What’s Keeping Your Home from Selling?

Few things are more stressful for a homeowner than doing all the work to prepare their home for the market only to have it sit, become stale, and not sell. If you’ve ever been in this position, you know well how frustrating and overwhelming this can be, especially if you’re under pressure to sell your home.

While the amount of time it takes to sell a home varies widely based on a number of factors, in Birmingham the average days on the market before a contract is around 46 days. Additionally, the reality is that the first 30 days is when a home is going to sell for the best price. What this means is that it’s not only stressful to have a home sit on the market, but it’s also likely costing the homeowner money.

That said, many homeowners are or have been in this position before. The good news is that there are some recurring reasons that homes don’t sell and addressing these issues can help you get yours sold. With that goal in mind, here are some of the most common reasons your home isn’t selling.

It’s Priced too High

This is the most common reason that homes don’t sell yet pricing a home can be difficult. Obviously, agents and homeowners use comparable sale prices when coming up with a listing price, but this alone isn’t enough. You also have to consider a number of other factors including the condition of the home, any unique features, current market conditions, the specific location, and anything else that might affect the sale. Correctly pricing a home isn’t easy, and experienced agents often get it wrong. That said, pricing your home too high is one of the biggest mistakes you can make and the most common reason that homes don’t sell.

It’s Not Properly Prepped and Staged

Preparing your home for the market is not a simple process. It’s not just about arranging furniture and cleaning it up. It also involves completing any repairs needed, fixing any cosmetic issues, and addressing any problems that will distract buyers. After you’ve made all repairs, it’s also necessary to declutter your home, depersonalize it, and stage it so that the best features are highlighted.

As part of this preparation, it’s also important to consider the yard and the curb appeal and to do any exterior work necessary to get buyers to look at your home. Doing this work will help to get more buyers into your home, will keep them from being distracted by small issues, and will make it easier for them to envision living there. In contrast, if your home is not properly prepared, buyers might become concerned about its condition, distracted by clutter, or turned off by bad curb appeal.

Your Photos Don’t Attract Attention

With more and more buyers searching for homes online, your photographs are more important than ever. This means that you need professional photos that highlight the best parts of your house. In fact, experts even get strategic about the order of photographs in listings because they know that some potential buyers will only look at one or two photos before going to the next listing. This means that your photos need to be high-quality and they need to attract buyers’ attention. If they don’t, you’ll never even get buyers through the door.

It’s Not Effectively Marketed

Unfortunately, just listing a home is not enough to attract a competitive pool of buyers. Instead, you need to do things to get the word out about your listing, like a social media campaign, fliers, word-of-mouth marketing through the real estate community, or local advertisements. Whether you’re working with an agent or listing the home on your own, it’s necessary to have an effective marketing campaign to ensure that the listing doesn’t grow stale.

It’s a Unique Property

For homeowners, this is one of the most difficult issues to deal with. After all, you can fix pricing or staging, but there are certain features about your home that you can’t change. Homes that have unusual features or that are unique attract a smaller pool of potential buyers. As a result, it often takes longer to find the right buyer for unusual properties. While there are some things you can do to address this – like targeted marketing or competitive pricing – in many cases, homeowners with unique properties just have to be a little more patient when trying to sell their home.

Buyers Don’t Have Enough Accessibility

This seems like a simple issue, but the reality is that it’s a common reason that homes don’t sell. When buyers can’t get into a listing, they often just move on to another property. To avoid this, it’s important to make your home as accessible as possible. Obviously, this can be hard, especially if you have children or pets or work from home. That said, it’s important to do everything you can to make your home conveniently accessible to buyers.

The bottom line is that there are a lot of factors that go into selling a home in a timely manner. While the good news is that you can address many of those factors, the bad news is that it often takes a lot of work to do so and it can be very disruptive to your life.

If you’re having trouble selling your home or want to sell it quickly, another alternative is to work with an as-is, cash buyer. Working with this type of buyer takes out the stress of preparing your home and waiting for it to sell. Instead, you simply contact the buyer, schedule an appointment, and then receive an all-cash offer. To learn more about how to sell your home quickly and stress-free, contact Home Buyers Birmingham.