So, You’ve Put Your Home on the Market: Handy Tips and Tricks for Avoiding Seller’s Stress
Moving home is often both exciting and stressful in equal measure, so once you have made the decision to sell your house, you have to find a way of managing the process in the best possible way, without getting too stressed out.
If you are in a real hurry and need to look at ways of selling a house faster than waiting for an agent to find you a buyer and going through the usual legal process, there are ways to get the cash you need quickly.
If you decide to put your home on the market and see what happens, here is a look at some ways to keep those stress levels under some level of control.
Prepared for the journey ahead
Almost regardless of whether you have been through the process of selling a house before or it is a new experience to you, you still need to be fully prepared for what lies ahead, if you are going to hope to avoid a few stressful moments along the way.
There is no doubt that the selling your home is most certainly loaded with plenty of pitfalls that can trigger some major stresses, so if you want to avoid experience the same level of stress that you can experience with traumatic events like divorce or personal loss, you will need to be prepared for what you will have to contend with over the next few weeks or months.
Your preparations start with discussing what you consider to be your lowest asking price with your agent and what you expect in terms of timings and any deadlines that you have to work to.
In addition to trying to be mentally prepared for selling your home, there are also some other actions that you can take at the beginning, in order to avert a potential meltdown. For example, you will need to gather all of your mortgage and other important home-related documentation together, such as warranties and maintenance contracts.
Do this at the beginning and you will have everything to hand when you are asked for it rather than scrambling around. If anything is found to be missing, you will at least have some time to get any copies you need before you get to far along the sale process, rather than stressing at a later date when you can’t find what you need.
A sense of perspective helps
Having unrealistic expectations about how long it is going to take to sell your home or simply stressing because everything is taking far too long to happen, is not really going to actually help you complete the sale any quicker.
It is inevitable that there are going to be periods of what you might perceive to be inactivity while the legal process and other aspects associated with selling your home, take place. The best advice to deal with these periods and avoid getting too stressed, is to get some perspective.
Try to prepare mentally and don’t put yourself under any unnecessary mental pressure, by stressing about delays or periods of inactivity, which you really can’t do much about. If you find yourself getting a bit hot under the collar and frustrated, take a deep breath and maybe take a walk outside.
An element of control
There are always parts of the house selling process that you have limited or no control over, as you are relying on other people to fulfill their part of the deal.
It is important to understand that there is really very little point in allowing yourself to get stressed about aspects of the transaction that you are unable to directly influence. Think about what elements of the process that you can control and maybe focus on getting those done as expediently as possible, but don’t get stressed about the unknown’s that you can’t control.
Putting each part of the transaction into these different compartments and working out what you can directly influence, will give you a greater feeling of control and should help you to avoid becoming overly stressed for no good reason.
Call on the professionals
You may well be trying to cut as many corners on the cost of selling your home and might even need to do that in order to keep as much of the house sale proceeds as possible, but if you are someone who gets easily stressed, this might not turn out to be the best strategy.
You can normally get professional help from building inspections to house moving at fixed rates, so consider if you might actually benefit from using some professional help with your house move, especially if you are trying to keep your stress levels down.
David Saba is an entrepreneur, a real estate agent and a survivor of the Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster in Italy. He is currently working on his latest project AssetColumn.com, a platform that connects real estate wholesalers with investors looking for properties below market value.