Guide to Selling Your Own Home

Step One

You will need to take some time to prepare your property for a sale, make sure that each room is neat, tidy and fee from clutter, and if possible ensure that any un-finished DIY jobs are completed.

Make your property stand out by ensuring that it has kerb appeal, for example does the front door need a lick of paint, are the windows clean, are there any weeds on the garden path, do the hanging baskets or garden need tidying up?

Step Two

Gather together the information you will need to upload your property details onto Alternative Sales website, it will help if you have to hand your:

Room Measurements

Measuring your rooms is a simple process, the most important part is not to forget to measure to the biggest part of the room, ie don’t forget to measure into bay windows and alcoves.

Photos

Before you take your photos, think about presenting the rooms to their very best, it is really important to remove any clutter, and to take the photo’s when the lighting is at its best, buyers like lots of light, so try not to upload dark photographs as you will not do your property any justice. Most importantly always take photographs of the rooms best features, ie do you have a lovely fireplace?

Alternative Sale would suggest you upload the following photographs:

Front Exterior

Lounge

Dining Room (if applicable)

Kitchen

Bathroom

Master Bedroom

Bathroom

Garden/courtyard

The content for your written description

Think about what you are going to say to make your property stand out. Alternative Sale will give you a lot of hints and tips when you are at the point of writing your property description, but it will help you if you have your own ideas, this is your opportunity to sell your home and the description is therefore very important. We would suggest that you look at other property advertisements, but don’t spend too much time worrying about making it sound Like an Estate Agent has written it, just stick to the facts, sell the good points and make reference to your neighborhood.

Price you have decided on

It goes without saying that you will want to achieve the best price possible for your home. If you set the price too high, you will most probably put off any potential interested party. For further information on how to set the right price see the House Price section of this website.

Step 3

Managing the Interest in your property

When advertising with Alternative Sale, you will have your own administration area, where you can log in and view a hits counter to see how much interest there has been in your property.

Step 4

Conducting viewings from interested parties

Alternative Sale would remind you to take the necessary precautions when inviting strangers to your home. We are confident that any interest that you receive via our website should be genuine in nature, but we can not be responsible for vetting any interest in your property, we would therefore always suggest the following:

Never allow members of the public to simply walk in off the street. If they want to view your property, then make them book an appointment to ensure that they are genuine.

Take full details from the interested party, including a landline telephone number if possible, and consider calling the interested party the day before to check that they will still be making the appointment.

Try not to conduct the viewing alone, if there is no option, then always let somebody know what you are doing, what time the viewing is taking place.

Before your viewer arrives, don’t forget to make sure your property is presented to the best possible standard, make sure each room is neat and tidy, with no clutter, if you have pets try to arrange for them to be with a friend or neighbor, don’t have the television or music on, as your viewers will want to ask you questions.

When your potential purchaser arrives, don’t forget to greet them with a smile, and when showing your viewer around, keep all doors closed and open them one by one, that way they won’t be looking in too many places at once. Most importantly don’t forget to sell your home, tells the potential buyer, how you have loved there, make your reason for moving a positive one, ie don’t say you don’t like your neighbors, or the house is too small.

Don’t forget that it is important for you to ask questions to, try to find out what position your potential purchaser is in, ie are they first time buyers or do they have a property to sell. You may be in the very fortunate position of receiving more than one offer, and by finding out as much as you can about each potential buyer, you will be able to decide which offer to accept.

Great you have accepted an offer

You have successfully marketed your property and have an offer on the table, so what do you do now? It’s really simple, and this is where your conveyancing Solicitor steps in, you will need to obtain your buyers details and details of their Solicitor, you then provide this information to your solicitor and they will take care of the rest.

Completion

You set a date to move out of your property and into your new one, congratulations!

**Property Chains

Unless you are accepting an offer from a first time buyer and moving into a property that has been empty for sometime, then there is likely to be some form of a property chain. You should try to gather as much information as possible about the chain from your buyers and from the people you are buying from (if applicable) and chase all transactions as appropriate.