How to Sell a House in Indiana Fast: 10 Tips for Selling an Indiana Home Quickly

If you need to know how to sell your house quickly you have come to the right place. This post will provide you with 10 actionable tips to help you get organized with a plan for selling your property fast.

Common Reasons People Need to Sell Fast

Home sales most often occur due to the occurrence of a major life event or financial pressure. Here are the typical reasons homeowners need to sell their home quickly.

Divorce: A divorce is a common reason to be saying I need to sell my house ASAP. Divorce is a common reason to want to sell a house quickly. Divorcing spouses are often ready to move on and move forward. A house payment and maintaining a home is a heavy anchor holding divorcing owners back from starting the next chapter in their life. Therefore, divorcing home sellers are often very motivated to move things forward quickly.

Inherited Home: Heirs who inherit a house are often looking for a fast home sale. This is especially true when none of the heirs have a use for the house or the heirs live far away from where the home is located. Inheriting a house is a great financial opportunity, but the home is only going to cost money in the short term. The sooner the home can be sold the less expense the home will cost you.

Foreclosure Avoidance: Homeowners behind on their mortgage payment who want to avoid a foreclosure are often very motivated to get their home sold. You can avoid a foreclosure by selling your home. There are strict timelines which must be met to keep the lender from interfering with your sale. Due to this, sellers trying to avoid foreclosure often need to sell their home quickly.

Job Loss or Job Relocation: An income reduction, job loss, or relocation are all major life events which can cause a homeowner to be motivated to sell their home quickly. With a loss of income it is just 30 short days before that next mortgage payment is due. On the other hand, people relocating for a job are ready to cut ties with their current area and move elsewhere.

Medicaid Spend Down: A home sale due to a Medicaid spend down also causes homeowners to want to sell quickly. This is especially true if the homeowner is already residing in a long term care facility or other care home and is approaching the end of their Medicare limits. Quickly qualifying for Medicaid by completing the asset sales leg can keep the homeowner in his or her current care facility.

Home Needs Major Repairs: Major repairs are costly, and some people just do not have the money. Often, the alternative solution is to sell the home to someone else who can manage the repairs. This is especially true with major repairs such as a failed foundation or septic system or regular water intrusion.

Found Your Dream Home: Lastly, are the homeowners who have found their dream home for sale but need to sell their current home to buy it. Each year I meet people who want to find the home they want to buy before trying to sell their current home. In these instances we end up needing to sell their home quickly.

Average Time to Sell a House in Indiana 2022

Throughout 2022, houses for sale in Indiana were going under contract in an average of 18 days. The median number of days on market was five. This means that half of all homes for sale were going under contract within five days of being listed.

Additionally, the average financed transaction in Indiana was taking 38 days in 2022. Therefore, for Indiana homeowners the average time to sell a home is about 56 days to go from a live listing to a closed sale.

How to Sell a House in Indiana Quickly with These 10 Steps

1. Pick a Selling Strategy

Sell your house fast by choosing the right way to sell your home. There are several options available to you.

FSBO

Selling your home FSBO will most likely be the slowest way to sell your home. This is due to the fact FSBOs really struggle with getting in front of the entire active buyer audience. Secondly, FSBO sellers frequently overprice their homes. In our modern swipe right, swipe left world overpriced homes do not sell. Going it alone without an expertise isn’t the best way to sell a house in Indiana quickly.

Hire an Agent

The best way to sell a house quickly is hiring a real estate agent. Real estate agents have the expertise to make your home attractive to the audience of active homebuyers. This includes the right staging, imagery, marketing remarks, and pricing. Moreover, a real estate agent can get your home placed in your area’s multiple listing service (MLS). The MLS will then syndicate your home for sale to all other real estate websites. This is how you can maximize the exposure of your house for sale to active homebuyers.

Alternative Ways

I-buyers are a quick way to sell your house. The most common alternative to FSBO or hiring an agent is contacting an i-buyer. An i-buyer is the term society has currently given to describe individuals, regional, or enterprise sized buyers of homes. I-buyers typically offer homeowners an instant, cash offer guaranteed to close in days or weeks.

2. Request a Cash Offers

Selling your home to a buyer with a cash offer is one of the best ways to sell a home quickly. What takes the longest to make a home sale occur is the approval of the buyer’s financing. You can skip this entirely by seeking out and accepting a cash offer.

A cash offer removes the risk of the buyer’s financing falling through. Additionally, the TRID rules establishing specific timelines do not apply either. Also, most cash purchasers will skip having an appraisal which will also speed up the process. A cash purchase can be closed just as fast as it takes for the title work to get completed. This equals about 10 days.

