Do you want to sell your house fast,? My lovely readers, if any of you out there is either selling or planning to sell your house fast, then you are in the right place. Since this post is absolutely based on our personal experience, I am going to give you all the tips that helped us to sell our house fast. No, seriously, we sold our house within three days. We closed it very quickly as well.

So before a further ado, let’s get started,

You all have seen our old 1970’s Ranch style home through pictures on my site, right?  

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Our Starter Home

When we purchased this house, it was a great starter home for us but we knew we would sell this house one day (only God knew the right time, though). My husband always wanted to get out of Wisconsin since he grew up there and wasn’t planning to live there for rest of his life shoveling a long driveway every winter.

I love Wisconsin, and it will always be in my heart. As I said, “only God knew the right time”. Out of the blue, I got a new job in one of my husband’s favorite cities, Portland, OR. I like it here too, but I’m still struggling to call it home. It took me 4 months to say “yes” to my new employer as it was hard for me to move on. We moved here and put our house on sale and sold it within three days! Yes! That’s why I am sharing these wonderful 13 tips with you so you can sell your house fast as well.

Before we moved, I made this checklist to sell the house.

If you follow my checklist, you will sell your house within no time, as you know selling a house could be really stressful. You want to sell your house within the first couple of weeks as if it sits in the market longer, the chances are less than you would sell your house on your asking price. These 13 points are proven. I have seen homes sitting in the market for so long, but thankfully we didn’t have to deal with this, although credit goes to me as I worked my butt off.

13 Proven Steps To Sell Your House Fast:

1- De-cluttering 

First things first, since you have to sell your house fast. Now you already know you are moving, (especially if moving far away out of state) start with decluttering. Get rid of anything you don’t need or not going to use it for a while, or if it’s too expensive to move. Sell it or donate it. It’s your personal choice, and we did both. 

If you are not moving out state or far away, then give yourself a favor and rent a storage unit. I can’t stress you enough that how crucial decluttering is when it comes to selling your house fast. Don’t you think when people are coming to visit you, they are not going to see your storage spaces? Heck yes, they gonna do that first. I have experience as a buyer and seller both so I can speak with my personal experience.

2- Fresh coat of paint

I can’t tell what a big difference this makes. It was winter and snowing every day so we couldn’t paint outside, but I had painted our interior a year prior to selling our house.  I just touched up wherever it was needed. If your paint doesn’t look great, go ahead and get some neutral colors to attract buyers. It will also bring tons of light in your house. 

Don’t ever assume that if you like green, your buyer would like as well. It doesn’t work that way. Selling a house fast isn’t easy but it’s not hard either. You can’t go wrong by picking any shade of gray or white. I would even avoid accent well as well or if you really want to add an accent wall just pick a darker shade from the primary color you are going to use.

3- De-personalize

I would say put your family photos away and clean your fridge exterior. Ours was full of tons of magnets, etc. Put your kid’s stuff away such as we had a corner for our kids to hang their backpacks and jackets, and shoes. I gave them bins for the rest of the time we were there. You want to have your potential buyers feel like it’s there space but by showing your pictures would not put them in the mood. It’s an important rule to follow in order to sell your house fast.  

4- Pack your stuff away

Again, since you are selling your home, you definitely are moving either in-state or out of state, so pack everything and label them accordingly (I will do the blog post on tips we used for moving to save time and money someday). We stacked our stuff in the garage nicely. Don’t overflow your garage though as you want to show that your garage is spacious enough for the new family. We finally put everything in U-Pack as it was the cheaper way to go for us. 

5- Deep cleaning

First, go through everything. Clean the whole entire house, flooring, windows, carpets, bathrooms, closets and kitchen cabinets. Once you think it looks pretty good, then it’s the time to get a professional cleaner to make the house even more spotless and sparkly. Have them clean professionally as they know what to do and how to make a house ready to sell.  

6- Repairs

Make all the important repairs. Any electrical, plumbing or any other issue you should address it before the inspection. I had to hire an electrician to do some jobs around the house and change chandelier for me. It was a couple of hundred dollars I had to spend, but it was totally worth it. Make sure there are no safety issues there as it can cost you a fortune when it comes to inspection. Fix them before you sell it. Keep all the receipts handy. 

