Why you Shouldn’t Leave your House on the Market

Estimated reading time 4 minutes

Selling your home fast is what everybody wants. They also want to get a stack of cheddar for their cherished abode. Because “why wouldn’t anyone want to live here”, right? That’s the thought process of many people, but the reality is that your house could be on the market for much longer than you’d expect. People will start to notice if a house has been ‘up for sale’ after about a month, and will start wondering; “what’s wrong with that house?”. This will undoubtedly deter interest in your property in the local community. So, that’s why you should not leave your house on the market for too long or set your asking price too high to begin with. But how long is too long?

How long should a property be on the market?

It’s interesting to review the selling times reports by area to see what the trends are near you. Home.co.uk offers this data and a bunch of other stats that can help you analyse the local property market near you, before you decide to put your house up for sale.

In London, the average selling time for all property is 78 days. Terraced property sold the quickest in London at just 67 days, and detached the longest at 92 days. On the face of it, the cheapest property in London did not sell the quickest, with property under £100,000 selling in 92 days (but there were only 32 properties recorded at this price range). However, the quickest selling was houses between £300,000 and £400,000 selling at just 67 days.

In Manchester, property between £400,000 and £500,000 sold the quickest, at only 48 days on average. The mean selling time here was 74 days for an average property, only slightly shorter than London. Terraced houses were also the quickest selling at just 65 days on average. And detached houses, as well as property over £500,000 took the longest to sell at over 104 days.

Unlike these two city locations, more scenic areas had a slightly different trend to their market. Property in Dartford in Kent for example took only 45 days on average to sell. With houses between £300,000 and £400,000 taking that shortest time to sell at only 40 days. And properties over £500,000 here took the longest selling in 114 days (that’s a third of a year, or 4 months).

How to avoid leaving your house on the market

Nobody wants their house not to sell, or to take months and months doing it. Once you’ve made the difficult decision to move, you don’t want to be faced with an uphill struggle of more and more difficulties. So here’s what you can do:

• Set a realistic asking price. One way of doing this, is to check the final sold prices of houses in your area. There are multiple sources of information for this, such as mouseprice.com, Land Registry and even Rightmove keeps some general data on this subject to help prospective sellers. Most estate agents that you ask to value your home will deliver an unrealistic figure in the hope that they will get you on their books, which will not help sell your house in the long run.
• Avoid changing or lowering your house price online, on house listing websites like Rightmove and Zoopla. Many people are more aware and more tech savvy than they used to be. So it’s easy for most people to see when you’ve made edits to your listing with tools like the property bee plugin for browsers. Instead, either take your listing down completely and re-upload the new one or look elsewhere to list it.
• Lastly, if you start to fear your property is not going to sell and will start dropping value the longer it stays on the market, then consider using a fast house sale company. Here at Sellhousefast we guarantee to buy your home within 28 days. Unlike property listing websites or estate agents, we are the buyers of your house, not random people looking for their next home. Therefore, there’s no chain when you sell with us, so you can be sure your home will be bought and you will be paid in full within a month. Get in touch now for a free valuation.

Feature image credit: Thinglass/Shutterstock