Selling

A Step-by-Step Guide to Selling Your Home

1. Contact Seddons for a marketing appraisal of your property. We will call out to see you and advise you what we consider to be the value of your property and the best way of selling, be it by normal private treaty sale or auction.
   
   If you are having several appraisals, do be wary about automatically instructing the agent who will give you the highest valuation! Some agents will value a property very high just to get the property on their registers. If you start off too high then you won’t even get applicants in the door to view and therefore you won’t get any offers! What you will have done however is to lose the initial marketing impetus and you will be forced to reduce the price later on.
2. Don’t be tempted to go for the agent who quotes the lowest fee! Seddons are not the cheapest in the area, nor are we the most expensive, however we like to think “you get what you pay for” and thus we can more than justify a relative small additional amount of commission by achieving a better sale and also a better sale price!
3. Once you have decided that you would like us to sell your property, then we will arrange to come out and take all the measurements and photographs and generally discuss the whole procedure with you and hopefully allay any worries that you may have.
4. You are required by law to have an Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) commissioned before your property can be placed on the market. An EPC confirms your "carbon footprint" and is an assessment of your home's energy efficiency and environmental impact rating. We can arrange this for you.
5. Once the EPC is completed, we can them commence marketing. We will produce high quality details of your property, illustrated with colour photographs both of the exterior and interior. The details will also contain a floor plan of the property, which is particularly useful for prospective purchasers.
6. We will erect a “for sale” board. You don’t have to have one, but we do sell more properties from our boards then we do from local advertising! If you have decided to sell then surely you want as many people as possible to know that your property is on the market.
7. We will advertise your property for sale and will also match your property to prospective purchasers on our computerised matching system. We will then telephone those applicants and send them details. We will add details of your property to our website.
8. We will arrange viewings of your property. If you are out at work during the day then providing we have a key, we can accompany viewers to your property. We always provide feedback to you.
9. Once we receive an offer for your property we thoroughly check the applicants status, making sure that they are in a position to purchase and that they have sufficient funds.
10. If you decide to accept the offer then you will need a solicitor, as will the prospective purchaser, and we will then notify both solicitors of the details of the sale. We can recommend a local solicitor if you wish.
11. Your solicitor will draw up a contract, which will be sent to the purchaser’s solicitor, who will raise various queries with your own solicitor to make quite certain that there are no problems affecting the property.
12. If your purchasers require a mortgage, they will apply to their bank or building society for a loan, who will arrange for their valuer to come and inspect your property. The average building society valuation takes about three quarters of an hour.
13. It normally takes about six weeks from the time that you actually agree a sale to the signing of contracts. During this time, we regularly check on the progress and make quite certain that everyone is doing what they should be. We will keep you fully updated.
14. Your solicitor will have drawn up two copies of the contract, one for you and one for the purchaser. Once the purchasers’ solicitors are satisfied that everything is as it should be and your purchasers have their funds from their building society, a moving date can be agreed and contracts can now be exchanged. Exchange of contracts is when the duly signed contracts are exchanged between the two lawyers and a 10% deposit paid. At this point you have a binding contract. Completion, when you move, normally takes place one to two weeks thereafter.