The Usual Way to Sell Your Home

If you've never sold a house through the conventional realty process, here's how it usually begins.
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You start by trying to find an agent you trust, who will present you with an analysis of comparable properties in Humble and help you determine a good asking price for your home. You'll then work together to decide what repairs and updates are worth making to increase your home's appeal to potential buyers (and also which ones are unlikely to produce enough of a return on investment).

Next, your realtor will advise you on how to stage your home for showings, which includes decluttering and organizing, as well as removing items that very personally identify the house with you. Some people hire a professional to assist with this step.

And the final part of the preliminary stage is for the agent to list your home on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), a platform that real estate professionals use to market their properties. It's also likely to be listed on publicly available websites (Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, etc.) for the world to see. At this point, anyone in Humble interested in buying a home like yours should be able to find it. 

Then, you hope for the best.

If all goes well, you'll get an offer at or above your asking price within the first week or two. Maybe as soon as five weeks later, you'll leave the house after a wonderful selling experience.

​That's the hope. But the process doesn't always go according to script.

Selling Your Home Usually Isn't Fun

Ask a few friends who have sold a home, and you'll probably find quite a few who have experienced at least one of the following.

• Your asking price is too high, and you either don't get many showings or have a lot of showings followed by lowball offers.
• After a few weeks, you don't feel like you're close to making a sale and decide to lower your asking price.
• As much as you want to sell your home, showings start to become a nuisance because you have to leave home each time. You also get frustrated by having to keep the house in perfect order day after day.
• You finally get an offer you're willing to accept, but after the home inspection, the buyer submits a long list of things they want you to pay to fix prior to closing (or they ask you to give them cash back at closing, so that they can make those repairs and updates later).
• After you reach an agreement on the inspection-related requests, the home appraisal comes back lower than the sale price. Now the buyer wants you to lower your price, or they're backing out of the sale. Or maybe the buyer was financing a high percentage of the sale amount, and the bank says the deal is off without a reduction of the price.
• You manage to clear all of these hurdles and finally see the paperwork coming together for the closing, and that's when you first become aware (or maybe just get a harsh reminder) that about 10 percent of your sale amount is going to be handed over in realtor commissions, title insurance and other taxes and fees.

All of this could play out over a span of four months or more. In the end, it's possible the whole ordeal was still the smartest way to sell your home. But it's also possible that it wasn't, and you may have unnecessarily subjected yourself to all that stress, not to mention the lost time.

So, before you decide to put your Humble home on the market, check with us to learn more about the alternative you have by going through a trusted home buyer.

Selling Your Home Can Be Easy

In real estate transactions, we typically obsess over the financial aspects. And that's natural, because for most people, those are the largest sums of money they'll ever deal with in their lives.

But your time also has value, as does your emotional health. You don't often think of those things before putting a house up for sale, but when you get into the middle of just a couple of the scenarios mentioned above, you become much more aware of how it all fits together.

Time, money and stress are three almost-inescapable elements of selling your home, and the real estate investor has a major advantage in helping you on two of those fronts.

FACT: Selling your home to an investor will allow you to complete the transaction faster than going through the realty process. In most cases, we're talking two or more months faster.

FACT: Once you've received an offer from an investor and agreed on it, which usually all takes place in a span of a few days, there's not much left to stress over (other than the upcoming move).
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The big question you probably have at this point: How does the investor help me on the financial end?