When it comes to selling your own home, most people will only have to do this 1 – 3 times in their entire life, if at all. Selling a home is difficult, especially if you are not up to snuff on the current state of the Washington State Housing market. The fact is, the process can be overly complex and leave you feeling bewildered and discouraged without some guiding strategies.
To start, if you want to know how to sell your own Vancouver or Tri-Cities home, you likely want to do so for one of a few specific reasons:
- You don’t currently have enough equity in your home to make selling it via an agent on the MLS feasible.
- You have equity in the home, but for another reason you want to save the money you’d have to give to an agent to sell your home the traditional way.
- You are currently or about to be in foreclosure on your home and need a way to salvage the situation and save your credit.
- For whatever reason, you cannot or simply do not want to go through the months long process to sell your home on the MLS with a real estate agent.
No matter which situation you find yourself in, there are and will always be options in Vancouver, Pasco, Richland, Kennewick, and other metro areas in Washington State for someone to sell their home on their own without dealing with an agent.
The good news currently is that the housing market has been rebounding nicely since 2014, so the current market is a good one to try to sell your home in. However, success will still depend, by and large, on the strategies you employ and marketing decisions you make. To help with that, we’re going to discuss some helpful guidelines anyone currently attempting to sell their Vancouver, WA or Tri-cities house without an agent should follow.
Selling in Vancouver, WA? Learn About & Assess the Current Washington Housing Market
First and foremost, you need to do everything you can to research the current state of the Vancouver real estate market. Specifically, you need to focus on your own neighborhood and the surrounding areas. You should look at marketing sites online (like Chase home value estimator, Eppraisal, Zillow, etc.). Also, call a couple agents to see what they think your home is worth. Read whatever materials you can get your hands on about the various market pricing techniques being employed in your area. The basic point is to try to learn as much as you can to avoid making costly rookie mistakes.
Sounding like too much of a hassle? There is an even easier way – selling your home to a reputable real estate company like Summit Development. If you would like to discuss your property with one of our team members and see what we’d pay for it as is, give us a call at 360-667-5424 (Vancouver) or 509-591-9196 (Tri-Cities) or fill out the form on our site. If we make you an offer, we can close in as little as 5 days, getting the house off of your back and cash in hand in just a week.
Once you’ve learned all you can about the market, start looking very closely at the houses in your neighborhood that are on the market. How much do they list for? How many foreclosures are there? What other patterns can you determine? Anything you can determine at the neighborhood level is going to have a large impact on what you can expect to sell your home for.
Assess the Current State of Your Vancouver, Pasco, Richland, or Kennewick House
You want your house to be as close to top condition as possible when you sell it. For example, do buyers want a garage or a driveway? Are the looking for two bedrooms or three?
Next, consider any repairs your house may need. Look at the roof, the paint job, the landscaping, the style. Is it modern? Outdated? Kept-up? Any of these things have the potential to make your home more or less attractive to buyers. What’s most important is how it compares to other houses in your neighborhood. So if all the other houses have a new roof and yours is old, this could really hurt your ability to sell.
Though it wasn’t always an option, you can find brokers who let you list a home on the MLS yourself for just a few hundred dollars. This can bring in a lot of other potential buyers, though their agent may charge a fee.
Additionally, place ads in local papers, websites, major roads, etc. Also hold an open house.
Do I really have to do all of this to sell my Vancouver or Tri-Cities house without an agent?
It depends. In the end, many Washington State home sellers think they save themselves effort by avoiding some of these steps. In the end, however, they often end up failing to get the price their house should be worth. Just keep in mind that some routes to sell that appear to cost less money actually cost more in the end.
The bottom line is that you must keep a few things at the forefront of your mind when selling your own home:
- Selling your home on your own is going to take some marketing effort & skill. If you don’t have the skill and don’t want to put out the effort, there is probably a better option for you to sell your Vancouver or Tri-Cities (Pasco, Kennewick, Richland) house.
- If you don’t put in a full effort on repairs and presentation, you may lose 5-10% of the houses total value in asking price. People just won’t pay top dollar for a house that doesn’t impress them.
- Don’t forget that every month you own your house has all kinds of costs, fees, and bills that stack up. A selling strategy that seems low cost but takes 8 months has a much higher cost than one that requires a bit more up front, but results in a sale in just 2 months. If you are paying $1,750 in monthly bills and mortgage payments, that makes the longer options nearly $10,000 more expensive!
Yes there is an easier way to sell your house in Vancouver, WA or the the Tri-Cities area – one that doesn’t involve months of effort or work. When you sell your home to Summit Development, we make an all-cash offer that we can close on in as little as 7 days. If you want to know more or want to receive a free, no-hassle offer just to see what we’d pay for your home, call us at 360-667-5424 (Vancouver) or 509-591-9196 (Tri-Cities) or fill out the form below.
We buy houses as-is. That means we’ll handle the repairs. You don’t need to do anything except agree to sell. Call Summit Development today to learn more.