The inspection and scoring effort should have identified the most essential issues to address to prepare your home to be seen as the best on the market. Check out  the Tampa Bay Home Seller Checklist – 10 most common issues to consider when preparing your home for sale – to make sure that these essential areas are addressed.  

Next, you will need a plan to implement these efforts that will coincide with placing the home on the market. This can be tricky if you need to involve any handymen or trades, as most worker’s schedules are sometimes booked out for a number of weeks and it might take an extended period of time to receive necessary materials.

This step is where creating a timeline will make provide a systematic approach to accomplish this effort. Start with the date that you defined in the Initiate step as when you wanted to move into your next new home and move backward from that date.

• Know that it will take most people 30 days to secure financing for a home.
• Look at the median number of days on market for your neighborhood to ascertain the time expected between the dates listed and the date under contract. Let’s say 30 days for this example.
• Now you know the date in which all repairs and staging efforts need to be concluded to place your house on the market.

NOTE: the buyers most likely to place the highest offer for your home will be the first people who view it once on the market. Missing this deadline, or trying to list the home before it is in condition to show its full potential, will significantly impact the eventual offers that you receive. Buyer’s WILL NOT loop back to see what improvements you have made.

Now, identify the timeframe to coordinate all the efforts, vendors and materials needed to get your home ready to list. In this case let’s say that it will take two weekends to finish the Home Seller Checklist and 2 weeks to get things like the HVAC serviced and some exterior painting completed.

This calendar (below) should now be utilized as your master timeline in listing your home. You should adjust the entire timeline if any of these timeframes change. Also anticipate that you should also take into consideration seasonality, market factors and demand outlined in the Listing and Pricing Strategy step to factor in selecting the date to list the home.