How To Sell Your House In Seattle, WA For Top Dollar: Faster, and with Fewer Hassles (Without Selling To A Cash Home Buyer Or Investor)
Selling a home in Seattle, WA, especially for first-time sellers, can be a daunting process. In Seattle’s competitive housing market, it’s crucial to have a strategy that not only attracts buyers quickly but also ensures your home sells fast, and for top dollar. If you’re trying to buy your next home, or time a move, things can get even more complicated.
For now, I’ll just focus on talking about what my HomePro Associates real estate team does to help ensure YOU get the home sale results you’re looking for.
My name is Emily Cressey and I’m a real estate agent. My team is dedicated to providing a smooth, effective, and personalized home-selling experience. With over two decades in the real estate industry, and a background as an investor, syndicator, and real estate coach, I have the expertise to navigate Seattle, WA unique real estate market and I will sell your house, find a home buyer, and strive to exceed your expectations at every step along the way.
Although you may find many Cash Home Buyers in Seattle, WA who want to buy your house for pennies on the dollar, that is not my goal. I am a full-service real estate professional and I want to help you sell your home and make money on the sale – a LOT of it!
I find by “maxing out” our home preparation and marketing, we are able to get our clients results that they are thrilled with. (You can check out our reviews to learn more about that.).
Take a look at how we prepare, present, promote, and price the homes we work with so that you can still sell quickly, without sacrificing getting a great price in the marketplace.
1. Getting Your Home Ready Before The Launch Is Important For Best Results When You Sell Your House
Your Initial Home Sale Strategy Consultation
The home-selling process begins with an in-depth consultation. Before we ever list your home, we take the time to discuss your goals, the current market landscape, and your home’s condition. Every home and seller are unique, so we tailor our approach based on your needs and objectives. However, we do have a proven “A-PLUS” selling system that forms the basis of our home sales framework.
We’ll also discuss recent home sales in nearby in your neighborhood and what they say about what your home is worth and what it might sell for in today’s market place. Many home sellers feel their house is worth quite a bit of money. For most, their home is their largest asset. We want you to get ALL the money you can out of the sale of your home, and this is one of our #1 goals during the selling process.
Timeframe: Setting Expectations Regarding the Time To Sell Your Home
Ideally, we love to see at least 3 months from the time your approach us, to the time you’re walking away from closing with a check.
This process can be shortened to 1.5 months if necessary, depending on market conditions and the home’s readiness for sale when we meet.
The time is broken up like this: 30 days to prepare your home for sale, 30 days to find a buyer, and 30 days for that buyer to close on the property.
This approach allows for adequate time to stage, market, and negotiate, ensuring maximum exposure and an optimal sale price.
If you need to sell your home faster, we do offer Home Buyer services through our “We Buy Houses” division. This can be a helpful “backup plan” if you are working with a tight deadline to get your home sold.
Staging Services To Sell Your Seattle House For Top Dollar
Our partnership with Distinctive Staging & Design allows us to offer professional home staging for three key rooms in your home, which we pay for, as part of our home preparation process.
When your home would otherwise be vacant, it looks better and creates an emotional connection with potential buyers, when they can more easily imagine how they would use the space. Our stager helps set that scene.
Staging is proven to increase buyer interest by presenting your home in the best possible light. Staged rooms create strong, emotional first impressions that help potential buyers imagine themselves living in your home. That emotional connection is what helps homes sell faster and for more money.
Handyman & Home Cleaning Services
When a potential buyer walks into your home, they want to feel like it is clean, fresh and well cared-for. They want it to feel like blank slate that is ready and waiting for them.
That’s why, if your home doesn’t need staging, we’ll instead provide access to trusted handymen and cleaning services to ensure your home is in top shape so you can sell your home fast.
If items of concern regarding the condition of your home have come through on the home inspection, we can help add those to the list of items to address.
From small repairs to thorough cleaning, we’ll help you ensure your home is buyer-ready. If larger repairs are needed, we can offer financing options, allowing for costs to be deducted from the proceeds at closing. Our focus is not on remodeling but ensuring everything is in good working order, maximizing the home’s appeal without unnecessary expenses.
How Long Does It Take To Sell Your House In Seattle, WA?
If you’re thinking about putting your Seattle, Washington home up for sale in the next year or so, you might be wondering how long it takes to list and sell your house. Of course, that will depend on the real estate market at the time you are planning to sell your house, but for the most part, your home can be listed quickly if necessary.
