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How To Sell Your Property

Thinking about selling your home or investment property in Ottawa or the surrounding towns, villages, rural areas or cottage country, you have a lot of options. On this page I outline the selling process and arm you with the information you need to make the right decisions to achieve the best results for your specific circumstances.

How To Sell Your Property

  • Follow A Project Plan

    Without a plan, you'll get random results.

  • Understand Property Value & Pricing

    And learn to price strategically.

  • Understand Representation

    Represent yourself, or hire an agent?

  • Myths - Selling With An Agent

    Avoid the smoke & mirrors; hire an excellent agent.

  • Myths - Selling Without An Agent

    The good, the bad, and the ugly.

SOLD Isn't Good Enough

Selling your property isn't rocket science. But you probably don't just want to sell. You want to maximize your equity. You want to net as much money as you can at the end of the process. And you don't want it to take a lot longer than necessary. And you want to avoid getting mired in re-negotiations after inspections, a closing date that doesn't align with your plans, or stressful and costly legal problems.

A well thought-out and battle-tested plan will deliver the best results. It's not rocket science - but it deserves some critical thinking and is founded on common sense.

Project Plan For Selling A Property

What is property marketing? Quite simply, it is the process you follow to attract potential buyers and achieve the sale of your property. Whether you have a plan or not, you have a process, and that is your de facto marketing plan. Sticking a sign on the lawn? Putting up posters at work? Placing a free ad on kijiji? Simple plans, but that's what they are.

Real estate is worth a lot of money - for most of us, the real estate we own constitutes the majority of our net worth. The fact that properties are worth a lot of money can be a double-edged sword. If you bought your house 4 years ago for $275,000 and someone offers you $475,000 today, you might get pretty excited. Especially if you heard that the neighbour sold last month for $425,000. You might jump on a deal like that, and perhaps never look back. But what if your property was actually worth $535,000? You didn't realise that the neighbour's basement was unfinished, or the attic contained asbestos, or they sold it to the first buyer on day one, with 7 other showings booked for day two. 

Selling a property is a bit like golfing. There are hundreds of little variables all over the place, and the difference between a great outcome and a mediocre one hinges on taking care of all the small details to minimize the negative and maximize the positive impact of those variables. That's what an excellent marketing plan is all about. And it's not complicated - it's just methodical, creative at times, and involves some work. Practice helps a lot. If you sell properties all the time, you can internalize the process and it will flow naturally. If you don't manage the process frequently, you're a lot more likely to make costly mistakes.

Coming from a professional product development and marketing background, I built a property marketing methodology as soon as I launched my real estate business in 2005. I'm always updating and improving it. To this day, I am amazed how few agents, let alone private sellers, have a bona fide plan to ensure reliably excellent results. While the marketing plan for each specific property is different, because every property and every situation is different, the plan must be built on a consistent and comprehensive methodology. I call my methodology, "The 5 P's of Property Marketing".

Expand the boxes below for a quick overview of each "P" in the methodology, and if you have the time and are more interested, read my article that explains it in detail, with real world examples of how each step in the methodology has saved clients tens of thousands of dollars and will yield the same for you when you sell.

The 5 P's of Property Marketing - A Property Marketing Methodology

Property Value & Pricing

Representation

Myths - Selling With An Agent

Myths - Selling Without An Agent

My Services