5 Reasons Your Home Probably Hasn't Sold

Nothing is more frustrating than planning to move, getting your home ready to sell, and then having it not sell! All your moving options and timetables are at a standstill because the home hasn’t sold. When houses don’t sell, the owner usually blames the agent, and the agent blames the price. While pricing is a big factor, it’s rarely just the price or just the agent (although sometimes it’s both!). Let’s look at the most common reasons why a home doesn’t sell.

Reason 1: The Real Estate Agent

If you’re selling a home and it doesn’t sell, the first person you look at is your agent. With good reason, the agent is likely the one who suggested the price, offered some advice on what to fix or clean, and marketed the home. With so much responsibility, it’s easy to point the finger at the agent.

Unfortunately, real estate is a business like many others where 20% of the agents do 80% of the work. The other 80% of agents are probably wonderful people but just aren’t treating real estate like a business.

How Do You Know If It’s The Agent’s Fault?

A real estate agent can cause a home not to sell by simply not doing their job. Not all real estate agents are bad, just the ones that do the following:

• Take photos with their cell phone instead of using high-quality photos
• Fail to research the price properly
• Fail to inform the client about the condition of the property
• Don’t make the homes available to be shown
• Communicate poorly with other agents (Did you know that 85% of home moves involve two real estate agents?)

Reason 2: Overpriced

Your home price is the single most important factor that causes your home to sell. Every possible negative about your home can be overcome with a lower price. A home next to high-tension wires might scare some families. However, if you price the home significantly lower than the rest of the homes in the surrounding area, you’ll find that some families don’t mind the potential superpowers they could get from the tower. In all seriousness, if you don’t want to make a repair, simply lower the price and attract more buyers.

In every study, the research is clear that pricing the home is the single most important thing that real estate agents and sellers can do. If you have one of the other problems listed below, then chances are you need to adjust the price down or improve the home’s marketability.

Reason 3: Bad First Impression

Imagine for a second that you’re working with me and we are looking at five homes. In one instance, we just viewed some amazing new construction, and in another, we’re driving up to a home that has ankle-high weeds and dead shrubbery in the front yard. What would you do?

You’d do what most people do. You’d move on to the next house. Unless the price was significantly less than all the other homes, you’re going to move on. That’s right, most people will move on over weeds! First impressions are everything when you meet people and when you shop for homes.

Reason 4: It’s Not Clean

Similar to a bad first impression is a dirty or messy house. Imagine that same home tour. You drive up and it looks nice enough on the outside. However, when you open the door, there are kids’ toys everywhere. At first, you’re only a little disturbed but think it could just be a fun home with kids. As you move through the home, you see pots and pans left on the stove, stuff all over the bathroom sink, and even clothes on the floor of the closet.

Should these things disqualify a home? After all, it’s really easy to clean this stuff up. Unfortunately, the answer is almost always yes. The problem isn’t so much that buyers can’t see past the dirt or mess. It’s that homebuyers typically are very poor cost estimators. They see your daughter’s pink room and assume it’s going to cost at least a few hundred dollars to get it back to neutral.

I asked Cathy Counti of Lee's Summit about this and she added: "Homebuyers are notoriously uncreative. If you are going to force them to use their imagination, you better price it to allow that imagination to run free."

Reason 5: It’s Outdated

The professional real estate term is “functional obsolescence.” When homebuyers see a home that’s outdated or simply not upgraded as much as competitor homes, they aren’t interested. Even when buyers see a home for sale where some homes are older and it’s expected, they still over-discount it!

When a buyer sees an outdated home, they know the problem upfront. What they don’t realize is that they often miscalculate the cost to update a home by as much as 100%.

Reason 6: You, the Seller

If a home buyer has decided to make an offer, chances are good there could be a closing and a moving date in the future. However, false perceptions and sometimes even personal feelings get in the way.

Sometimes a home seller will get a lowball offer and get upset. Instead of trying to work out a deal and see if the buyer will pay what the seller wants, the seller decides not to engage at all. I've had home buyers willing to pay full price, but their first offer was 50% of the list price!

The reality is that often small compromises in certain areas can smooth a home selling transaction. However, nothing shuts down a home sale like a bad attitude.