Start a Bidding War for Your Home
Bidding wars, despite their name, aren’t always a terrible thing when it comes to selling your home.
What is a bidding war?
When two potential purchasers continuously raising their buying price because they both want the property, it’s called a bidding war. Buyers are willing to pay full price or substantially more than asking for the perfect property. The dream of every seller.
Rather than settling for a lower price, another potential buyer could keep raising their price until the other potential buyer abandons the transaction. While it’s impossible to foresee which properties will spark bidding wars when they go on the market, there are a few steps you can take as a homeowner to ensure your property sells for the highest possible price.
How Can You Start a Bidding War for Your Home?
Get an Experienced Real Estate Agent
As a homeowner, sometimes it is hard to step outside of your own feelings about your home and neighborhood. That’s why many homeowners contract the services of a real estate agent to represent their interests and give them an unbiased view of the market environment.
The selection of a listing agent is very important. They should have experience dealing with multiple offers and be able to orchestrate the timing of your listing, hitting the market at the best time to have the largest pool of potential buyers. If you have some wiggle-room in terms of when you list your property, timing can be the difference between your home sitting on the market for months and getting multiple offers in the first week.
It’s a real estate agent’s job to make sure that potential purchasers are able to pay the highest possible price for the home. It is for this reason that knowing and understanding the target market is crucial.
Pricing is Critical
Home buyers are comfortable in a certain price range and have an innate sense of what homes in that price range should look like and which homes represent a great value for the money.
Underprice a home and people will wonder what’s wrong with it. Overprice it and no one will see that much value for their money.
Experts suggest pricing your home at market value or slightly under market value to have the best chance of a bidding war.
A buyer who looks at your home has undoubtedly seen hundreds of similarly priced homes online and have done an extensive amount of research. Your agent should have done as much homework, and should inform you of the state of the market today including number of active buyers, mortgage rates and amount of competition.
Marketing Prior to Listing Your Property
Listing agents often keep upcoming home listings in their “pocket” and share with other listing agents before anyone else can see your home. If the housing market is especially hot, you may find that your home sells before it is officially listed if your agent has networked efficiently. This can happen if your home is in perfect and desireable condition and your agent knows that it will sell fast. You want your agent to be enthusiastic about your property so he or she can easily encourage other agents to communicate your home to their clients.
Home staging for the market is an important action that can have a big impact on how much attention the property gets while it is on the market or before it hits the market.
Your listing price will reflect both the condition of your property and how well it looks in online photos, social media and listing brochures.
Staging to Sell
Staging helps to create bidding wars for homes because it communicates an irresistible value proposition compared to other homes.
Your goal as a homeowner who is staging their property in competitive markets, is to closely match or exceed what your target home buyers expect to see in terms of appearance and condition.
The goal is to be the best looking, best maintained home on the market in your price range. What staging will do is help home buyers envision themselves in your home leading their perfect life as they dream it. When you hit the target perfectly, you’ll find multiple buyers willing to pay the full homes price and even enter into a bidding war for your home.
Studying the current market data, researching the neighborhood where the property is located, and staging the house effectively are all critical stages in ensuring the property receives the attention it deserves on the market from real estate agents and prospective buyers.
Home Staging Tips to Attract Multiple Buyers
It’s critical that you don’t over-stage the property. Over-staging will turn off buyers and cause the property’s price to plummet owing to a lack of attention. Similarly, not staging the property or doing too little, will not create the value image you want to achieve with buyers.
Knowing your target market will give you a clear picture in your mind of who the buyer will be, allowing you to guarantee the property is staged for them. Knowing who the potential buyers are and what their likely purchase price range is will help you give you the best shot at staging your home that will have two individuals fighting over who wants to buy it more.
In a sellers market, you can be a bit off target and still get lots of interest from buyers even before hitting the market in the multiple listing service or on online real estate portals such as Zillow and Redfin.
Your listing price will reflect both the condition of your property and how well it looks in online photos, social media and listing brochures.
Staging the home so that a large number of potential buyers can envision themselves living there is a terrific approach to ensure a large number of possible purchasers in the current housing market.
Use neutral tones and avoid overusing any style trends to achieve this. While you don’t want the house to be on the market for years, it’s crucial to arrange it as if it’ll look the same next year.is there anything that will go out of style? If that’s the case, get rid of it.
Potential buyers must be able to envision themselves living in the home, not only seeing it as staged for the present season.
Selling Your Home In This Market
With mortgage rates at multidecade lows, a home purchase has never been more affordable for most home buyers. This environment allows potential home buyers to stretch a bit more than they otherwise could to secure a contract on the home of their dreams. This makes for the perfect environment for a bidding war and a reward for all your hard staging work.