Scared of Selling Your Home? Common Fears of Home Sellers

Halloween may have passed, but the fear of selling your home still lingers for many. Don't get spooked! With the right assistance from a professional real estate agent, you can move into this process with confidence, knowing that you're in good shape to sell your home.

As with those skeletons and other scary creatures, you can deal with a lot of your real estate seller fears by facing them head-on and shining some light on them. Here are some of the ways that real estate agents can help you settle your nerves.

Dealing With a Hot Market

Hot markets always make people on both sides of a real estate sale feel nervous. Although hot markets may be great for sellers in some scenarios, there is often the fear that you might lose out on this opportunity by moving slowly, or that the competitive process is going to be stressful and require snap decisions. How do you even know if now is the best time to sell versus a few months from now??

In any case, your agent can help you plan for this market by looking at seasonal trends, local market trends, and the state of the current real estate market to help you understand what's happening so that you don't feel like it's going to disrupt your sales process.

Fluctuating Interest Rates

Interest rates moving are probably more scary to buyers than they are to you if you're selling. However, one fear around interest rates is that they will rise so much that buyers will be scared off, especially since home values continue to rise. 

Again, though, many of these fears are somewhat unrealistic. Interest rates tend to tick up and down around a general value—they don't just spike overnight and then continue to soar. Regardless of the activity, with a common-sense sales process, you should be poised to move forward regardless of what's happening with base interest rates at a given time.

What About Low Inventory?

This is another problem that may be scarier for a buyer than it is for a seller. Low inventory means that there's not a lot of homes available, and so there's more market interest. In general, low inventory levels help sellers get where they want to go more quickly.

But let's talk about the corollary fear that many sellers might have: "Is now the right time to sell, or should I wait?" Also, "If I sell my home, I'll have to buy another during this period of low inventory, yikes!"

In short, if you're looking to sell, that means you’ll likely have to move somewhere else (unless you have a second home). You’ll have to do it on a defined timeline. One of the best ways to deal with this fear is, again, to do the research and start a basic shopping process for yourself before you even put your home on the market. Your agent can help you through this process.

Is My Home Good Enough?

This is one of the most common fears that professional agents help sellers with.

It's normal for sellers to look at their own properties with a critical eye. Maybe the landscaping is not optimal or the house isn’t in good shape for staging. There may be any number of structural or home system problems that have been causing the sellers themselves grief. They live in fear that their property will be considered a ‘dog,’ and sit on the market forever.

That's really at the heart of many of these fears—that the property won't sell for the highest value, discounting the emotional investment that they have put into the home. Having to take a loss on a property is another thing that sends shivers down a seller’s spine.

The good news is that, again, professional real estate agents can ballpark values and assess a property with all of its flaws, in the context of the deal that’s likely to be made. They’ll get you to a price point where your property will sell, plus, they'll help you list out any imperfections and market the home accordingly so that a fair deal is made by both parties.