How To Prepare a House to Sell:

There are a number of things you should do in order to maximize the selling price of your home. In general you should do whatever you can to put your house's best face forward if you want to sell your property at or close to your asking price as quickly as possible. Short of spending a lot of money, here are several ideas for making your home show better:

• Sweep the sidewalk, mow the lawn, prune the bushes, weed the garden and clean debris from the yard.
• Clean the windows (both inside and out) and make sure the paint is not chipped or flaking. And speaking of paint, if your home was built before 1978, new federal law gives a buyer the right to request a lead inspection. If you think you might have some problems, do the inspection yourself or hire an Austin Texas Real Estate Appraiser beforehand and then make any fixes you can.
• Be sure that the doorbell works.
• Clean and spruce up all rooms, furnishings, floors, walls and ceilings. It's especially important that the bathroom and kitchen are spotless.
• Organize closets.
• Make sure the basic appliances and fixtures work. Get rid of leaky faucets and frayed cords.
• Make sure the house smells good: from an apple pie, cookies baking or spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove. Hide the kitty litter.
• Put vases of fresh flowers throughout the house.
• Having pleasant background music playing in the background also will help set your stage.

In addition to hiring an appraiser, you should contact an experienced Austin Real Estate Agent who can provide you with a market analysis and give you an estimated sale price of your home. This analysis will compare your home and propertu to other homes recently sold and other current real estate listings.

Selling a Slow Mover:

Even in a down real estate market, local Austin real eatate experts say that price and condition are the two most important factors in selling a home.

If you are selling in a slow market, your first step would be to lower your price. Also, go through the house and see if there are cosmetic defects that you missed and can be repaired.

Secondly, you need to make sure that your property is getting the exposure it deserves through open houses, broker open houses, advertising, good signage, and real estate listings on the local multiple listing service (MLS) and on the Internet.

Another option is to pull your house off the market and wait for the real estate market to improve.

Finally, if you who have no equity in the house, and are forced to sell because of a divorce or financial considerations, you could discuss a short sale or a deed-in-lieu-of- foreclosure with your lender.

A short sale is when the seller finds a buyer for a price that is below the mortgage amount and negotiates the difference with the lender.

In a deed-in-lieu-of-foreclosure situation, the lender agrees to take the property back without instituting foreclosure proceedings. The latter are radical options. Your simplest, and in many cases most effective, option is to lower your listing price.