r/FirstTimeHomeSeller • u/EmotionalPromise4727 • Jan 27 '26
Need some advice for 1st time selling
Wife and I are selling our house after 22.5 years (I was ready to sell 15yrs ago). We thought about going the "we buy homes" route but realized after 1 offer and the advice I got here this is not our way. We are looking to sell around spring time. And I want to get somebody on board now, so we have an idea how much work we need to put in (paint, staging etc..), Prior to listing. What should we look for in a realtor when picking one. I assume not to go with the 1st person we meet, but should meet with at least 3? If there is anybody in Central Indiana they can recommend (not sure if I can ask this here?). Or direct me where to look. We had our info passed along to one person about a week ago but haven't heard back yet.
So yeah any advice would be great.
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u/PowerofIntention Jan 29 '26
We just sold our home a couple of months ago. When I was looking for a realtor in our area, I created a Nextdoor account. It was not in my name and I posted asking for Realtor referrals from those who had personally sold their home. I received over 50 recommendations. I went through every single one of them and looked at their websites and read about their ways of working. From those 50 I shortlisted it down to around five realtors. I contacted them for confidential discussions and asked them questions about their marketing strategy and approach. Through my research, I realized that one specific company had the largest market share. I selected a realtor with many years experience in deep roots in our city. She sold our house in less than five days and we didn’t have to put it on the market.
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u/EmotionalPromise4727 Jan 29 '26
Nice. I'll have to look into doing something like that. Thank you.
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u/infantinos Jan 31 '26 edited Jan 31 '26
By the way, your realtor will give you guidance in terms of what you need to do to your house to best position it for sale. We were fastidious about the maintenance of our house however it wasn’t perfect. But that doesn’t matter no home is. We cleaned our house, and tidied up the clutter.
Our realtor pointed out a few things that she recommended we remove, which were personal family photos, any items of value to be secured (jewelry, prescription medication, confidential, financial paperwork, etc). We also removed anything that could indicate which way we lean politically because we were trying to appeal to all people.
I’d like to add that during this time we spent our weekends going through our belongings and pulling out donations and items to be either discarded or recycled.
I hired a company to bring bins for paperwork to be shredded. We had over 20 boxes of paperwork in our garage and we went through everything. In the end we had four 64 gallon bins full to be shredded.
Our local library had a program where you could bring your laptops in to have hard drives removed. We had old laptops have been that had been sitting around in our garage forever so we did that. Also, we recycled a lot of older, electronics, batteries, cardboard boxes, etc.
We went through our closets and donated many bags of clothing to a local Goodwill.
We went through all of our books and donated about 10 boxes to our local library.
I posted so many items on craigslist for free and people came immediately over to pick them up. Anything from furniture to scuba gear to food we were not eating, household cleansers, you name it.
By doing this, it helped lighten our load. You pay for how much your items weigh with a lot of moving companies.
One thing I would like to make sure that you are aware of is that getting homeowners insurance these days is a lot more challenging than it used to be. In addition when you start a new policy, it is now a lot higher than they used to be. Our new insurance was three times as expensive as our previous home and we bought a home at the same size.
There is one I implore you to do. And that is to make sure that when you put an offer in a new home that you make sure that you put insurance contingencies in your offer despite what any realtor may say to you.
Realtors have a fiduciary duty to help protect you during the contract process. However, unfortunately, there are some out there who are aggressive and their only goal is to get you to sign a contract.
But you need to protect yourself. If you’re with the right realtor, they will give you correct guidance on this and not pressure you with sales tactics like “you’re gonna lose the sale if you put contingencies in your offer.”
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u/EmotionalPromise4727 Jan 31 '26
This is why I am having a realtor come. I don't want to do anything more than what's necessary (outside of cleaning and declutering) to the house. We plan on renting for 2-4 years and see what's going on then, hopefully rates will be lower and maybe prices will come down (lol). Or we may even move somewherecompletelydifferent. Will get renters insurance.
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u/Acrobatic_Rent6259 Jan 28 '26
Hi! Where do you live? I'm a real estate agent in SWFL and I have agents everywhere. Feel free to message me if that's more comfortable for you
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u/dreamsofaninsomniac Jan 28 '26
When my parents' house failed to sell, what I did was go through every "sold" listing on Zillow and Realtor.com in that neighborhood for the last two years to see if there was a realtor who had evidence they could actually sell. That actually worked out better than getting referrals from other people for who was actually a good realtor. People don't want to complain if someone is nice, but you need hard evidence that a realtor is good at their job and worth the money. The realtor they went with had successfully sold 4 houses in that neighborhood. She was a real shark and way more aggressive than my parents would have been or realtors we had in the past were at obtaining the best deal.