Selling a home, step by step

Preparation is the part most people underrate, and it is largely clerical. A sale will require the deeds position, any guarantees for work done, building regulations paperwork for alterations, service records for a boiler, a lease and management information if the property is leasehold, and answers to a long list of standard questions about boundaries, disputes, services and alterations. Assembling this before marketing rather than during it removes weeks of delay later, at a moment when delay is expensive.

The physical preparation is a smaller matter than television suggests, with two exceptions. Anything that a buyer will read as a defect in the fabric — damp staining, a slipped tile, a cracked render patch — will be priced by that buyer at several times what it costs to fix, because they do not know what it means and must assume the worst. And anything that makes rooms hard to read, principally clutter and heavy furniture, reduces the number of buyers who can imagine living there. Both are worth attention. Repainting a serviceable kitchen usually is not.

Pricing is a search problem

The most useful way to think about an asking price is that it selects an audience. Price high and you address a small group of people who could afford more house elsewhere, and who will compare yours unfavourably with what that money buys. Price at the level of the market and you address the group actually looking for what you have. Price below it and you address a large group, which is a legitimate strategy in a market with enough depth to produce competition, and a mistake in a market without it.

What an asking price cannot do is make a house worth more. Buyers in a town like this look at everything in their range and know the comparables better than anyone expects, because they have spent months doing nothing else. An optimistic price does not persuade them; it simply removes the house from their search and leaves it sitting.

Time on the market is a signal

That sitting has a cost beyond the delay. Listings carry their history, and a property that has been available for a long time invites the question of what is wrong with it. Buyers then offer accordingly, and the eventual sale price of a house that was priced too high and reduced twice is frequently below what a correctly priced house would have achieved in the first month. Reductions also arrive with diminishing returns: several small ones read as a seller in trouble, while one decisive one reads as a seller who has taken a view.

Judging an offer

The number is only part of an offer. The rest is the buyer's position: whether they have a property to sell and how far along it is, whether they have a mortgage agreed in principle or merely assumed, how long a chain sits behind them, and what their own timetable requires. A slightly lower offer from a buyer with nothing to sell and finance arranged is frequently worth more than a higher one from someone at the top of a five-link chain, because the probability of completion is part of the value.

It is fair to ask these questions directly, and the answers are usually given. What is not reliable is enthusiasm. Every buyer at the offer stage is enthusiastic; the useful information is structural.

Holding a chain together

Once a sale is agreed, the seller's job becomes information management. Chains fail from silence far more often than from disagreement: a party stops hearing anything for three weeks, assumes the worst, and starts looking again. Regular, unglamorous contact with your conveyancer and your agent, and prompt answers to enquiries, do more to secure a sale than anything else available to you at that stage.

The other thing within a seller's gift is realism about timing. Fixing a completion date to something irreversible — a school term, a job start, a rental notice already served — converts an ordinary delay into a crisis. Where the timetable can be left with slack in it, leave it there.