Staging your house with for maximum appeal...

When it comes to selling your own house fast, first impressions from your buyers is very important.  Buyers are quick to find reasons they DON’T want to buy, and so you’re job is to make that as difficult as possible for them.  One of the ways to solve that problem is by staging your house.

 

House staging is when you setup the furniture and interior decorations in  your house to increase the appeal to a broad group of potential buyers.  This is a tactic commonly used in model homes for home builders.  And for those who are very good at it, they get paid top dollar to do this for real estate professionals all the time.

But, should you stage your house?  Absolutely.  However, you can do it with a limited budget, or no budget at all for that matter and make a big difference in the way your house shows.

Here is a complete article I wrote that will give you some tips on staging your house for a fast sale:
To Stage or not to stage, what to take out, and what to leave in your house

Great article on the potential credit damage of short sales...

Short sales have been the latest buzz on the news and just about every media source.  Essentially a short sale is when you are behind on your mortgage payments by at least 3 months, and you contact the bank to ask for a discount on your mortgage so you can sell it to your buyer.  Essentially you would need to have an offer to buy from a buyer and then there are many other steps involved to get this to actually happen.

The reason someone may use this method to sell is because they have mortgage balances that are greater than the current value of their home, and they ultimately are looking to avoid a foreclosure.  And in this real estate market it is a very common scenario.  Discounting the mortgage gives you the opportunity to sell to a buyer at a much more reasonable price.

I have had a few people ask me about how this would affect their credit score vs. a foreclosure or a deed in lieu of foreclosure, and I have found an article that explains this in perfect detail, so rather than explain it all out again, Ill just give you the link to that article:

 

Click here to read: Short sale or foreclosure, either way your credit is shot