How to sell an apartment

Recommendation points

• Adequate price
• Order in documents
• Correct pre-sale preparation
• Consider seasonality

Are you going to sell your apartment? In this case, you immediately face a lot of questions: how to sell quickly, at what price to sell, whether to entrust the sale to realtors and much more.

Victor Borisov-Musatov. Waiting for guests. 1894

We will try to tell you how to behave when selling an apartment so that the transaction is successful, quickly and does not cause you unnecessary problems.

Adequate price

Before you list your apartment for sale, you need to determine its potential value. Of course, you can find out how much an apartment costs on your own – you just need to study similar offers on the market. Remember that the main parameters that affect the cost of an apartment are the area and condition of housing, the number of rooms, the type of building, the area, transport accessibility, the availability of infrastructure, distance from the metro and some others.

However, the reality is not so simple. Basically, prices in the capital’s residential real estate market are sometimes greatly overstated, they do not correspond to market reality and the paying capacity of the population, and in some cases to the quality of the offered apartments. Some sellers are convinced that they can set any price, and there will still be a buyer.

But this is absolutely not the case: by putting up an apartment for sale at a clearly inflated price, the seller risks that no one wants to buy it for quite a long time. On the other hand, no one wants to sell too cheap, and in this case, you can lose a decent amount.

According to metropolitan realtors, an apartment at an adequate price is sold in about two weeks – a month.

Naturally, if an apartment is bought on the very first day of its listing for sale, the price of the object is greatly understated. If the apartment is not sold for more than a month, therefore, its price is too high.

Determining the normal market price is the main task of the seller. This will make it possible to avoid many difficulties during the sale. There are different ways of assessing, as we noted above, you can do it yourself, but this option requires a lot of effort on the part of the seller.

Henri Matisse. The Red Room (Harmony in Red). 1908

You can make it easier and contact a real estate agency, where they will not only tell you the best price, but also help with the sale of the apartment. A competent realtor will also identify the advantages and disadvantages of your offer, as well as suggest how to eliminate them and sell the apartment at the most favorable price..

A real professional, whose task is to control the current market situation, will not only talk about the prospects for the sale of your apartment, but also explain these prospects to you, taking into account various possible strategies for selling it.

Order in documents

If you want to sell an apartment quickly and without unnecessary problems, you need to put all the documents in order. If the apartment was redeveloped, it must be formalized according to the law. If there are problems with heirs, minor children who live in an apartment and a number of legal issues that complicate the transaction for the sale of real estate, then all problems must be resolved before its implementation..

Legal purity is a very important factor affecting both the price and the speed of apartment sale. If the seller has the opportunity to check out and write out other tenants registered in the apartment for sale before the transaction is completed, this is excellent. Many buyers simply do not want to get involved with alternative deals because of their duration and doubts that in the end the deal will not take place. In addition, apartments in which no one is registered can be sold at 10-15% more expensive compared to alternative options where there are tenants.

The fact is that at present a lot of apartments are sold precisely through alternative deals, that is, the object will be sold only when the residents registered in it can find new housing for themselves..

Therefore, if the seller is deprived of such an encumbrance, this will surely attract buyers to him who want to quickly complete a transaction, without any delay, and who are ready to pay for such efficiency.

Correct pre-sale preparation

Before you sell an apartment, you need to assess its condition and presentation. For example, all other things being equal, an apartment in the best condition will be sold faster and, in some cases, even more expensive. At the same time, it is not necessary to do an expensive renovation, you just need to put the apartment in order.

Minas Avetisyan. Meditation. 1972

We advise you to do a little market research and make a list of possible low-cost pre-sale activities that will help you remove the disadvantages of your apartment, make it look good and get the benefits for a faster sale..

Remember that if, after assessing your apartment and its competitiveness in the real estate market, you have found among the obvious shortcomings of your offer those that can be easily corrected on your own and without serious costs, then this must be done. At the same time, you should understand that an elite renovation with re-pouring of floors, as well as leveling ceilings and walls, is unlikely to pay off after the sale of the apartment. But by making cosmetic repairs, replacing old plumbing fixtures and gluing fresh wallpaper, you can get an advantage in comparison with other similar objects on the market..

In addition, simple repairs must be done wisely, for example, light wallpapers visually enlarge the living space, a decorative border on the wallpaper will visually help make an elongated room more harmonious. But even if you do not resort to special design tricks, a fresh and tidy look will in any case increase the rating of your apartment on the market..

Even without renovation, in order for the deal to go through more successfully, it is very important, and sometimes vitally necessary, to bring the sold premises into a “presentation” before the demonstration of the apartment: put things in order, remove all unnecessary items and ventilate the rooms. The room should not give the impression of clutter and neglect. Also, if possible, pay attention to the state of the staircase – when selling an apartment, it can also play a very important role.

Consider seasonality

Many people believe that any real estate transactions should be carried out at a certain time of the year. So, for example, there is an opinion that buying an apartment should be at the end of spring, when the low season begins, but selling – at the beginning of autumn, at the start of the high season..

However, in recent years, the severity of the seasonal factor, according to some experts, is not significant. Of course, with the onset of summer, many potential buyers are paying more attention to rest or summer cottage issues. It is natural that the volume of transactions carried out in the residential real estate market in the summer period decreases slightly. Nevertheless, experts do not expect a complete calm, comparable to “complete calm”, at least this year..

If the main thing for you is to sell an apartment at a higher price, then you should postpone the deal until autumn and return to the market in the second half of September..

Many modern sellers, unlike in past years, now do not perceive the summer decline in buyers’ activity in the market as a catastrophe and do not try to sell their properties at cheaper prices. Currently, the capital housing market is gradually recovering from the crisis, demand is gradually recovering and many sellers, realizing this, do not force events, especially when there is no reason to rush and the sale of an apartment is not urgent.

You can give advice, if the main thing for you is to sell an apartment at a higher price, then you should postpone the deal until autumn and return to the market with the onset of the “high season”, which starts in the second half of September. Note that many sellers do just that..

If you are selling your apartment at the average market price, then you should not wait and leave the market until autumn. In this case, you have every chance to quickly sell the apartment. Yes, there are not so many buyers, but the supply usually also decreases, therefore the buyer will not have such a rich choice. In this case, as a rule, one- or two-room apartments that have an optimal price-quality ratio win. An apartment that meets basic consumer requirements and is sold on a “clean” sale basis will find its buyer without any problems at any time of the year, including in summer.

Hence we conclude that sellers of such apartments should not wait and wait until the beginning of the season. On the contrary, it may turn out that it is in the summer that they will find their buyer faster..

It also makes no sense to wait for the sellers of elite, atypical apartments, which are designed “for an amateur”. According to most experts, such objects almost always have a long exposure time, since the search for this very “amateur” is not an easy process. Consequently, the seasonality factor practically does not affect these apartments..

In the case when you want to sell a typical apartment, the liquidity of which, due to the suboptimal ratio of price and consumer properties, is not high enough, during the summer market off-season it is possible, and even profitable, to “go into the shadows”. Advertising costs for the sale of such objects, given a slight decline in demand in the residential real estate market, may be in vain.

In conclusion, it should be noted that when selling an apartment, you need to take into account a lot of factors. Be sure to analyze the current situation on the real estate market: sometimes it is worth waiting a little to sell an apartment at a higher price, and sometimes it is worth lowering the price in order to sell it faster. It all depends on your goals and the specific market situation. If in doubt or if there are any difficulties, contact the professionals who will help you sell your apartment more profitably.