3. Price Your Home Correctly on Day One

The number one best way to sell a house quickly is to price it correctly. Overpriced homes do not sell.

Did you know most homebuyers simultaneously use two or three real estate websites or apps to search for homes? They are swiping right, swiping left, liking, exing, and pushing buttons. If your home does not fit in with other similarly priced homes it will not sell quickly. Worse, it might not sell at all. One of the best ways to sell your home quickly is to price it correctly at the start.

Set a Timeline for a Price Reduction

Be prepared to reduce the price of your home if needed. In our instant information era homebuyers will quickly respond to a home’s pricing. If activity is weak for a week, drop that price. Continue doing this every 7 to 10 days.

Consider Sales Incentives

You can incentivize buyers to come view your home. Excellent incentives include marketing a home warranty, the ability to take possession at closing, or even covering some of the buyer’s closing costs. Avoid incentives about offering an agent a bonus for bringing a buyer in a certain amount of time. Offer incentives to buyers and not to the real estate agents.

4. Take Care of Quick Repairs

Well maintained homes in good repair are attractive to buyers. Take a look at your home and fix anything that is openly and obviously not working correctly. Easy fixes include tightening loose handrails, finishing paint jobs, replacing damaged baseboards, and poorly latching doors. Replace burnt out light bulbs, too. Taking the time to address these minor items will make your home more attractive to buyers.

5. Stage and Curb Appeal

Carefully decorated, staged homes perform great. Sprucing up the yard always helps, too. See, it’s all about aesthetic sentiment.

Aesthetic sentiment is the feeling you get from seeing an image. The better decorated and tidied up your home is the better images you will capture in the photos of the home. Great imagery will leave a lasting, positive effect with buyers viewing your home online. Those buyers will request a showing and come tour your home which will lead to offers.

6. Take the Highest Quality Photographs

Homes with high quality photos get more showings which increases the likelihood of getting an offer. If you are not a photographer do not pretend to be one when it comes time to sell your home.

Both of these homes sold for about the same price. Both are in similar areas. Both have similar features. Which one would you be more interested in seeing in person?

If you chose the one on the left, you are looking at high quality photography shot by a professional photographer. Also, the customer on the left was coached about how to have the home looking on picture day so it was ready. The prep work is most noticeable in the kitchen photo. You can see there are few things left out on the counters.

High resolution photos are crisp, colorful, and make your home look exciting. Demand that your agent hire a professional unless he or she has the skills and equipment to take the photos themself. If you do not like the photos due to poor quality, tell your agent to do them again. Also, so those photos look great, have your home ready to be photographed on picture day.

7. Write a Great Listing Description

Another tip to know how to sell a house quickly is writing excellent marketing remarks. Long ago in the early days of being a real estate agent I didn’t think too many people read the marketing remarks. Wrong. Most people do read the marketing remarks. Here are tips for writing the best marketing remarks when listing your home for sale.

• Limit it to no more than 1,000 characters
• Don’t take readers on a tour of your home
• Focus on features in your home. Every buyer is trying to solve their problems. Mention your features so they know your home solves their problems. For example, if you have a fenced yard, mention it. Now, homebuyers with a dog know Fido will be safe because there is already a fenced yard.
• Make sure to mention the location, especially if yours is excellent. Mention specific places your home is near. For example, if your home is within five miles of a Target or Starbucks say so.

8. Get Your Home in Front of the Largest Audience Possible

You need to get your home everywhere so it is in front of every possible buyer. Maximize the exposure of your home.

The best and easiest way to do this is by contacting a real estate agent. Your agent will get you access to the MLS for your area. Once your home is placed in the MLS it will be fed to every real estate related website including national search sites, local brokerage websites, and websites owned by real estate agents.

In addition, start putting the home in front of your sphere of influence. Tell everyone you know you are selling your home. Post it on your social media profiles, send an email to all your contacts, and get a sign in the yard immediately. Let everyone know it is on the market.

9. Make Your Home Easy to Show

Are you ready for an inside tip from an actual Indiana real estate agent? You want to know something buyers and real estate agents find really annoying? When the seller makes the home difficult to show. You as the seller need to be as accommodating as possible. It’s about the buyers’ schedules and not your own. So, what makes a home difficult to show?

