What to do when your house isn't selling

Reasons your house may not be selling:

Your price is too high. If you recently upgraded your home, you may list your home too high. Don’t trust the Zestimate on Zillow because that is just an estimate of the entire area and doesn’t take into account things like location. A real estate agent can help you understand your local market and better position the price of your home.

Your house doesn’t fit the mold of the area. Maybe your house has some unique features like a second kitchen or an outdoor bathroom (we’ve seen it!) that could make marketing your home different than other homes. However, if you think about the reasons why you bought the home, you can market the house towards other people who are like you.

Your house is staged poorly, or isn’t staged at all. If you have a single chair with a lamp hanging over it, it may not be staged well for potentials buyers (but it could be great for a horror movie!). Houses that are staged well tend to sell faster and for more money. Staging is more than just setting up furniture. It also means making sure that you fix the paint, groom the yard, and declutter your house. Unfortunately, that could mean you have to put in the money to stage your home or have someone stage it for you.

Your curb appeal is subpar. If your house doesn’t look inviting, potential buyers may not want to step foot in the house, regardless of how nice the inside looks. Landscaping like mowing the grass, adding plants, trimming the bushes, and fixing anything that may be falling apart can help tremendously.

Your photos aren’t great quality. Most people look at pictures of a house before ever visiting it. If you have pictures that were taken on your phone and don’t look the best, it could turn people away.

You haven’t taken the feedback from people who have viewed your house. For example, people have said that they can’t figure out where the TV would go. To mitigate this, you could use staging as a resource and put up a TV (either real or fake) to let potential buyers know where they could put the TV. If people have said they can’t tell how much counter space there is, make sure you declutter so that they can see exactly how much space there is. If people have commented on the size of the kitchen, or location of the house, this would fall under a pricing issue. Price your house lower to compensate for things like kitchen size and house location.

You are receiving bad advice. Maybe you had (or have) an agent who is telling you to dump a bunch of money into making a bigger kitchen, rather than suggesting you lower the price of your home. You don’t want to get stuck in a scenario where you have put more money into the house than you will be able to get out of it. However, upgrading things like your HVAC system probably will help in selling your house.

If you still aren’t able to sell your house and it is becoming a financial burden, try renting it out, even if you only rent it out for a year while the market adjusts to the price that you want or need to sell the house.

For more tips that will help your house sell, check out our blog, Tips to Prep Your House to Sell!

Selling in the winter? Check out our blog about selling your house in January!