My Hattiesburg

9 Steps in Selling Your Home: Steps 5-6

Step 5: Determine the Cost to Acquire a New Home
Total your costs to acquire a new home may include but not limited to: down payment, loan costs, moving expenses, home inspections, title work and new hazard insurance policy premium. When you applied for pre-approval your lender should have given you a disclosure of estimated costs.

Step 6: Calculate Your Estimated Earnings
This is basically estimating the money you will have left over after you sell you home.
First, deduct the mortgage payoff from the fair market value of your home. Then, deduct the cost to sell from the remaining balance and this will give you your total proceeds made from selling you home.

For example, my mortgage payoff is $70,000, fair market value is $100,000, and the cost of selling my house (includes agents commission, repairs, advertising, ect…) is $7500.

This is how you would work it: 100,000 - 70,000 = 30, 000 then 30,000 - 7500 = 22,500. So the total proceeds that will be made off this example would be $22,500.

9 Steps in Selling Your Home: Steps 7-9

Step 7: Make Needed Repairs
Be sure to fix the thing about your home that is broken and in need of repair. Failing to do so may result in a buyer submitting a lower bid.

Step 8: Get Your Home Ready to Show
Most homes need a little cleaning up before they are ready to be shown to potential buyers. Some improvements may include: fresh paint indoors, a cleaned yard, well organized closets, clutter free rooms, and clean floors, windows, and appliances. I think you get what I am talking about.

Step 9: Stay Excited About Showing
If you use a real estate agent then they will more than likely ask you to leave while they show the house to a potential buyer. Why do agents do this? Well, so that no undue pressure is on the buyers. Sellers that lurk around the house while a buyer is looking often makes the buyer uncomfortable and you should want the buyer to be as comfortable as they can possibly be. However, leaving your house 3 or 4 times a week for a agent to show your home will become taxing on your emotions. Just keep your attitude in check and get through it because the more times a agent shows your house the more likely you are to sell it.

Getting Started

In the next couple of days I will be doing a series of posts on buying a house, selling a house, and real estate investment. However, for today I just want to give you a glimpse on how I will be posting. For this upcoming series I will basically act like you know nothing about real estate and give you what I hope is a wealth of knowledge about real estate. The posts that follow this series will be more freely written with topics ranging from home appreciation to Mississippi State Real Estate Tax Law. Hope to see you tomorrow