Be an Exterior Landscaper 

When you’re preparing your Pittsburgh home to sell on the market, you’ll first have to stage it so that it brings across the best first impression to potential home buyers. After all, the decor of your home truly impacts the way your home sells.

Potential home buyers perceive that the outside of your home reflects what’s on inside. You'll want to make sure your home looks its best by filling cracks in your driveway, power washing the exterior, and sprucing up the landscaping.

Be an Interior Designer

Once the outside is ready for buyers, the inside will need some work as well. You want your home to achieve the perfect balance of looking cozy, but also depersonalized.

Inside the home, you'll need to scrub your carpets and mop the floors, declutter all of your living areas, paint your rooms with neutral colors, and a whole lot more.

Be a Professional Photographer

Once you’ve cleaned your house inside and out, it’s time to capture your home’s visual appeal. Stunning photos of your home say more about your home’s beauty than a description ever could.

You need to make sure your hard work gets noticed in your home marketing materials or on the local Pittsburgh MLS.  This means ditching your iPhone and upgrading to a professional camera. Savvy real estate agents also know a video tour of a home gives it even more exposure, especially when it’s posted to YouTube.

Be a Home Appraiser

If you’re going to find that sweet price — not too high, and not too low — you will need to research the current Pittsburgh real estate market. You’ll want to find out how much homes have sold for in your neighborhood in the last 6 months — especially those properties that are similar to yours in size, features, condition and floor plan.

The true market value of your home can come from a comparative market analysis. It will take all your property upgrades and your neighborhood’s property values into account when finding the value.

Be an Effective Marketer

Sticking a sign into your front lawn will probably only broadcast your home for sale within your Pittsburgh subdivision. When you’re selling your home yourself, you need to become your own online and print marketer to effectively reach the largest audience of Pittsburgh home buyers possible.

Print brochures, host an open house, and broadcast your FSBO home on social media. This is where you can add the stunning home photos, descriptions of your home’s features, and the appeal of your property and neighborhood. Remember, you’re not just trying to sell your house locally. You’re attempting to reach home buyers from across the country or even the globe.

Be Your Own Representative

Real estate agents act with the home seller’s best interests in mind when showing potential buyers around a home. Selling your home yourself means that you need to act as the real estate agent, accepting all forms of feedback — both good and bad.

Some Pittsburgh home buyers may not be comfortable expressing their honest opinion of the wallpaper in your living room or the smell of kitty litter that you’ve grown accustomed to. We all look at our home through rose-colored glasses. Listening to negative feedback is crucial to sell your home, but it’s not something that’s pleasant to hear.

Be a Security Guard

When you’re starting to show potential buyers your new home, you need to make sure that your property is secure. When someone shows up at your door, are they truly interested in buying home? And what if you’re not at home and someone requests a showing for that very moment? Real estate agents either elect to show homes for sale themselves or leave your house keys in a lockbox. But even if you put a combination lock on your home, it still runs the risk of getting broken into.

You need to act as your own security guard to protect the home that you still own and the belongings within it.

Be...a Whole Lot More

These few aspects to the home selling process are by no means an exhaustive list. You also have to play the part of:

• home improvement expert
• successful negotiator
• professional cleaner
• creative copywriter
• graphic designer
• home financing guru
• and many, many more…