Scoring the highest sale price possible is always the goal when selling your home. While there may be a lot of tips and suggestions floating around on how to do this, these tend to dwell more on the practical or technical side of things. However, closing a sale has a lot to do with mindsets – both yours and the buyer’s, so why not get ideas directly from the field that studies the mind?
Here are some tips from psychology you’ll find useful in selling your home:
1. Don’t Get Overconfident
People tend to be more confident in their ability to pull off certain feats than would be reasonable. This is called “Overconfidence Bias,” and it usually leads people to believe that they are more than capable to handle things on their own. In the case of real estate, this manifests in people who are confident that they can make the most out of a sale without the help of a real estate agent.
Take a step back and assess what your skillset, experience, and current circumstances dictate you are actually capable of doing. You may not be as charismatic as you think you are or as knowledgeable of the home market in your area as you think you might be.
2. Make the First Impression Count
People tend cling to the first piece of information they get about something and base their decisions and understanding of situations on that information. It’s hard to let this bias go despite new information that may come in. It’s called Anchoring in psychology.
In real estate (and sales in general), this has some bearing on your initial offering and the first visual people have of your home. When negotiating the sale price, feel free to start a little high to let every offer after that first be a lot more appealing. When it comes to your home, do everything you can to make it as neat and beautiful as possible – do some landscaping, get a fresh coat of paint on, and so on.
3. Detach from Your Home
Having lived in a place you call your own for a while now is likely going to trigger what’s known as the Endowment Effect when it’s time to let it to. Yet another bias, the Endowment Effect brings us to overvalue what we own despite its actual value in the market.
Overpricing your home will not translate to earning more money from its sale. Instead, buyers will be less likely to make the purchase – especially when they’re informed by a real estate agent on the state of the home market in your area. It’s not easy to detach yourself from your home, so to avoid this bias altogether, it’s best to leave the sale to a competent real estate agent of your own who would have no emotional attachment to the property.
Decisions line the entire path to selling your home, and the mental fog from these biases that come from being human make a tough task tougher. Self-awareness and a healthy sense of your own limitations, however, is a great step forward.
If you don’t have time for these tricks, however, you can still sell your home to an investor like Blue Hen Homebuyers. As a home investor, we buy all kinds of homes, regardless of their age or condition. Call our offices today at 910-802-2222 to learn more about how we can help you.