Sell your house fast: think like a buyer

Want to know the easiest way to sell your house fast for cash to potential buyers? Get in their heads. Think about the steps they will take to making an offer on your house and you may be able to influence their behaviour.

Starting the search

The first thing any house buyer will do when they’re thinking of moving is to check out what’s on the market. And the easiest way to see the most properties as possible is to use an online portal. So the big four you need to be thinking of are:

Rightmove: the biggest and most well-known. Brilliant for rural properties in England.

Zoopla: great for comparing recently sold properties and defining search areas.

Primelocation: lots of London agents and buyers prefer to use this over Rightmove.

FindaProperty: best for rental properties.

Making sure your property is listed on all four of these major portals will give it the best chance of being found online.

Filter the results

The next stage of the house hunt involves drilling down the results. All the online portals will let buyers filter their results by the following:

Area: You can search by postcode, town or region. Rightmove and Zoopla also allow you to draw a search area on a map – in case there’s a street you really don’t like or a station you want to be close to.

Price: They’ll search by price. This is key – all the portals allow buyers to set price parameters, so make sure yours gets seen. While most buyers will set their upper price limit around £50,000 above what they can afford, many people won’t. When you’re setting your asking price, make sure you don’t exclude potential buyers by pricing them out of consideration.

Bedrooms: Potential buyers will only select the minimum number of bedrooms they require, so make sure your property it listed properly in this section.

Type: They’ll choose from houses, flats, bungalows or commercial properties and many portals will let you search with a keyword too – so make sure the right words are in your property description.

Scrolling through

Once they’ve gotten their list of properties, they’ll look through the results. There’s likely to be many…so you need to make sure yours stands out if you want to sell your house fast.

Images: are they striking? Do they draw the buyer’s eye to them? Badly taken photographs can stop people from even looking at your advert. Be sure your pictures are flattering and the chosen selection of thumbnails sum up the best bits of your property at once.

Price: Right away, buyers will compare the price to the pictures and figure out whether it’s worth what you’re asking for. So make sure that photograph shows your home at its best.

Area: They’ll double check your property is in a good location – is it close to the amenities they need? What are the schools like? While you can’t change where your house is you can use the property description to highlight the benefits of its proximity to shops, schools and transport links.

Keywords: If you’ve got an annexe, your house has been designed by an architect or comes with some land, make sure this is included in the description. You want your home to appear when keyword filters are applied.

The click-through

You’ve gotten a buyer onto your page, well done. Next they’ll start looking at the images: between 10 and 20 is ideal. They’ll read the introduction so make sure it’s snappy and inviting to lead them in – see our post on writing your own house description and why it’s important.

A well-drawn floorplan can be instrumental in getting buyers through the door, and reduce time wasters: if they think the layout won’t work for them, better they know now.

What’s next?

Plenty of searches on property portals end here. Perhaps those ‘buyers’ are just window shopping, or scouting out a new area before they decide to sell their own place, secure a mortgage or find a new job.

Whatever the reason, statistically your property has to show up in around 300 searches a day to be in with a chance of getting viewings. This will vary depending on where you live (and the time of year) but it’s a good marker to be aware of.

It all slows down

The painful waiting game begins. A buyer will now need to contact an agent and wait for them to get back to them. They’ll ask questions and wait for answers – then hopefully book a viewing. If you’re using an agent to sell your house, make sure you put pressure on them daily to respond to requests as soon as possible. Ask a friend to call and judge how the agent handles it so you can see how much effort they’re really putting in.

And if you’re not using a traditional agent, you might be able to sell your house faster – for cash. There’s no need to play mind games with us. We’ll buy any UK property and sell it for you in as little as a week.

Are you thinking what we’re thinking? Give us a call.

Source: Home Truths