Selling Your Home? Tips For Ensuring The Sale Goes Through
If you are preparing you sell your home, you may be well aware that there are times where the buyer can back out of the sale and not lose the earnest money that they paid. This means that you end up losing a potential buyer, and your home will continue to sit unoccupied for another month or so. Thankfully, there are ways that you can prevent this from happening if you are looking to sell your home quickly.
Have A Home Inspection Performed
While a home inspection is one of the first things that a buyer does after an offer is accepted, that doesn't mean that you shouldn't have a home inspection done yourself. The inspection will tell you everything that a buyer is going to hear when they have the home inspected so you can get in front of potential problems before the buyer decides that they are deal-breakers.
For example, a home inspection may find signs of water damage that can be repaired before someone makes an offer on the home. There may be issues where parts of the home are not up to code and should be fixed. If you do not take the time to discover and repair these problems, a buyer might decide to walk away because they feel there are too many problems or the repairs will be too expensive.
Have The Home Priced By A Realtor
Many people list their home for what they feel it is worth, not what it is actually worth. This causes problems down the road when the mortgage lender has an appraisal done. The buyer will need to make up the difference in price since they won't be able to get a mortgage above the appraised value. This can cause the buyer to back out of the sale further into the process.
For example, if you list the home for $250,000 but the bank says it is only worth $200,000, the lender will only offer $200,000 for a mortgage. The buyer needs to come up with $50,000 in cash for a down payment, and if they don't have that, buying the home may not be an option.
The best thing you can do is worth with a realtor that will compare your home to recently sold residential real estate in the area. This will tell you how much your home can actually sell for so that you do not list it for a price much higher than the mortgage lender's appraisal price.