How to Prepare your House For Sale Online like a Pro

The selling of your home can be an enormous source of frustration. When you’ve made the decision to sell your home, it’s likely because you have something else in the pipeline such as downsizing to a smaller property or moving to a new house / area for employment reasons. If there’s one thing that you can’t afford it’s to put your life on hold indefinitely while you wait for someone to buy your property. Yet, that’s what so many of us choose to do. We look at the sale of our property as though it’s entrusted to the whims and caprices of fate. We blindly entrust the sale of our homes, and thus the next step in our lives to market forces and assume that we are powerless to influence whether our home will be sold or not.

But you are far from powerless! At Griffin Property Co, we like to ensure that our clients feel empowered and proactive when selling their homes. It’s time to cease the passive assumption that the sale of your home is out of your hands and take control. It’s time to adopt a more professional approach to the sale of your most valuable commodity.

It’s time to be the boss!

Here we’ll look at some ways in which you can take a more active and professional approach to the sale of your house. If you are already an entrepreneur or someone with experience running your own business, this will already be familiar ground for you, but even if you’ve never run your own company, you can still handle the sale of your home like a pro! It’s simply a case of bringing the same exacting standards that you’d bring to bear in a business endeavour to the sale of your property. You will need to establish a professional mindset. You will need to start looking at the property as a commodity, not your home. Sentiment can lead us to make poor decisions and so it’s essential to adopt the right frame of mind when selling your home.

Here are a few ways in which you can sell your home online like a pro...

Never, ever settle when it comes to an estate agent

You wouldn’t ever employ someone just because theirs was the first application form you stumbled upon. Likewise you wouldn’t choose to do business with another individual or company without doing a significant amount of homework on them, either. When you choose an estate agent to facilitate the sale of your property you place a colossal amount of trust in them and it’s vital that you can demonstrate with near-certainty that they will earn that trust.

So many sellers choose an estate agent to sell their property based on whose office is closest to them or whose website looks the nicest. But no decision so important should be made so arbitrarily. Don’t be afraid to interview a multitude of different agencies and ask them tough questions about what they will do to facilitate the sale of your property that their competitors won’t.

Remember that in the digital age, you’re no longer beholden to the relatively tiny confines of high street estate agents. There’s a new breed of online estate agents out there who may well be better equipped to meet your needs.

Check out the services that we offer as standard at Griffin Property Co. We’re confident that you won’t find anyone who goes above and beyond like we do. Our Gold package includes;

• 12 month property listing on Rightmove, Zoopla and Prime Location
• The full support of our experienced team of property advisors
• A unique messaging service that provides complete control over viewings and offers
• Activity reports to monitor the level of interest in your property
• Your own dedicated account manager
• Memorandum of sale
• A Discount Conveyancing package which saves you money rather than costing it

Our platinum packages also include your For Sale boards, your EPC certificate, your professional floor plan, up to 10 professional standard photographs, full property particulars and full sales progression / completion management to ease stress and give you peace of mind. Our packages can also include extras from virtual tours to premium listings and viewing services in selected areas. If an estate agent cannot offer you all of the above, they aren’t fit to entrust with your property. If you like what you see above get in touch with us today to arrange a free valuation of your property!

At Griffin Property Co, one of the top online estate agents in the UK, we pride ourselves on our collaborative working relationship with clients. A good estate agent will want to work with you as well as for you, giving you creative input into everything from the photos taken to the language that goes into the property description. Still, don’t be afraid to keep in constant contact with them to ensure that they’re doing all that they can to help to sell your property. You’re the boss, after all!

Handling valuations

An important rule of business is to know the value of any commodity you are selling. Over estimate that value and you could be stuck with something that you are unable to sell, under estimate it and you will inevitably lose out on a comfortable profit. When it comes to valuing your property, you have the final say and so you will need to walk that fine line.