7- Staging

Okay, staging is something which could cost you thousands of dollars. I had no idea until I called some stager since I was out of time and it was better for me to just have someone else do it so I could be more focused on moving. The minimum was $5,000 and that was way too much for me to spend on one day’s photo shoot. I decided to jump in and just do my own staging. I gave myself a $500 budget and I spent a little more than that, but it was so rewarding when the photographer came in and said, “who did you use for staging”?

Honestly, I was so happy to hear that. I felt like all my hard work had paid off. Have your friends and family look at your house to give you an honest opinion. I had one of my husband’s friends and our neighbor to help us with that. Clean inside and clean outside and pay attention to curb appeal. After all, you want to sell your house fast! Well, in Wisconsin, winter is not so good to have a curb appeal but do whatever you possibly can. Our house was already pretty clean, but after getting rid of a lot of clutter it started to look more spacious. 

Here is the link of local staging companies in Portland

8- Pay attention to details

Make sure you clean your closets and kitchen cabinets very nicely. No marks or spots are in there. I purchased a cheap liner and lined all my drawers just to make them look pretty. You know, those liners make cabinet drawers look very pretty. I thought someone might appreciate it. We changed the hardware for our kitchen cabinets as well.

9- Bathrooms

Like you all know, old ranch homes do not have big bathrooms in them. Pay special attention to those bathrooms. Stage them well. Remove any personal stuff out of the bathrooms. I put everything in a small bin such as our toothbrushes, toothpaste, etc. and placed that bin under the sink. Remove colorful towels or mats. Not everyone likes the colorful stuff, and I had red towels for kids and yellow for us, but I brought white towels to stage my bathrooms.

We had three shelves in each bath. I removed two of them and left one just to give both bathrooms a more spacious look. I think it worked out perfectly. Remove any personal pictures. Anything you have shows a personal touch, just remove it.  See your home from the buyer’s perspective. It’s not going to be your home anymore anyway. Otherwise, you won’t be reading here on “how to sell your house fast”.   

10- Appraisal

Make sure your appraisal is up to date with the city assessors. This is a mistake I made and the first buyer offered me $35,000 less than the asking price. I get it that. I wanted to sell my house fast but on the other hand, I didn’t want to lose money either. An appraisal is something not everyone would talk about when it comes to selling your house fast.  No one bothers mentioning that tip. 

11- Professional photos

This is also very crucial. Have your real estate person use a professional photographer as opposed to taking pictures with his/her phones. It makes a whole lot of difference. Most professional real estate agents or brokers, whatever you call them, use professional photographers. 

12- Be aware, and check out the comparison

Know your property value. Check out the comparison online for the last three months. Know how to deal with low ballers. Your real estate person, of course, helps you but you have to be prepared for this. You have to know what’s going on in your neighborhood. This is really critical to know. Where our house was in Wisconsin, in that particular neighborhood, houses don’t sit in the market for a long time. Yet, I have seen some sitting for months and I researched that those were the houses that they put no effort and just listed with messy pictures. Portland is currently a very hot market. People still stage their house in this hot of a market where you barely find a house to buy.

13- Be firm in your dealings

Now since you ready to list, please be firm in your dealing, don’t lose money on the seller’s market. Be determined, and don’t be shaky thinking “Oh, what If I couldn’t sell”. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Trust that you are gonna sell your house fast. We had multiple offers, and the people we sold our house to gave us the lowest offer possible, but they bought our house at the price we wanted to sell it at. Don’t take anything personally. Our buyer wrote us an offensive letter but we still sold the house to them. Our real estate agent was also very skilled which was a tremendous help. 

Conclusion

So there you go. I have mentioned everything based on my personal experience. I hope these 13 tips have been helpful and you have found this post beneficial. If you really want to sell your house quickly, then you gotta work hard at it, but I promise, it will pay off at the end. If you have some extra money then hire someone to help you, otherwise use your elbow grease, it’s all worth it. Good luck with selling your house fast!

We closed our house within two weeks. The buyer was very tough in negotiations but ended up paying us what we wanted to get.

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Tell me about your experience or tips about selling your house or buying a house where you felt like that seller should have taken care of some stuff?