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How To Sell A House In A Difficult Market

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By Lex Levinrad

Are you having a hard time selling your house in today’s market? As prices have declined and as sellers have become more desperate to sell it has become increasingly difficult to sell a house for fair market value.

More than 50% of the properties that are listed on the MLS are either bank owned properties or short sales. These properties are already substantially discounted for cash buyers. This fact can make selling your property for fair market value extremely challenging.

So what do you do in this type of environment if you want to sell a house? The first thing you need to do is to think outside of the box. If you are doing what everyone else is doing then you are probably going to find it very difficult to sell your house. Why? The reason is because the strategies that worked in a good real estate market will not work in a difficult market.

If you want to learn how to sell a house quickly then the first thing you need to do is review what everyone is doing and why that is not working. So what is everyone else doing? Most sellers are listing their properties with a realtor on the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) and are waiting for a buyer. Why does this strategy not work? This doesn’t work because listings at fair market value do not seem like a great deal to buyers and because it is very difficult for buyers to qualify for conventional financing.

The key to selling a house in a slow market is to do something differently. What you need to do is make your listing so unique, so different to all the other listings that it immediately grabs buyer’s attention. How do you do this? Do the following:

  • Price your property very aggressively i.e. way below all other retail sellers
  • Create an instant buying frenzy for your property by listing aggressively
  • Hold an open house on a Saturday and Sunday
  • Hold an auction for your property the following Saturday at 2 p.m.
  • Advertise your auction online and offline and spend some money marketing
  • Stage your property and make it nicer than all of your competitors
  • Offer to pay all closing costs for the buyers
  • Offer to pay 6% commission to buyers agents even if you are a realtor
  • Offer an incentive such as new appliances to buyers
  • Have a mortgage broker ready to pre qualify buyers on all open house days
  • Be prepared to help contribute towards the down payment for FHA buyers
  • Take a video of the property and post your video on You Tube
  • Make a postlet of your property and place the video into your postlet
  • Create a blog and syndicate your video of your property on your blog
  • Syndicate your video on Facebook, Twitter, Linked in etc.
  • Let the world know that there is going to be an auction for this property
  • Create a buying frenzy even before the auction has begun

If you do all of the above steps then you should be able to easily sell your house quickly. If you purchased a house at a good price from the bank and are selling it for a profit then your goal should be to sell it quickly and move on to the next property. Don’t let greed get in the way of common sense. Book a profit and move on to the next deal.

To your success

Lex