In this episode of the Get Me Ready to Sell Podcast, we discuss the common reasons why homes may not sell, even after being on the market for weeks, months, or even having an expired listing with an agent. We explore three possible explanations for the lack of sales, including limited access, poor first impressions, and incorrect pricing, providing practical tips and insights for homeowners to overcome these challenges. Tune in to find out why your home didn't sell and how to rectify the situation.

2:30 - Limited Access

5:39 - Poor First Impression

11:01 - Incorrect Pricing

Why Didn’t My Home Sell?

Your home has been on the market for two months, and it's only been seen by a buyer one time. Why hasn't your home sold?

So on this episode of Get Me Ready to Sell, we're going to talk about why your house didn't sell. You're beyond ready. You've had a sign in the yard. It's been on the market, but no one's looking at it. You still have it.

Maybe it's just been two weeks, but maybe you've had a sign in the yard for two months and only one buyer has looked at it, or maybe none. Or maybe it's been on the market for six months, and that was the length of your listing agreement, and that's now expired. Your home didn't sell. What happened? What was the problem? Well, today we're going to explore three possible scenarios about why your home didn't sell. Hopefully, out of this, you're going to see maybe what could have been done differently to get your home sold. And if you're one of those folks that are still exploring selling your home, you want to make sure that you avoid these reasons that would potentially keep your home from selling. Now, let's face it. Every home that's on the market that people want to sell doesn't mean somebody wants to buy it.

There are a lot of different reasons. Maybe the neighborhood flipped from being residential to commercial, and nobody wants to buy it for commercial, and nobody wants to live in an area where homes around them have either been converted to office spaces or have been torn down. And so it may just be difficult to sell. There are also homes that are in such bad condition, a buyer is not going to buy it, and the seller either doesn't have the funds or the time or the interest in putting anything into the home to get it sold. There are a variety of reasons it couldn't sell. But we're going to talk about three possible reasons that are typically within your control as the owner and the seller to make it to where your home could actually sell. So now let's just jump into what those three possibilities are.

2:30 - Limited Access

They may only have a brief window of opportunity during a lunch break, during mealtime, only one particular night of the week that they're available. Shift work, family things, whatever the things could be that would keep buyers from being able to see it when a seller when you would want them to. Those opportunities to show the property need to be convenient to the buyers. And I know that potentially makes it inconvenient to you. But remember, you want to sell the home, you want to live somewhere else, or maybe you already are living somewhere else and you don't want this home. So if you want to sell it, then you need to make it as easy as possible for potential buyers to actually take a look at the property, minimize those restrictions to when buyers can see it so that it's available for them whenever they do want to go see it. So we know that limited access is a potential reason that has your home still on the market or maybe it's expired and you got to list it all over again, put another sign in the yard, do something to try to get it sold so that limited access is one of those.

5:39 - Poor First Impression

The second reason I want you to think about is a poor first impression. Now, if you go back to episode three of the Get Me Ready to Sell podcast. I deal with this aspect of preparing your home that's getting it ready to sell in that particular episode. It's a full episode devoted to that. I'm not going to go back over all that here, but I'm going to talk about a couple of things, and one of those is curb appeal. According to a US. News article, if people drive by but aren't interested enough to walk through the front door, you'll never sell your home. You've got to draw them in when they drive by and they see it. If the shrubs are overgrown, if paint is peeling off, windows are broken, the driveway has debris all over the place, the grass hasn't been cut in a very long time.

Anything that people would drive by and go, I'm not even going to waste my time taking a look at that property. That's what we call curb appeal. And you need to fix those things. You need to at least consider it. Maybe you don't have the funds for a variety of reasons why you're not going to paint the whole exterior of the house. I get all that. But you just need to know that that curb appeal could be the reason why. I have actually had buyers that I have been showing properties before, that we have driven through the neighborhood and gotten to the house.

They'll either motion for me to come to their car and they're like, we're not even going to get out. Or they'll text me and say, hey, let's just skip it and go to the next one. That's curb appeal, and it's a real thing. You as the seller might think, well, I've lived with that like this for the last four years, and it doesn't bother me. Well, it doesn't bother you, but you're not looking to be the new owner of the property. It may bother somebody else. You just need to know that that curb appeal has an opportunity to either draw buyers in or repel buyers. And we want to make sure that it's not repelling any buyers.

