Ray Peckham Real Estate

Surfside Real Estate Search

5 Steps To Sell Your Surfside Home

Selling your Surfside home is a process that involves five basic steps. These steps are Preparing the Home for Sale, Finding a Buyer, Qualifying the Buyer, Negotiating the Terms, Handling all the Details needed to finalize the sale. If you list your home your real estate agent takes responsibility for each step. If you sell on your own, it is your responsibility to complete each step.

Negotiating the Sale of Your Surfside Home.

Some say that the “Devil is in the Details” and these last two steps are full of details as buyers make offers contingent upon certain conditions being met by the seller and sellers make counter offers in the process of closing your Surfside home. Once there is agreement, however, many details still remain in order to finalize the sale.

Surfside. How Much Should You Offer?

Comparable sales figures is a good guide for homeowners who are pricing their Surfside and a good guide for prospective buyers. Make sure you compare homes that are similar to the one your are considering...the same neighborhood, the same size, the same condition. Also, make sure you compare sales within the past six months.

Ask your REALTOR for a comparison of the list price and sales price of comparable Surfside sales. This information may give you a trend and a guideline for your offer. For example, maybe homes in the area have consistently listed for more than they actually sold for. If that is the case, find out what percentage of reduction occurred. Use this information as a basis for your offer.

Surfside ...How To Determine Price

The asking price of your Surfside real estate is not something to decide willy-nilly. Price it too high and you may not get any offers. Price it too low and you fail to maximize the return on your investment. Here is a good way to go about determining the price for your Surfside home.

Buyers who will consider your Surfside are out there inspecting and comparing a variety of homes that are for sale at the same time your home is on the market. If your home is priced significantly higher than comparable Surfside homes, you may not get very many buyers to even look at your home. Ultimately, it is buyers who determine what your home is worth. Buyers who are represented by an agent are privy to knowledge of what homes are actually selling for. You should be armed with this knowledge as well and you should use this knowledge to guide your pricing decision.

The Benefits of Selling Surfside

As you know, you are allowed to sell your Surfside principal residence once every two years and exclude up to $250,000 ($500,000 for a married couple) of the gain of the sale on your Federal income tax. Please note: This is not a once in a lifetime tax savings and you don’t have to be any certain age or buy a more expensive property. If you meet the two-year residence test you can sell your principal residence every two years if you are so inclined and the market cooperates. But this tax saving does not affect rental property unless you convert the rental to your personal residence, live in it for two years and then sell it.

The Benefits of Selling Surfside

In order to sell Surfside as your personal residence, you must have lived in it for two out of the five-year period ending on the date of the sale of the property. This means that you can buy a second home and live in it as your personal residence while renting out your first home. If, in a couple years you decide to sell your first Surfside personal residence you can sell it and still benefit from the $250,000 to $500,000 Capital Gain tax exclusion. The law says that the home must be your personal residence for at least two out of the past five years.