The best way to ensure that you make an informed and educated decision is to invite as many estate agents as you are able round to evaluate the property. There is no upward limit on the amount of times you can do this but we would recommend at least 3. Unless you have 3 wildly different valuations (which is unlikely) selecting a median amount for your asking price is a good bet. Of course, there’s no such thing as too much knowledge, so it pays to educate yourself as to what influences an estate agent’s decision when valuing your property. Typically their decision is determined by;

• Supply and demand- Demand for property in the area and how many similar properties are already on the market.
• Property size and land attached
• Property type, style and age
• Planning permissions
• Method of production and building materials
• Ownership status; freehold / leasehold
• Energy performance as per EPC
• Environmental factors (e.g. proximity to a river which is vulnerable to flooding)

Photographing your property

Whether you’re selling your property yourself or entrusting the sale to an estate agent a picture is worth a thousand words. The photos you post online of your home will make all the difference between a potential buyer contacting you or your estate agent for more information and them scrolling by to view the next property.

Any entrepreneur knows that great product photography is essential to ensure that their product stands out in a highly competitive market... And with the disparity between buyers and sellers on the current market this most certainly applies to you! In order to make your property look as appealing as possible in photographs, ensure that photos taken are of high resolution using a camera that’s no less than 5 megapixels.

When photographing rooms, the rule of thumb is, the brighter the better. Make sure that your photos capitalise on as much natural light as the space can get. Try to arrange for photography on a bright and cheerful day. Dark, gloomy and rainy days can add a veneer of dullness and gloom to your images.

Try to take photos from the point of view of what buyers will want to see rather than the affectations of which you’re personally proud. Try to focus the image on the property itself rather than the contents. The images should encourage the viewer to imagine their own belongings in there and the potential your property has for them to make it their own.

When photographing a property, shots tend to look better when taken from the doorway looking directly into the room. Shots from an angle work better than shots taken directly from the front which can make an image look flat and make a room look smaller than it actually is.

By all means tweak your images slightly in post production but ensure that any tweaks or changes you do make are subtle and do not result in an image that looks “fake”.

You will also need to include a floor plan that paints a more detailed picture of the property and capitalises on the interest and attention captured by the images.

Marketing your property

While marketing your property is the responsibility of your estate agent, it still behoves you to have some creative input over the marketing of your property. One area in which you can exercise some creative ownership is the property description.

By rule of thumb, in a property description the best way to write is with brevity. Users will likely only skin the text and will want as much information as possible from the description with a minimum of effort. So, keep your sentences short and concise but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use some emotive language. Stick to old faithful descriptors like “beautiful”, “spacious”, “luxurious” or even “elegant”. Try to keep your language as neutral as possible and avoid pigeon-holing the reader e.g. “this property is perfect for children”.

Try to sign off on a note that implies scarcity and urgency. Encourage readers not to miss out on this once in a lifetime investment opportunity and be sure to sign off with a compelling call to action.

Transforming your home into a property

Remember what we said about adopting a professional mindset? This is essential in making your property more marketable to buyers. You will need to remove the idiosyncratic stamp you’ve made on the property and make it more neutral in appearance.
Thus, cleaning away clutter should be your number one priority. Where possible, you should ensure that your walls are light and neutral in tone. Bold colours and statement wall paper may be your idea of domestic bliss but they can be surprisingly off-putting to some buyers.

When conducting viewings you will need to ensure that your home is neutral so that they can impose their vision upon it while still being welcoming and inviting. Ensure that the ambient temperature is pleasant and that there is a cosy atmosphere. Some choose to use this as the perfect opportunity to bake something, others to put on a pot of coffee. Or you could simply light some scented candles, it’s a matter of personal preference. Treat your property as a showroom and do what you can to ensure that your product shines!

Adopt a professional mindset and keep one hand on the steering wheel at all times, and you’ll find it far easier to take control of your property’s sales process and facilitate a closure that benefits you, the buyer and your estate agent!