What to Expect When Selling a Home

Pittsburgh Real Estate Podcast with Gina Giampietro

The process of selling a home can be overwhelming, but even just knowing what to expect will make things go more smoothly for you.

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Do you know what to expect during the home selling process?

The first thing you'll do is meet with your agent, sign your paperwork, and prepare your home to go on the market. Then, your agent will have you clean your house, stage it, and get a photographer in to shoot photos of your home. Then, they'll install a lock box for keys and put a sign in the yard. After all that, your home will go live on the market and, for the next three weeks, you're going to have a lot of activity.

Those three weeks are the most important time to be on the market. That's when all buyers who haven't bought a house and any new buyers are going to come look at your home, and that's also when we're going to see the most serious offers come through the door.

If your home doesn't get a lot of activity in the first three weeks, you need to go back to your agent and find out why. You need to figure out what's going on with your home that caused you to not get a lot of activity since that activity is so important. It could mean a lot of things; buyers might not like the photos, they might not like your interior, or your house might need work that they're not willing to put in at your given price.

Remember also that buyers will always negotiate in their favor. That doesn't mean that they won't come up to your asking price or that you're going to have to give away your house. All it means is that they're going to try to negotiate the best deal for themselves.

The first three weeks on the market are the most important.

The next thing you'll do is go through inspections, which are there for buyers to be able to find out everything that's wrong with your home. Do not think that the home inspector isn't going to find issues–that's what they are hired to do! That doesn't mean that you have to repair all these issues or even that you have to agree with them. The buyer will request a ton of items to repair, and we'll go back and only fix the ones that are absolutely necessary for your home to be purchased.

After the inspection comes the appraisal. The appraiser works for the bank, not for you. The appraiser's goal is to value the home for the condition that it's in for the current market. If your house is overpriced and doesn't match the appraisal but someone is willing to pay that price, we can go back and fight the appraisal, but most of the time, the appraisal is the last word in the sales agreement. The bank will not lend more than what the appraiser says the home is worth.

When the appraisal is done, you then have moving and closing disclosures and everything that goes along with closing. This can be stressful for you and it can get delayed. In fact, it's happening more and more on a daily basis. Lenders aren't ready, appraisers get backed up, and disclosures don't go out on time sometimes.

When you move, remember to allow yourself two to three days to move, because it always takes longer than the one day you think it might take. You need to give yourself enough time to move and clean the house for the buyer at the time of closing.

It's a substantial process, but just knowing the steps and being prepared for the process of selling your house will help you out immensely. If you have any questions about the selling process or you're just thinking about selling your house, give me a call or send me an email. I'd love to help you out!