When it’s time to sell your home, you may find that you automatically gravitate toward the familiarity of a traditional home sale with a real estate agent as your representative. However, there are many different avenues available to you and you may find that putting your home on the market and waiting doesn’t fit in with your plans or your timeline. We’ve put together a guide to home sale scenarios, providing you with a variety of different ways to sell your home so that you can create a process that truly works for you.
Traditional MLS Listing
This is probably what you think about when you first consider selling your home. A standard listing process means that you’ll be working with a real estate agent and preparing your home for the open market, seeking to appeal to buyers in your area and beyond.
Pros
One of the biggest advantages of listing your home on the MLS is the opportunity it gives you to reach a large audience. The MLS, or Multiple Listing Service, feeds photos, video, and floorplans of your home, a well-written property description, and facts about your home’s history and your neighborhood to all of the major real estate portals, putting your property in front of an international audience of buyers and real estate professionals. From a marketing perspective, this is a huge boost to your home’s visibility and greatly increases your chances of getting your home in front of the right buyer.
By working with a real estate agent or broker, you’ll be able to take advantage of professional-level market knowledge and marketing strategies. That can help you more accurately price your home for sale at the sweet spot that brings buyers through the door without leaving money on the table. In addition, your agent will schedule and conduct tours of the property and provide information to interested buyers and their real estate agents.
Of course, both of these elements — the right price and a wide audience reach — help to ensure that you sell your home more quickly. The more days your home sits on the market, the less interest buyers will generally show and the more they will tend to submit lowball offers well below the asking price. Timing and pricing are both important for an optimal home sale process, and they are both enhanced by a traditional listing process.
Another advantage of working with a real estate professional is that they provide their expertise about the transaction process and documentation required to sell your property. A home sale is a complex legal and financial process, requiring a high level of knowledge to navigate. By working with a licensed agent or broker, you’ll have someone to talk to when you have questions or concerns. This is especially important if you have very little experience with the home sale process — for instance if you are a first-time home seller or have been living in your current home for several years.