At HomePro Associates, the marketing we do for each home we list is truly above-and-beyond, and the way we present your home to the marketplace, especially utilizing digital platforms, separates it from the competition and shows it to buyers who may not otherwise know your home is for sale.
2. The Custom Marketing Plan To Sell Your House
Once we have your home’s preparation dialed in, we want to make sure it is going to be promoted in the marketplace. We want to help buyers see that YOUR home is the Obvious Choice in their price range and quickly get motivated to make an offer for your house.
We’re not putting the home on the MLS and hoping someone will take it… we actively SELL homes we represent. We are getting out and putting it in front of potential buyers in Seattle, and both tried-and-true utilizing many cutting edge techniques to sell your property.
Mailers & Door Knocking
One of our premises in finding someone to buy your house fast, is the importance of talking to the neighbors. Many times, neighbors will be the most likely to know someone who will want to buy, because birds of a feather flock together. They may have a family member or friend who is interested in the property, and they are eager to own a home nearby. This happens more often than you think. Very often neighbors are “in the know” and ready to make a connection when you decide to sell.
Our marketing plan is includes targeted mailers and door-knocking campaigns in the local neighborhood. These efforts help reach potential buyers who are actively looking for homes in your area as well as their friends and family members.
Open House Events Sell Houses
Hosting open houses is another powerful tool we use to increase your home’s visibility. We don’t just host the traditional Open House, we make it an event. Our goal is to PACK the property with as many people as we can to create social proof around the listing. Sometimes we will offer free food, run paid ads promoting the Open House, delay showings until the Open House “launch,” have as much “social proof” around the demand for the unit as possible.
You don’t have to do an Open House, and they work better for some houses than others, but the best way to sell is to plan on using as many tools as you can, and this is a powerful one.
We have sold houses to cash buyers in Seattle who have walked in from the Open House, so Open Houses are one more effective way to sell your house.
We create welcoming and engaging events that attract serious buyers, giving them the opportunity to explore the home in person and envision their future there.
Digital Marketing Helps Sell Your House In Seattle, WA – FASTER!
People are spending more and more time online these days, and that includes motivated home buyers.
Scrolling the internet can be very addictive, so we promote and list your house online in paid advertisements (not just “organic posts” – which nobody sees anyway, since these platforms have become “pay to play” in many circumstances).
In today’s digital age, we feel online marketing is essential for any comprehensive home marketing plan, and we can target different groups of people who are ready to buy your home and have shown an online interest in Seattle Real Estate. This is thanks to the “big brother spying” capability of our many online platforms. Now you can finally use it to your advantage.
At HomePro Associates, we use a combination of Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads to target potential buyers. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars in training learning how to do this effectively.
In addition, we employ retargeting techniques to stay in front of those who’ve previously shown interest in similar properties.
We also leverage our database of hungry buyers who are constantly looking for homes, ensuring your property gets the attention it deserves.
To further amplify exposure, we even use platforms like MoveTube, which puts your home on TV, giving it an unmatched level of visibility.
Selling Your Seattle Area House Can Be A Quick And Simple Process
HomePro Associates is one of the most trusted real estate brokers in the Shoreline, WA area and our whole mission is to help make the home buying or selling process easier for you while keeping more of your hard-earned equity in your pocket.
From start to finish we take care of everything so you can live your life while we worry about the details.
3. What If Your Seattle Home Does NOT Sell Fast?
One concern that home sellers have is being locked into a long contract with a real estate agent who is not getting the job done. We have a “no handcuffs” agreement, so you’ll never feel stuck with us.
However, what most clients want is not to fire their agent, but to have an agent who listens to their concerns and addresses them, in the event that their home is not selling as quickly as planned.
For this reason, we have set up a communication plan to help address the #1 Home Seller Complaint Nationwide: Lack of Communication.
We commit to speaking with you each week (usually on Monday) to discuss the interest in your home in the marketplace, and discuss the fastest way to sell, even in a tough market. Most people who want to sell their home as-is don’t want to do any repairs and just want to get their cash and move on.
Other sellers may be willing to try other techniques, like re-painting an accent wall to make the home more neutral, staging the house, getting new pictures, or trying a new price. We’re not saying it’s easy to sell homes in Seattle, but we are saying we’re going to pull out all the stops so you can find decide the best way to sell your house and get the results you want.
Weekly Updates On Home Sale Strategies
Once we’ve launched your home on the market, we maintain close communication with you, offering weekly strategy reviews. We have certain metrics and criteria we’ll be keeping an eye on to make sure your home stays competitive.
