will dismiss it without a viewing.