And it's not just the outside. The outside is the starting point. It's the curb appeal. It's kind of like giving somebody an elaborate gift that's just in the box, man. Think of the curb appeal as the wrapping paper and the bow and the ribbon strips to be the little curly cues. It just looks really sharp and looks like a really pretty package. Now it can look like a pretty package and be junkie on the inside, and it can be great and a fantastic gift on the inside, but look, junkie on the outside and somebody would turn their nose up. You're giving me that they have no idea what's on the inside.

Well, deal with the curb appeal, but also make sure that you stage the home properly on the inside. Let's call that the internal appeal. You got the curb appeal, the external appeal. Now we have the internal appeal. And again, I deal with all this in episode number three. You can listen to it where you get podcasts, or you can watch it on the YouTube channel. Either way, you have access to it to be able to see the stuff that or to hear the stuff I talk about in the stage of getting your home prepared. But when we're staging your home in that episode, I talk about repair, replace and remove.

Repair some things that may be broken. You may consider replacing some things that are outdated or beyond repair and removing some things, getting rid of the clutter, all of the extra stuff in there. And you may have heard me say this before, if you know you're selling and you're moving somewhere else, live in your home now as if you're a guest. Pack up as much stuff as you can pack up. Get it out of the home. As much as you can get out of the home. You're going to need clothes, you're going to need all your bedding, all your toiletries, your cooking things, the kids toys, the lawn equipment, all this. I get what you're going to need.

But if you're selling your home in the summer and you expect to be out before winter, get rid of some of the winter clothes out of the closets. Make sure that you have out only appropriate decorations. Move things. One reason it's not just about clutter, but it's about safety. Especially if you have things that you think could potentially be damaged or missing. You want to make sure that stuff is moved and put out of the way. Any type of valuable, belongings, firearms, whatever it may be, you want to remove those things. But it's all about staging so that when there is good curb appeal and somebody's actually driven by and they want to come in, when they come in, they don't want to run away.

They want to stay in there and take a look around. Excuse me just for a second. It so poor first impression if I didn't say that as number two. That's number two. Poor first impression from the curb appeal and from the internal appeal, from the staging. That's the second reason why your home may not be selling or didn't sell during the time that it was listed.

11:01 - Incorrect Pricing

And we're going to get to number three and number three, incorrect pricing. Now again, I deal with this in an episode as well. And it's. Episode number four pricing your home is important to getting your home sold.

Business Insider recently said the biggest mistake that sellers make is overpricing their home. The biggest mistake overpricing your home. I challenge my buyers and try to educate my sellers excuse me. I challenge my sellers I try to educate my sellers to price their home based on the current local market conditions. Current, not what was happening a month ago, two months ago, six months ago, last year, two years ago. Current what's happening now? Local. As local as possible. That may be a whole county.

It could be a city. It could be an area of a city or even a neighborhood. What's happening in that current local market with houses as similar to yours as possible. That's what we base our pricing on. Not what you think it could sell for, not what somebody else told you it would sell for, not what you see in some online portal that tells you an estimate of what your home is worth and what it would sell for. What are buyers paying for homes now? And we'll look at what's currently on the market and how it's priced. But if there's a home similar to yours and you want to price it where that one is and everything else is equal, and it's been on the market for 45 days, do you really want to price it there? You don't want to overprice it. You need to look at current local market conditions.

And we base that primarily on what sold recently, not what's on the market, not what's under contract. We'll look at those things so that we'll know what are they not looking at when they come to look at yours, or what are they looking at if they're skipping yours? Why are they going to those other houses in your neighborhood or a couple of neighborhoods over, and they're not looking at yours? Why? Well, let's compare prices. Let's take a look at those things. If your curb appeal is great, if you're making the internal appeal is great, you're making it as available as possible. You don't have any restrictions on when anybody can come and see it. The only thing left is going to be price. We got to figure that out. So price it based on current local market conditions and price it based on the condition of the home.

A home that was built 35 years ago with Formica countertops, and those countertops have all been changed out to granite or some solid surface, some solid stone. The appliances are two or three years old. The HVAC system has been replaced. It's a new roof. It was painted within the last five years. Obviously, that home should demand a higher price than a same home, two streets over, same floor plan, built at the same time that hasn't been touched in the 35 years since it was built, except maybe for a coat of paint 15 years ago. Yes, that current condition is not the same. And your house, a house that's been updated, it's been taken care of, should sell for more than a home that hasn't.

