This is a collaborative post.
If you are thinking about selling your house or flat, it’s important to know that there are certain factors that can devalue the property and reduce the value of offers from buyers.
These potential negative aspects can range from things that you might have created and can fix, such as cluttered rooms that detract from the home’s appearance, or that occur for some other reason but are still problems such as subsidence or the presence of Japanese knotweed. Knowing about these potential issues is the first step toward addressing them.
Even if you there are certain things occurring at your house or flat that reduce its market value, rest assured that most of them can be fixed and you can still get a good sale price.
5 factors that can reduce the value of your house or flat
A handful of problems can lower the overall value of your home, but many of these factors can also be fixed successfully and often at low or zero cost.
Dirty or otherwise unattractive appearance – You want to make sure your house or flat looks it best when selling, so if the garden is overgrown, or the interiors are dirty, it will make people think the place is worth less than you could actually get with some simple cleaning up of the property.
Overly cluttered or personalised rooms – Prospective buyers want to visualise themselves in your home, but if the rooms are cluttered with your belongings, buyers might think the space isn’t as valuable as you believe and will therefore offer you less money in a possible sale.
Japanese knotweed – This weed is an invasive species in the United Kingdom whose shoots can spread far and quickly, damaging concrete, and making your home’s foundations unstable. It can be treated but its mere presence might hurt the overall value of your property.
Subsidence – This is a major problem that occurs when part of the property is sinking, but it is possible to treat subsidence with the investment of a lot of time and money. Still, some homeowners have successfully found buyers even when subsidence is occurring. You can read further information regarding subsidence on the RICS website.
Having a swimming pool – While it might seem enticing to be able to home a pool that should drive the overall value of your house or flat, the cost and time involved with maintaining pools can be a major turn off for many buyers and lead them to lower their purchase price offer.
How to sell your home even if something is devaluing it
Although it’s possible to correct the problems that might be devaluing your home, you can also attempt to sell it via an estate agent or auctioneer or property buying company.
A benefit of using an auctioneer is that they will take care of listing and marketing the property to generate interest in it. The auction date also gives you a specific day for when your home will sell, which can be great if your top priority is having certainty about when you’ll sell.
There are downsides to auctioning, however, including the fact that the auctioneer will charge fees that you’ll have to subtract from the total sale profit. The auctioneer will typically ask you to set the minimum reserve bid at a level lower than you might actually want to accept for your home. They’ll do this with the hope of sparking interest from buyers so that it leads to competitive bidding on the auction day that drives up the final sale price. But there’s no guarantee this will happen, and you might end up with just the reserve bid, meaning you’ll have to settle for more than you actually want for your home.
An alternative option is to sell your house or flat to a property buying company, and LDN Properties is a good example of a reputable business that works directly with homeowners to give them fast and competitive offers to buy their properties without charging any fees. This can be a great choice for selling because not only does it typically mean the sale will be completed very quickly, but you also will retain the full sale value because of the lack of fees.
You could also try selling your home “as is” through an estate agent without taking steps to address the issues that are devaluing your property. They will be responsible for listing and organising viewings for the home, reducing the stress of selling. But your house could be on the market for many weeks, months, and in some cases even a year or more, so it’s not a great choice if you need to sell in a hurry. And estate agents will also charge fees, so you’ll have to pay those out of the total sale price, reducing your overall profit from the sale.
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