There are a lot of different reasons why someone might want to sell their home fast, but it typically has to do with their financial situation, their personal lives, or both.
Whether you have already bought another house and are sick of handling two mortgages, or you inherited a house that you just want to turn over quickly, there are a number of different options to help you sell your house fast.
Selling your home is always stressful, but there are ways to speed up the process and move on with your life.
Let’s take a look at how to sell your house fast and what your different options are.
How to speed up traditional home sales
People don’t always mean the same thing when they say they want to sell their home fast. Maybe they mean they want it to sell swiftly within the season, while someone else might mean they want it out of their hands in two weeks.
If you’re in the former camp, there are a number of things you can do to sell your house in Tampa as fast as possible on the traditional market. This means that you can expect homebuyers to be seeking financing to purchase your home. You therefore cannot expect the deal to be over and done with for a least a couple months.
That being said, following these tips can help ensure that your home doesn’t sit on the market indefinitely without any reasonable offers rolling in.
1. Declutter and clean
You’ll want to get rid of anything making your home look busy or put it in storage. It’s also a good idea to give your home a deep cleaning to get ready for pictures and showings.
2. Price it right
If your main interest is selling your house fast, then you want to get the price right. If you price it too high, it’ll sit on the market without promising offers rolling in.
3. Set a price reduction timeline
Have a plan ahead of time for how you’ll reduce the price. This can ensure that if you do price it too high, it doesn’t sit on the market that way for too long.
4. Deal with quick repairs
While you might not want to replace the roof, you can deal with small repairs like a leaky faucet. Little things like this give buyers less to fret over.
5. Stage your home
Staging a home is a great way to help buyers envision themselves in the home. If the home is too personalized to you, they might not psychologically be able to get over feeling like their in someone else’s home
6. Add curb appeal
First impressions matter. Perking up the outside of your home can get you more showings and a faster sale.
7. Market it right
You’ll want to have professional photographs taken, a high-quality listing description, and you’ll want to list it in the right places. When time is of the essence, you can’t afford to cut any of these corners.
8. Sell at the right time
Different locations have different peak selling seasons. Hitting the market at the right time can make the process go much more quickly.
10. Be available for showings
Selling your house is going to take over your life for a bit. If you want it to happen quickly, you can’t be picky about when people come to take a look. Build your schedule around open houses and showings, not the other way around.
How to sell your house fast: The different options
You’ve got options when it comes to how to sell your home. As you’ll see, they’re not all created equal when you want to sell your house fast.
List your home with a top Tampa real estate agent
You can go this route if you’re in a hurry, but not too much of a hurry. If you find a real estate agent that has a proven track record of selling homes fast, you might be able to have a relatively quick sale. Real estate transactions are complicated and having an agent there to help you isn’t a bad idea.
Look for an iBuyer
One of the quickest and easiest ways to sell your home is to sell it to a cash buyer. iBuyers will make instant all-cash offers. If you’re in a hurry to sell your house and move on with your life, this might be the right option for you.
iBuyer offers typically don’t take any longer than 48 hours. When you go this route, you don’t have to worry about your house sitting on the market endlessly. You also don’t have to worry about making upgrades, repairs, doing showings, or any of the other hassle that comes along with selling a house on the traditional market.
Another big plus of going with a cash buyer is that you don’t have the headache of dealing with the buyer receiving financing from a lender. During the mortgaging process, there are any number of things that can go wrong. It is a lengthy endeavor that is incredibly stressful, complicated, and can get pulled out from under you at the last minute, leaving you at square one.
If you’re underwater: Find out if you qualify for a short sale
Being underwater on your mortgage or having negative equity is not a position that anyone wants to be in. Unfortunately, sometimes it does happen.
If you owe more on your home than the home is worth, this means that you have negative equity. If you’re looking to sell the home but will end up owing your lender money rather than profiting, you can see if you qualify for a short sale.
A short sale doesn’t necessarily happen very fast. All it means is that your lender has agreed to let you sell your house for less money than you owe them for it. It will generally take longer to finalize a short sale than a traditional sale.
If you’re trying to sell your house fast, this isn’t the option for you. If you’re in a bind and you don’t appear to have many other options, it might be worth exploring.
Sell your home FSBO
People are drawn to selling their homes FSBO (for sale by owner) as it means you don’t have to pay real estate agent commissions. In a seller’s market, you might have a relatively easy time of selling your house. However, going it alone isn’t always the best option.
Real estate deals are complicated and involve tons of documents that are seemingly written in Greek. It is a big responsibility to sell your home on your own and isn’t necessarily any faster than hiring a real estate agent. Because you don’t have the expertise of an agent when it comes to pricing and negotiating as well, you might not get as much as you want for your home.
Sell your house at auction
This is another legitimately fast way to sell your house. Typically, it takes somewhere between 45 and 60 days from listing to close to sell a house on auction.
Before you get too excited, you must understand how risky it is to sell your house at auction. You have very little control over how much your home ends up selling for. You set a minimum bid, but there’s no telling whether or not buyers will bid up the price much from there.
It’s important that you have at least 25% equity in your home if you’re considering putting it on auction. The most important thing is making sure that whatever your home goes for at auction, you don’t end up still owing money to your lender.
This isn’t the right choice for all properties by any means. You’ll want to carefully look into the options to make sure selling your home at auction is the right thing for you.
Why is an all-cash offer the fastest way to sell your house?
One of the things that make the home sale process so lengthy is the mortgaging process. When you are only dealing with parties that are making all-cash offers, you don’t have to deal with this aspect of selling your home.
Another reason this is the speediest way to get to closing is that the sale doesn’t rely on the home appraising for a certain value. Home sales frequently fall through due to issues with financing, and you simply won’t have to worry about this with cash buyers.
On top of that, you won’t have to put in the time or money to get your house ready for listing. There are a lot of little expenses and projects that can mean it takes months or longer to get your house ready for the market. Many iBuyers are buying houses as-is, so you won’t have to deal with any of that.
While there are ways to speed up selling your home on the traditional market, using an iBuyer is the only way to legitimately close in as quickly as one week. Otherwise, the process is inevitably going to take somewhere around two months or longer, even if you do everything right.
Sell your house in Tampa fast: It’s possible!
Using an iBuyer is one of the easiest ways to sell your House fast. While this might not be the right option for everyone, it can be a quick, easy, and stress-free way to keep the home-selling process short and sweet.
Are you wondering how much your house is worth? Check out our free home value estimator today!
