Toughest sell starts at home

Modern home-buyers expect nothing less than immaculate presentation. Photo / Geoff Dale

The hardest part of the process of selling your home is letting go. Once you have done that, the rolling-up-your-sleeves process is just a list of tasks. You can do this two ways:

1. Hold on to your house as your own precious nest, an expression of your personality and presence. You can re-buff the real estate agent and potential buyers who insist on snooping through your space while you passively wait for the money that you know this place warrants to roll in. This can make for one unhappy, not-in-control seller.

2. Think of your house as a product to be marketed. A product that must be positioned to the appropriate target audience, prepared and presented to push as many "I want it" buttons as you can, a product to be sold to the highest bidder in the market at the time. This makes for a happy seller, who actually comes to enjoy the process of preparing and selling his or her property.

Clearly, in this market, you want to be the happy seller. Here's how:

* Become a buyer in your own home: Be dispassionate about its strengths and weaknesses, figure out its flaws, accept that not all the world will love it warts and all.

* Do your homework around the neighbourhood: Go to other people's open homes to get a feel for the competition and to listen to buyers. And listen to the kind things an agent says about a property - s/he will say the same about yours.

* Work hard to present your property in the best light: Not how you like to live, but how other people might live.

* Be prepared to "camp" in your own home: Minus some of your clutter or quirks, for the duration of the marketing campaign.

* Figure out who your buyers are: You might like to think your place is versatile enough to appeal to everyone, but you may be better to target useful (and growing) niches such as young singles or couples buying houses to cater to their kid-free lives. House buyers are single parents, empty-nesters, people who are running home businesses, urban eco-warriors. But all buyers probably have a core demand – they worry about having enough room for all their stuff (including multiple cars and outdoor toys). Buyers are busy, busy people and, unless they are property nuts, don't have time to sort through the dross to look for the gold, and buyers have learned to expect careful, clean and tidy presentation. They want their hopes and dreams fired up when they cross the threshold of "their" house.

Your buyers are as likely to be people moving For the pure thrill of change: serial renovators or house decorators, city people who want to try out the country lifestyle (or vice versa), people following the trendy suburbs, people following work moves or school changes.

Sometimes they may even be people who had absolutely no intention of ever moving house, but happened to fall in love at a casual walk-through open home and decide to up sticks and move.

Some tips to keep in mind:

1. House-buying is as much about emotion as it is about sense. Hearts can drive a buyer's reaction to a property as much as head. Even hardened property investors respond immediately to a house, albeit to a much stricter brief than people wanting a home to live in.

While most buyers start by describing "The List" - the must-haves, such as bedroom count, internal garaging, even particular streets - experienced real estate agents know that it may take weeks, months, or even years for the "tick-all-the-boxes" property to come on the market, if it exists at all. So, yes, they will start showing house-hunters a range of properties outside the list, and sometimes a complete "list-breaker" is the winning house.

2. Houses can tell a story: they are a product which is marketed to the "right" audience in the same way as fizzy drinks or mobile phones or cars. Homes are one of the central stories in most people's lives: the houses they grew up in, a favourite grandma's or friend's house, their first flat, their worst flat. The dream house they've always fantasised about.

Look at the success of magazines and TV shows about people's homes. Notice how they've moved away from "decorator showcases", with never a body or a book in sight, to people-driven profiles, interviews about the design process, the way they entertain friends or their favourite retreat in the garden.

3. Location and positioning are not the same thing. Thousands of experts have written millions of words on the key success factor in real estate: location, location, location. When you are getting ready to sell your property, there's nothing you can do about location, but what you can do is position, or re-position, your property in the minds of buyers. Positioning helps you determine where in the market your house fits, and who it is most likely to appeal to.

You then work to make sure all your messages are congruent with this - the marketing and advertising copy, the description of features and benefits, the look and feel of the house, even the way the agent talks about the house to buyers.

4. The days of an easy sellers' market may have waned (apart from pockets of choice suburbs or by-the-sea locations that continue to escalate), so buyers can now be a lot pickier and less panicked that they will miss out than they were in the early 2000s.
They are impatient with sellers who appear to have a sloppy approach, they don't have time to muck around with dross and are also more design-savvy - hey, they've watched the TV shows on how to transform your house in a day with $200 (and a secret crew of 40 workers), so are fully conversant with indoor-outdoor flow, feature walls and sending the dog and kids to the pound for the duration of the sale.

5. Real estate agents are people, too. Agents have often come into the business of selling houses because they love property, people and what's happening in their neighbourhoods. The good ones are passionate about it.

Real estate agents will work harder on a property that they know will create a great first impression. It reflects well on them. If they have to keep apologising about the state of the property, then both buyer and agent feel on the back foot.

Many top agents will simply not make themselves available to sell a property they don't feel comfortable presenting. Or they will present it as a "do-up", which means buyers expect rock-bottom, bargain pricing. Not what you want for your house.