How To Sell Your Home Fast Amid the Covid-19 Pandemic

How to Sell Your Home Fast Amid the Coronavirus Pandemic

Selling your home is a daunting task, even under normal circumstances. However, now amid the global Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the process has been further complicated. Although the home selling process may be a bit more challenging, it’s still possible to sell your home fast during the global pandemic. Below we will discuss some tips on how to sell your home during the current global pandemic.

Particularly, many buyers and sellers alike want to avoid excessive contact with others and wait to move until the pandemic dies down. This has triggered about half of the prospective buyers to put off their home search. However, for those buyers who still remain in the market, the quality has gone up tremendously. This means that sellers can take advantage of the sluggish, yet quality traffic.

Additionally, financial uncertainty and increasing joblessness have led many mortgage lenders to tighten their lending standards and qualifications, consequently making it harder for borrowers to secure pre-approval or a home mortgage at a decent rate.

In any event, to sell your home fast amid the coronavirus pandemic, you should consider using the following tips.

Hire an Experienced Real Estate Agent To Sell Your Home

While it is true that the majority of homes on the market are sold under the guidance of a real estate agent, their role amid the global pandemic has become even more critical. Particularly, experienced real estate agents have firsthand knowledge about your local market. Additionally, most agents have substantial experience with digitally marketing a home, which is even more crucial during the pandemic. Therefore, this is not the time to try and sell your home by yourself. Hire an experienced agent to help you with the process.

Create a Virtual Experience for Prospective Buyers

Work with your agent to post a virtual, pre-recorded video walkthrough, or listing video of your property listing. Virtual tours give buyers a reasonable experience of the property, which might assist them in seeing that your home is genuinely a fantastic match.

Optimize Your Online Property Description

One of the very first things you need to do amid the Coronavirus pandemic is to optimize your property’s online presence. Specifically, you should highlight the home’s best features and key upgrades in your listing description.

Do your best to paint a vivid photo of your home. You can do this with a descriptive listing describing features that buyers may miss or ignore during a virtual showing or tour.

Sell Your Home By Increasing Your Home’s Curb Appeal

Before scheduling an in-person showing, many agents are taking their buyers on preliminary showings to highlight the surrounding neighborhood, street, and outside of a home, they’re interested in. Therefore, you should invest a quarantined weekend in enhancing your curb appeal to impress any purchasers who may do a drive-by or who may be touring the neighborhood.

Communicate Digitally

Even in more predictable times, an excellent real estate agent is in continuous contact with their client.

However, to adapt to the brand-new selling post-coronavirus, agents have been keeping a close watch on the market and continuing to interact what they see to customers on almost a daily basis through teleconferencing options like Zoom or FaceTime

Be Ready to Sell Your Home Fast

A good majority of sellers are hesitant to put their homes on the marketplace, which is unfortunate.  In most markets, the housing stock is down right now, but buyer demand is still high. This makes it an excellent time to list a property while other property owners are hesitating to do so.

Start preparing your home to sell, that way when everything is officially lifted, you can be the first in line to put your home on the market.

Listing your home now puts you ahead of your competitors. Since you’re investing more time in the house than ever before, begin taking actions to prepare your home. Deep clean the interior and refurbish the outside entrance. Declutter and organize your home. Lastly, arrange your closets, pantries, and drawers.

Be Ready to Sign Addenda and Disclosures

Over the last couple of months, it is more and more common to see “COVID-19 provisions” or Coronavirus “addenda” or “amendments” in the sales contract. Overall, these have become a regular addition to buyer’s purchase agreements across the country, and it’s not expected to end anytime soon. These provisions allow agreement closing extensions and even termination without financial consequences.

As a seller, you must know what your options are during these chaotic times. When you get an offer, you should confirm what the terms of the coronavirus amendment will be.

Talk with your agent in detail about negotiating the specified deadline extensions. This will keep the down payment in what scenario, and as else included in the addendum. However, the majority of buyers will not submit their offer without some type of agreement protection specific to these situations.

In any event, make certain you speak with your real estate agent before signing to any unknown documents.

Consider Selling Your Home for Cash

If all else fails, you should discuss with your real estate agent the possibility of selling your home to an investor for cash. While it is true, you will not get full market price for your home, if you need to sell your home fast due to financial stress, this is one of your best options. Particularly, you can sell your home “as-is” without making one single repair. Likewise, you can enjoy a fast closing often less than 30 days if you want. Mainly this is because a cash investor does not need to deal with a bank or lending institution. Therefore, many of the things that hold up a conventional home sale are nonexistent when you sell your home for cash.

With that being said, do not be reluctant to talk with your agent about any and all of the above. Most real estate agents have pivoted their business amid the coronavirus and would be happy to schedule a virtual conference with you.