For example. We’ll be looking out for:
- New Listings Near You (Fresh Competition)
- Nearby Homes That Have Sold (Gone Pending) – We will call these agents and try to find out about their buyers and why they chose “that house” and not ours.
- Closed Sales – These homes have changed hands recently and we want to know all the details about the final sales price and any concessions the seller may have offered.
This way, we’ll know if the value for your home is a match between what’s going on in the marketplace, and the price we have the home listed for.
We’ll Collect Feedback From Your Home’s Visitors To Find Out What They Think Of The Property
We also want to track how many buyers are looking at your property online, coming to visit it, and thinking about making an offer. For example, if nobody’s coming to look at your home the pictures and the pricing are not compelling enough to get them out to see it. I am taking over a listing right now that only had 6 visitors in the past five months and it has still not sold. That is a serious problem.
However, if your home has had dozens of showings, but no offers, that means the price and the pictures are looking good online, but something is disappointing them about the property when they go out to look at it. Maybe it has a smell that they didn’t notice until their arrived at the home. Maybe it’s nearby to an electrical power plant that made buyers uncomfortable. We don’t know until we ask, and that’s why we follow up with every showing agent that brings a buyer to the property, so we can track exactly what is going on with the home.
We want to know what buyers really think – the honest truth!
This ensures that as market conditions shift or buyer feedback comes in, we can adjust our tactics accordingly. Our regular weekly updates allow sellers like you feel involved and informed every step of the way, giving you control over the process.
If potential buyers express concerns or make suggestions, we adjust accordingly (by changing the property or the pricing) to make your home as appealing as possible. We may also try to negotiate with them then and there. If there were something we could fix to make the property appealing to them, what would it be?
This ongoing feedback loop keeps us nimble and responsive, ensuring no opportunity is missed.
4. Negotiating Offers and Closing the Deal
Expert Negotiation
Negotiating the best deal for your home requires a high level of skill and experience. Emily Cressey brings a unique advantage here, having taught real estate negotiation classes to serious investors. She employs various NLP frameworks to extract information, convey information, and help buyer agents feel that we’re all on the same team.
Basically, we want to allow the other party to feel they’ve secured a “win,” while putting more dollars in your pocket. This nuanced understanding of human psychology is key to securing the best possible outcome for your sale.
Contract Guidance
The contract phase can be overwhelming for first-time sellers, but we guide you through every step. From understanding contingencies to navigating timelines, we break down complex legal language into easy-to-understand terms. Our goal is to ensure that the contract works in your favor and that the closing process is smooth and efficient.
5. Fast and Effective! Home Sale Testimonials From Real Clients With Real Results
Our past clients have seen tremendous success selling their homes with HomePro Associates. Here’s what a few of them have to say:
- “Emily and her team made selling our home easy and stress-free. They handled everything from staging to marketing, and we had an offer in just two weeks!”
- “We appreciated Emily’s open communication and thoughtful approach. She helped us get top dollar for our house, and we couldn’t be happier.”
Incorporating client testimonials into the listing process highlights the positive experiences others have had working with us, building trust with future sellers.
Conclusion: A Smooth and Fast Home Selling Experience With Trusted Realtor, Emily Cressey
At HomePro Associates, we are committed to providing a personalized, stress-free home-selling experience for Washington State home sellers, focused around the Seattle area. If you want to sell a house in Seattle, we are here to help you get it ready to sell, so you can sell your home quickly once we release it into the market.
From the initial consultation where you’re juuuust starting to consider selling, to the day of closing where you get your check deposited into your bank account, we actively manage every aspect of the process, allowing you to focus on what matters most.
If you’re in a big rush and looking to sell your house for fast cash, we can help you with that, too. We occasionally act as cash home buyers and can close quickly, or we can put the home in front of dozens of Seattle cash home buyers and have them compete for your listing, pay all-cash and you can sell as-is and be off the market in a week.
We focus on traditional full-service home sales, as we feel this gets our clients the best return-on-investment, but sometimes you can’t afford to take longer to sell and you just need to sell your house in a week. That’s why we offer multiple solutions. We want you to be well-informed and feel in charge of the situation.
With our expertise in the Seattle, WA market, we can help you decide when to sell, list and market the house the traditional way and utilize customized marketing strategies, and strong negotiation skills. Our goal is always to help you walk away happy and pleased with your experience at the end of the day. Typically that means we ensure that your home sells for top dollar, sells faster, and with fewer hassles.
I’m Emily Cressey and I hope you’ll consider trusting me to guide you through this important life event, and deliver the results you deserve. I’m looking forward to helping you.