4 Ways to Fast-Track a Home Sale in the Off-Season

The off-season can be a pretty lackluster period to sell your home. In a buyer’s market, prospects know they have the upper hand in negotiations and will happily leverage this into asking for a lower selling price.

Still, selling a home in a down market isn’t impossible, and with the help of a few tips, you still have a fighting chance of closing a deal and selling your home on acceptable terms. Here are some to get you started:

Engage with Your Buyers a Bit More

It’s the off-season, so you can expect to interact with fewer buyers when selling your home. While the number of prospective buyers may demoralize you, you should instead treat this as an opportunity to engage with each buyer a bit more.

Answer every question, do some follow-ups, give each prospect a more thorough tour through your home, and learn about their needs. Buyers this time of year may be few but they also tend to be more serious about closing a deal, making it best to match that with your own efforts.

Sweeten the Deal for Realtors

One of the bigger challenges of the off-season is getting buyers to notice and pay attention to your listing. There’s a whole slew of ways to accomplish this, but appealing directly to buyers’ agents is an underestimated tactic. Offer the Realtor or listing agent incentives in your listings, whether in the form of a bonus if they manage to close the deal before a target date within the off-season or simply a higher commission rate.

Put your Eggs in the Online Basket

With the growing prevalence of online marketplaces and rise of younger, more digital-savvy homebuyers, it has never been more important to be proactive in promoting your home online.

And with buyers usually being lazier to go out and look at properties in the flesh during the off-season, pouring your resources into the online realm is the way to go this time of year. Get your listing up on social media, perhaps even spend a little on boosting your online listing, and engage with prospective buyers who contact you.

If They Do Come Over, Be Ready

While digital may be important, buyers are inevitably going to come around and take a look at your property up close. When this happens, you want to be ready on two fronts: curb appeal and home staging.

The off-season falls on a time where there will naturally be debris and perhaps even snow on your yard. Curb appeal may not have bothered you, the resident, during this season, but it will definitely be a turn-off to your buyers. Their experience with your home will matter as much as its appearance, so you’ll also want to make sure that the property is staged according to the season.

People also look for a cozy, homey place to live in this time of year, so stage with that vision in mind, perhaps get a professional to do that for you, and turn up the heater. Do what you must to make it feel like their effort to leave the comfort of home to tour yours was well worth it.

When all else fails, however, you can always sell your home to a property investor like Blue Hen Homebuyers. 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.

Photo by Michelle Phillips from FreeImages