Selling

Welcome to the Sun Stone Helps You Find a Buyer section. If you are considering selling your home, we want to help you. Do you see the links tat the bottom? They are the entryway to some invaluable information to help you make some critical decisions. Like, do I really want to sell my home, what do I need to do if I want to sell it, and do I need a Realtor® and is that Realtor® a trained professional at Sun Stone Property? It cost you nothing to interview us, so email us at Info@SunStoneProperty.com or call 1-866-995-6366.

It's so simple. List your home with our company and one of our highly trained, professional agents will help you find a buyer and get the most money for your home possible. We really do want to help you find a buyer for your home.

Pricing Guidelines

Perhaps the most challenging aspect of selling a home is listing it at the correct price. It's one of several areas where the assistance of a skilled real estate agent can more than pay for itself.

Too high can be as bad as too low
If the listing price is too high, you'll miss out on a percentage of buyers looking in the price range where your home should be. This is the flaw in thinking that you'll always have the opportunity to accept a lower offer. Chances are the offers won't even come in, because the buyers who would be most interested in your home have been scared off by the price and aren't even taking the time to look. By the time the price is corrected, you've already lost exposure to a large group of potential buyers.

The listing price becomes even trickier to set when prices are quickly rising or falling. It's critical to be aware of where and how fast the market is moving - both when setting the price and when negotiating an offer. Again, an experienced, well-trained agent is always in touch with market trends - often even to a greater extent than appraisers, who typically focus on what a property is worth if sold as-is, like homes in our market right now.

Agent education, experience critical
When working with a real estate agent, it's critical that you have full confidence in that agent's experience and education. A skilled, knowledgeable agent should be able to explain to you exactly why your home needs to be priced at a certain level - compared to recent listings and sales of homes similar to yours.

Experienced agents also know exactly what the current pool of buyers are looking for in relation to particular styles and price ranges of properties. A skilled agent can recommend changes that will enhance the salability of your home, thus increasing the price - and/or decreasing the length of time before a sale.

Little touches can generate big returns
Some of these changes may be cosmetic, involving literally no expense on your part. It might be as simple as moving out some of your furniture and adjusting window coverings to best display desirable qualities of the home. Other changes might demand an investment, but the cost will likely more than pay for itself in the final sales price or timeliness of the sale.

It's critical to keep all these aspects of pricing in mind, regardless of whom you choose to list your home.

Home Improvements

There are two reasons for pursuing major home improvement projects:

• You want some new features in a home to improve your family's quality of life, but you don't want to leave your current home.
• You want to make your home more marketable to maximize return (or minimize loss) and speed up the sale process.

In the right market conditions, a project might fit into both categories. Other times, though, the two approaches will conflict:

Just want to do it
In situation A, the project is perceived as a necessary or worthwhile improvement to your family's lifestyle. Say you have two or three teenagers in the family and the morning bathroom situation is completely out of control. It doesn't matter if an additional bath generates a 150 percent return on investment or actually decreases the value of the home (unlikely, unless you're a completely incompetent do-it-yourselfer with a bizarre design sense). The economic impact just doesn't matter. If you have the money for a new bath and you don't want to move - you add the bath. It's that simple.

Or say you're a barbecue fiend and the only feature missing from the dream home you've just purchased is a sprawling backyard patio with a natural-gas grill custom-built with flagstone and river rock. Again, return on investment just isn't going to be a critical question. The improvement becomes more comparable to purchasing a depreciating asset that you feel is a necessity for your lifestyle - such as an automobile. When the barbecue aficionado adds a deluxe patio to a home that's already the most expensive property in the neighborhood - perhaps destroying the entire backyard in the process - there's a good chance that very little of the cost will be recouped in a subsequent sale.

An even better example might be a pool. If you're a person who simply has to have one - fine. Put in a pool. But it's probably worth checking with a real estate professional first, just to make sure you fully understand that adding the pool might actually lessen the property's value and make it more difficult to sell should you later decide to move. That's the reality in many markets. That doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't do it, especially if you're planning to live in the home for the rest of your life. It just means it's worth knowing the cost and salability impacts at the front end - even if they're not going to deter you from pursuing the project.

Really need to do it
The "type-B" home improvement project is pursued primarily to increase the property's salability. In turn, this often increases your return on investment. A good real estate agent can advise you of possible improvements that will attract more potential buyers and also pay for themselves either through increasing the home's value or through shortening the time it takes to sell the home.

Here we're typically talking about projects such as: painting - either because the existing paint is in bad shape or is an unusual color; replacing carpets - again because of age, color or style; repairing or resurfacing a cracked driveway or sidewalk; refacing kitchen cabinets; and trimming or removing overgrown or unattractive landscaping.

While spending several thousand dollars on your home right before you sell it might not sound very appealing, it's not uncommon for the right work to more than pay for itself in a higher selling price and shorter marketing time.

Consult with an experienced real estate agent to learn what improvements will make your home more marketable in comparison to similar properties that are now - or recently have been - on the market in your area.