Selling a home, step by step

Price against achieved sales, not against listings

The most consequential decision in a sale is made before anyone views: the asking price. It should be derived from what genuinely comparable properties have completed at recently, adjusted for the differences a buyer will actually notice - condition, aspect, plot, parking, floor area, and whether the layout works. Asking prices of things currently for sale are not evidence, because they include everything that is failing to sell.

Overpricing is not a neutral experiment that can be corrected later. A property receives most of its attention in the first two or three weeks, when everybody actively searching sees it as new. If it is priced beyond what that audience will pay, that attention is spent and cannot be recovered; the later reduction is seen by a much smaller group, and it arrives carrying the information that the property has not sold. Properties that eventually sell after two reductions usually achieve less than they would have at the sensible price on day one, and take several months longer.

Prepare the paperwork before the photographs

The stage that most often causes a sale to drag is the enquiry stage, and it drags because documents do not exist or cannot be found. Anything that was built, altered, rewired, replumbed or replaced generally has a paper trail - permissions, certificates, guarantees, completion notices - and assembling it before marketing turns a three-week delay into a same-day answer. Where a document genuinely does not exist, knowing that early gives time to resolve it rather than discovering it at the point where a buyer is deciding whether to continue.

Presentation: legibility rather than styling

The useful goal is not to make a property look like a showroom. It is to let a buyer understand the space and imagine their own life in it. That means clearing enough that rooms read at their true size, making sure every room can be photographed with the light it actually has, fixing the small things that suggest neglect out of proportion to their cost - a dripping tap, a cracked pane, a door that sticks - and leaving alone anything expensive that a buyer will want to do their own way.

A floorplan with dimensions is worth more than another five photographs. It is the single thing that most reliably converts a listing view into a viewing, because it answers the question a photograph cannot: does this actually work for us.

Reading feedback honestly

Viewing feedback is the only real-time information a seller gets, and it is usually discounted because it is unwelcome. The pattern to watch for is consistency. One person disliking the kitchen is taste. Six people independently mentioning the road, the second bedroom or the price is data, and it is telling you the property is correctly presented but wrongly priced, or correctly priced but carrying a defect that should be addressed or disclosed and discounted openly.

The absence of viewings is also information, and it is the clearest kind: at this price, in this market, the property is not entering anybody's search. That is a pricing problem, not a marketing one, and no additional photography will fix it.

Comparing offers properly

An offer has at least four dimensions. The price. The financing - whether a lender has actually committed, and how much of the price depends on borrowing. The chain - how many transactions sit beneath this buyer, and whether any of them are agreed yet. And the timing - whether the buyer's preferred date is compatible with yours. A buyer with no chain and confirmed financing offering slightly less is frequently the better offer, because the probability of completing is much higher and the time to completion much shorter.

Ask the questions directly and expect straight answers: is your sale agreed, has your buyer's financing been confirmed, how many parties are below you, and what is your target date. Vagueness here is itself an answer.

The gap between asking and achieved

In a balanced market the achieved price sits a little below the asking price. In a strong market for a particular type of property it can sit above it. In a slow market the gap widens, and it widens most for properties that have been listed longest. Tracking that gap in your own submarket - not nationally - tells you what a realistic outcome looks like before you set your figure, and it tells you during the process whether the market is moving under you.

Managing the middle

Between agreement and the binding step there is a period where nothing visible happens and both sides become anxious. Most of it is waiting on searches and enquiries. A seller can shorten it materially by answering enquiries completely the first time rather than in instalments, by supplying documents as scans immediately, and by staying informed about the chain below them. Sales fail more often from accumulated delay and lost patience than from any single discovered problem.

If a survey comes back badly

Expect it to find something; every property of any age has a list. The question is whether what it found was already reflected in the price. If it was, say so and hold. If it was genuinely unknown and material, the reasonable outcomes are a price adjustment reflecting the cost of the work, the seller carrying out the work, or the sale ending. Obtaining an independent quotation for the remedy converts an argument about a survey's language into a negotiation about a number, which is much easier to settle.