We have touched on selling issues before, but recent experiences demonstrate that they bear repeating.

It is always stressful to put your home on the market to sell and the journey is usually longer rather than shorter. We all live the way we want to live in our homes, because after all, our home is our castle, so to speak. In the spirit of my father, if we wanted to live differently in our homes, we would. Where the problem comes is when a seller has a “highly personalized style” that doesn’t appeal to the broader market or the seller is unwilling or unable to be flexible to the parade of buyer’s and their schedules.

As see in our recent video with Dennis Conner Getting your home ready for sale, strong statements in art or furniture can distract buyers from the real features of the house. If there is too much furniture, the home looks small. If there are strong colors on the walls in the kids room, the buyer calculates the inconvenience of painting, if the rug is an outrageous color or pattern, buyers calculate the cost of new carpet and if there are visible signs of wear and tear that aren’t address, buyers wonder about the maintenance items that they can’t see and if the house has been reasonably maintained.

The other big problem is when a home is not accessible when a buyer wants to see it. In our area, we have lots of buyers coming in for jobs. They fly in for the weekend and have to find a home. They have a limited time to complete a complex and stressful task and they usually get it accomplished with the home that meets most of their criteria. Recently, I was showing a couple for the weekend and we saw 20 houses. The first day didn’t go well, but on the second day, the first house we saw was almost perfect and we spend the rest of the day comparing every other house to it, until… Until we saw the last house. The last house was completely different, but it has two features that were on their wish list, but they didn’t think that they could find a house with both. In order to make their final decision, we wanted to go back to the first house for a second look, so that they could make a timely comparison. Imagine our surprise when the seller said it wasn’t convenient and we should try another day. I’m sure you can guess the rest of the story. We wrote on the last house and never went back to the other home.

The thing we’d like you to remember and share with everyone you know that is selling or has sold, you only need one buyer to buy the house, you just don’t know which one it will be and what will appeal to them. Be ready, willing and able to show when the buyer is ready and broaden your market appeal with more generally accepted choices so that when the buyer comes in, you’ll have the best chance to go from For Sale to Sold.