3 tips to know to sell your apartment quickly and well

Do you want to take advantage of the economic situation to sell your home to buy a larger or better placed? It is still necessary to find a buyer quickly and at the desired price. To put the odds on your side, you must carefully prepare your sale before crossing the door of a real estate agency we buy houses.

  1. Estimate the property at its fair price

Today, the average time to sell an apartment or house is, according to the Century 21 network, 95 days. But a good whose price has been overvalued can take months or even years to sell. Moreover, it generally finds a buyer at a price lower than that which could have been obtained if, from the beginning, the estimate had been correct. Hence the need not to be wrong in this key step of the sale.

For a first approach, look at listings of similar homes to yours in the neighborhood. Consult the sites of the agencies (Century 21, ERA, Orpi …) and the internet portals (Explorimmo.com, Seloger.com, Pap.fr, Leboncoin.fr, etc.). You can refine the data collected through online estimates. Free on the site of the Private individual, in partnership with Meilleursagents (Leparticulier.fr), they are paying (from 128 to 248 € according to the size of the good) on that of PAP.

It is also possible to access recent transaction references stored in your area. For 10 €, the Paris site. Notaries. En gives you this information about Ile-de-France. For national references (excluding Alsace, Moselle and Mayotte), consult the Patrim database, made freely available to the public by the tax authorities since January 2014.

But estimation is a difficult exercise because multiple criteria come into play: neighborhood, exposure, floor, and interior condition of the property, standing of the building but also school map and energy performance. To reduce the risk of error, contact a local real estate agent who knows your area. He will provide you, free of charge and without obligation, a written estimate. To be reliable, it must be supported by concrete examples: goods on the market with their selling price, well sold (with the initial price, the final price as well as the time of sale) and the unsold. “A prize can never be set at random,” says Bernard Cadeau, president of Orpi. Attention, it still happens that some real estate agents overestimate the property to get the mandate.

Know, if you live in the west of France (Brittany, Normandy, Pays de la Loire …), you can have the property assessed by a notary, because studies there, usually, a transaction service.

  1. Privilege the exclusive sales mandate

If you chose to sell your home with the help of a real estate agent, you will have to sign a sales mandate with him. This one can be simple or exclusive. In the first case, you can entrust the business to several agencies, or even sell “live” to a buyer that you have found yourself. You will benefit from a wide distribution of your sale. The downside, professionals may not feel involved in a transaction they are not sure to materialize. In addition, a good that is presented in several agencies, sometimes at different prices, is quickly discredited in the eyes of prospective buyers.

Second solution, you give exclusivity to an agency. This means that you agree to treat through him through the duration of the mandate (usually 3 or 6 months). You hesitate to entrust an exclusive mandate because you fear that your sale remains too confidential? Rest assured, if you choose a network, your file will be communicated to all its agencies. Similarly, it can be shared on the Amepi file which, locally, includes the exclusive mandates of all partner agencies.

In this case, the other agencies can present your property to potential buyers, but without advertising around.

Opting for an exclusive mandate often leads to greater efficiency. Indeed, the professional is usually particularly diligent because he has the assurance not to be “blow” the case by a competitor. “The transformation rate is 1/8 with a simple mandate, 1 / 2.7 with an exclusive mandate and 1/2 with an exclusive mandate shared on Amepi,” said Hervé Blery, president of the file Amepi.

  1. Look after the presentation of your home

“Today, there is an average buyer for a property for sale. In 2010, there were 10 buyers for the same property, “said Sébastien de Lafond, co-founder of Meilleuragents com. This means that buyers have the choice and that your property must stand out from the crowd to seduce them. To you, therefore, to make it as attractive as possible. To do this, enhance the space by storing and getting rid – even temporarily – of your most impressive furniture (big Norman wardrobe, large Empire style furniture …). Help the visitor to get into the scene by making the decor as neutral as possible: remove your family photos, trinkets and ostentatious religious items. Be careful about the small details … that are not necessarily. “One gets used to the small defects of a place in which one lives for years. This will not be the case for the buyer who will see a source of additional expenses, “warns Laurent Vimont, president of Century 21.

For example, replace the burned out bulbs or repair a defective intercom because the buyer will anticipate, from the outset, an electrical problem. Similarly, remove the dead plants from your terrace or balcony because he will think that this outdoor space is hardly used because unwelcoming (too windy, poorly exposed …). And, of course, if you have a pool, do not leave it empty or, worse, filled with greenish water!

Home staging companies can help you value your home and perform these tasks for you. “The home stager is there to highlight what the buyer is looking for: volume, brightness, space,” says Francky Boisseau, co-founder of Home-Staging Experts. For this, it can even, in some cases, furnish an empty dwelling (an unfurnished surface seems ever more cramped) and bring some touches of contemporary decoration. Only work that is really necessary (replacement of old used and stained carpet, for example) is undertaken; the others are encrypted by quotes.

On average, the services of a home stager are between 1 and 2% of the selling price. The game is worth, it seems, candlelight. In fact, according to the statistics of the Avéo home staging network, the time to sell a property whose owners have used one of its franchisees is 46 days, which is half the national average.