Featured Property

If you’re trying to sell a home in the current overstocked real-estate market, you already know that the days of hot bidding wars are gone. Nationwide, home sales are down 24 percent from last year, while home prices have dropped 8.2 percent. If that weren’t worrisome enough, the U.S. housing inventory remains bloated and the subprime mortgage crisis has made it tougher for buyers to secure loans.

To make a deal in this market, experts say, sellers need to set the right price and hone their negotiating skills. Pricing is the single most important thing to get right. There are too many similar properties out there, so sellers need aggressive pricing. If a home is priced where it should be and it’s appealing, it’s only a matter of time before it sells.

How can you make your home stand out from all the others on the market? Real-estate specialists offer the following tips:

1. Pick the right broker. Look for local agents who are listing, marketing, and selling in your community even if the market is slow. Ask several of them to make a "listing presentation" to discuss your home’s value, justify their numbers, and how they would market your property.


2. Understand the real marketplace. To negotiate effectively, you need to know up-to-the-minute sale prices—not just what your neighbor’s house sold for last year—and the deal-making behind them. For example, two homes may each have sold for $400,000, but if one owner gave a 3 percent credit for deck repair and a new furnace, that’s a $12,000 reduction. Your agent should be knowledgeable about the details of sales in your area and be nimble enough to revise the marketing plan for your home to reflect changing conditions.


3. Curb your enthusiasm. Walk down your street, then walk back to your home and try to see what other people see. Tend to any overgrown landscaping, and make sure shrubs are nicely trimmed. When people look for a house, curb appeal is the most important thing.

4. Use staging to enhance the home’s appeal. A professional home stager can make over your home to de-emphasize your personal taste and become more visually appealing to a broader range of buyers. Pros say the key is to clear out clutter and clean, clean, clean. "If you can smell it, you can’t sell it," says Barb Schwarz, a real-estate broker and author of "Home Staging: The Winning Way to Sell Your House for More Money" (John Wiley & Sons, 2006).

Staging can extend from rearranging your furniture to preparing an entire house for sale with rented furniture and accessories. A two-hour consultation with written recommendations for do-it-yourselfers costs around $300. But a full staging of a large home could range from $500 to $5,000, notes Schwarz. Costs average around $1,800 in the Midwest, $2,800 on the West Coast, and $3,800 on the East Coast. Those fees are paid up front to professional stagers, but many real-estate agents include some staging as part of the services they offer that are covered by their commission.

5. Be ready to negotiate. Buyers are likely to be demanding in today’s market, so be prepared for hardball negotiating. Some brokers advise that you remove anything you absolutely can’t part with before you show the house. If a buyer sees it, they may want it and it could make or break a deal.

6. Monitor and update your MLS listing. If it’s April, you don’t want the photo of your house on the Multiple Listing Service displaying a snowman on the lawn. An out-of-season picture is a dead giveaway that your home has been on the market for awhile. And with many buyers doing their first "look-see" on the Internet, the quality of the photos is paramount, too.
And proofreading the description of your home for the MLS and elsewhere is always a good idea.