There are a variety of opportunities in the Central Pennsylvania real estate market for both buyers and sellers. If you're a prospective buyer click here for a full home search, or if you're considering placing your home on the market this spring, get a free home value report, right here. Is it time to refinance? Click here!
While the client perspective will always be our top priority, nothing puts things into better perspective than experiencing selling your home first hand, which is exactly what Chris and I recently did. We spent the entire summer going through the same process that we routinely help our clients through.
The first step we took was preparation. Our listing agents are constantly preaching preparation to their clients, so this was my opportunity to practice what we preach. We chose to get our home pre-inspected, which means we had an inspector come in and take a look at our home before it hit the market. This is attractive to potential buyers and is helpful in teaching sellers the true condition of their home. This helped us jump ahead of the curve, as we made small repairs inside and out before even listing our home!
Next, we decluttered our rooms and closets and staged the home to sell. Then we moved outside; we mulched, cleaned the shed, repainted our brick walkway, and even purchased a new pool line, knowing these expenses would really pay off in the end.
All of that preparation culminated in our photography appointment. Professional real estate photography is a remarkably important step to selling your home. Joy Daniels Real Estate Group has used professional photography from the beginning. These photos are your chance to make a lasting impression on potential buyers -- Chris and I realized this, so we put a lot of work and effort into preparing our photo appointment. The preparation paid off, as our photos looked absolutely fantastic!
We put our photos up on various websites, but the one we most want to tell you about is our own. We have a new website called CentralPAComingSoon.com which allows sellers to showcase their home before it's even listed. The Coming Soon sign in the yard really jumpstarted the process. We went active in the last week of May, and within a week, we already had an offer! Chris and I were overjoyed knowing our hard work had made a difference.
However, as we already knew going into the sale, real estate is never a sure thing. The deal we were working on eventually fell apart. At the time, it was a lot to process -- the prospect of going back on the market was really disheartening. But we knew what we had to do. Real estate transactions have ups and downs, but since we were already in a good position to list, it was not a problem getting up and running again. Our home went live in August, but we didn't receive any offers in the first few weeks. We decided the best thing to do would be to lower the price, which we did, and ended up getting a whole bunch of showings! We sold it the weekend following the price reductions!
Next, we had to actually move out -- but we'll cover THAT in our next video! If you have any questions about selling, or real estate in general, please don't hesitate to reach out to us. We would love to hear from you!