Just kind of common sense, however price it based on that if you want to sell your home for the price that that home that's been updated, sold for, it's probably not going to happen. And even if it does happen, it could take a really long time. How much in a hurry are you to get your home sold if you're not in a big hurry? Okay, but there could be some problems down the road, because when you go to start dropping prices, that tends to scare people away. Buyers will go, well, that house been on the market for two months and still here. I wonder what's wrong with it. Nothing's wrong with it other than it was just priced inappropriately to begin with, but it's not going to draw buyers in. They're going to question what's wrong with it if it's been on the market for a long time, and then they're going to think, oh, man, we're going to get a great deal because they keep dropping the price. It's down $30,000.

So price it based on current local market conditions, price it based on the condition of that actual home, your home, and price it based on data. Let's look at the cold, hard facts. If you're in a state that's a disclosure state, you can actually find online what properties sold for and compare them similar to yours. If you're in a nondisclosure state. One of the states that I'm licensed as a real estate agent in is a nondisclosure state, meaning we can't publicly broadcast what homes sell for. However, I have that data, and I use that data when I'm determining what a potential sales price for your property would be. I can use that data because I have access to it in our multi listing service. I can see it, and I can use that data to present you some possible price ranges for what your home could sell for.

Price it based on data. Please don't price it based on your emotions. My father built his dream retirement home back in, I guess, 23 years ago. He built that, and five or six years in, he had somebody telling me, he said, oh, man, you could get $800,000 for this house. He didn't want to sell it back then, but we recently sold it. And I'll tell you, we didn't get 800,000 for it, not even close to 800,000 for it. Part of it was because of the condition, and part of it was they inflated it because of how it looked and its uniqueness. And I don't know that it would have ever even appraised for $800,000, but there was some emotional attachment to it that made it difficult to put a realistic price on it from the seller.

And at the end of the day, whether I'm your real estate agent listing your property or you have a real estate agent listing your property. It's not our decision what your property is listed for. We're doing the best we can to give you the best information to price your property. But at the end of the day, you as the owner and the seller, are the one who is ultimately responsible for deciding what that price is. We're not making the decision for you. It's entirely up to you. My recommendation is that you listen very carefully and very seriously consider the information that that agent or that I am giving to you. When it comes to pricing your home to sell, we don't want your home sitting on the market for a very long time.

Because if we are leveraging getting other listings by saying, hey, the way I price my homes, they're only on the market for five days before somebody snatches them up or 20 days and other agents, they're on the market for 45 or 50 days or whatever it may be. It's kind of bragging rights for us. Let's just face those facts. If we get it sold quickly, that's bragging rights for us. We don't want to underprice it and cost you money. We also don't want to overprice it and have people look at us and go, I can't believe you've got that house listed. Man, you sure are proud of that house over there, aren't you? You know what? It wasn't my decision. I'm going to be obedient to your decision, what you want to price it at, whether I like it or not, I'm going to give you the best information that I have, the best data I have to make the decision on what is probably the best price to list your home at.

At the end of the day, it's yours. But if your home has been sitting on the market for two weeks and nobody's looking at it or two months and it's been one person or six months and nobody's looked at it after the first three weeks, it's been sitting idle for the last four months. If you're making it available, if it has great curb appeal and staging for internal appeal, all that's left is going to be price. And maybe houses around the neighborhood have sold three or four months ago for what your house was listed for three or four months ago. But that's not what homes are selling for now. You need to seriously consider price. And remember, Business Insider said the biggest mistake sellers make is overpricing their home. Don't overprice your home.

You want to get it sold. You want to get as much money for it as possible. The longer you hold on to it, the more you're paying for insurance, the more you're paying for taxes, the more you're paying for interest. If it has a mortgage on it every time you're making that monthly payment, you're getting some equity, so you're getting some value. Back out of it, but you're also giving some of that money away for insurance for interest. So if it takes you three months to sell your house, that's three more months of payments that you've had to make between when it went on the market and when it went under contract. It still may take a little while to close, but if you don't get it under contract pretty quickly after you've got it listed and it's not under contract for two months or three months or four months, then you've made those payments. And if you're making a $2,000 payment, chances are there's close to $1,000 of it that is going to interest plus your insurance, plus your taxes.

So is it worth it to hold out that little bit higher price? Or is it better for you to drop that price? Some price it there to begin with so that you save all that money. You're going to be out down the road if you have it for a while. Just some observations on why your home may not have sold and some steps that you can take to actually get your home sold as quickly as possible. Make it available for buyers to see it, make sure that it's a great first impression and price it right. Have a blessed day.