• Sellers made the home unavailable or blocked out too many showing times
• Sellers cannot accommodate short notice showing requests. Every buyer wants to see the home today or tomorrow.
• Alarms. shut it off for us so I do not have to figure out how to do it. Would you rather me talk about your nice entryway and help the buyers take in your home as we first step in, or would you rather me run to a keypad and type in your dog’s birthday to shut off an alarm?
• When the seller is present during the showing (this is the #1 worst thing a seller could do)
• Pets. you do know some people are allergic and the last thing they want to be reminded of is deep cleaning the house to get out the allergens? Or, how about your dog that won’t stop barking at us. Yeah…take your pets with you if you can.
• Dirty houses. So gross. Buyers don’t buy dirty houses. Clean your house. And don’t forget the yard and litter boxes if you have pets.

10. Clean Your House and Cut the Grass

Clean homes sell. Dirty homes do not.

Clean homes are calm, enjoyable, and a place anyone would want to call home. No homebuyer wants to walk in and see your dirty dishes, smell your garbage, or see piles of laundry. Clean your house. Also, cut your grass and spruce up the yard. Gnarly bushes, weedy garden beds, and piles of unraked leaves are eyesores. Use these items below as a checklist of what to do to have your home looking clean the day of a showing.

• Make the beds
• Bathrooms clean with toilet seats and lids down
• No dishes in the sink
• No laundry piled up in the laundry room
• Everything looks organized with everything in its place
• Vacuum carpet and sweep floors
• Kid or pet’s toys are put away
• Cat litter boxes are cleaned
• Dog waste removed from yard
• Grass is cut and landscaping looks kept up

Avoid “Sell House Fast” Gimmicks

A warning I want to give to home sellers is the “sell my house fast” gimmicks. We’ve all seen the “We Buy HousesCash” signs stapled to a telephone pole. Steer clear of these.

Here’s the thing. First, there are many reputable, sophisticated i-buyer companies in the U.S. The last thing you need is some investor who is really nothing more than a wholesaler coming in and making an offer to you and then watching it twist in the wind and not close as the buyer dangles it in front of you. Instead, contact a sophisticated, established i-buyer to purchase your home.

On the other hand, contact a real estate agent. All across the U.S. there is an extreme shortage of homes for sale. You can sell your home extremely quickly with a real estate agent. Just last week, I listed a home and thought we were high on the price. Like, really high. We received an offer in four hours above the asking price.

Conclusion

You are not alone in needing to sell your house quickly. Many major life events can cause you to need to sell your Indiana home quickly. On average, Indiana home sellers should expect it to take about 50 to 60 days to get their home sold and closed.

These 10 tips to sell your home fast will work. These are actionable steps you can take to get your Indiana house sold quickly. Start by choosing the correct method for selling your home. Beyond that it’s pretty basic what is needed to sell a home fast. Price the home accurately, have excellent imagery and marketing remarks, and make sure the home is clean and well maintained once showings begin. If you follow those steps your home will sell fast.

Lastly, be wary of cash-for-keys buyers. There are a lot of wannabe real estate investors. Many of these will waste your time.

On the other hand, hire a real estate agent. Real estate agents like the Quadwalls Northwest Indiana Real Estate Team of Realtors® can get your home sold quickly. We have the ability to get your house in front of the entire audience of active homebuyers and price your home correctly from the start.

The Quadwalls Team Of Realtors® In Northwest Indiana

About Quadwalls.com

Quadwalls.com is a real estate website founded in Valparaiso, IN dedicated to helping home buyers and sellers make better decisions when buying and selling real estate. We do this by giving clear, honest information to our clients based on what we have learned by completing hundreds of home purchases and sales.

How Quadwalls Helps Homebuyers

The Quadwalls Real Estate Team has some of the best Realtors® in Northwest Indiana. We are ready to help you find and buy your new home. Each of the Quadwalls Team Northwest Indiana real estate agents is ready to provide you with attentive, personalized, warm, caring service to help you find and buy a home. Whether this is your first or fifteenth home purchase each of us has the skills and experience to represent you. Start viewing homes for sale in Northwest Indiana today!

How Quadwalls Helps Home Sellers

Receive a free, remarkably accurate market valuation of your home by completing the Quadwalls.com Interactive Home Value Experience. Also, we post the real estate commission fee we charge on our website. Our fees for our full-feature home selling services are amongst the lowest in the industry. You can learn more about our full-feature home selling services and my answers to home sellers’ most common questions when hiring a Realtor to sell their home.

Is There Something Else?

Do you just have some real estate related questions? If so, feel free to contact us. We will respect your privacy. All conversations and inquiries are confidential. Just let us know how we can help.