6 Likely Reasons Your Home Isn’t Selling (And What to Do About It)

After a year and a half of a runaway seller’s market, even a few weeks on the market can feel surprising to home sellers, but rest assured, you can figure this out. Many homes in buyers markets do have to sit for a few weeks to find the right buyer who needs what you have to offer, but when the buyers aren’t beating down your door, you can work through a few thoughts and see if you fall into one of these reasons why your home isn’t selling.

Your Area Is Losing Desirability (Or Still Beginning to Gain It)

If you have lived somewhere for a while, you may not have noticed that people are starting to move out of the area into other, more desirable parts of town, or you may be anticipating an influx of interest that hasn’t quite arrived yet. If you need to sell now, recognizing that the interest is pretty cool in your area just means focusing on all the things that make your home worthwhile even if other factors about location aren’t perfect.

You’re Not Working With a High-Involvement Agent

Almost before any other question, look at what your agent is doing for you: if they are acting easy-breezy about time on the market so far, you may be working with someone who isn’t as high-involvement as you want. Agents who want to move houses quickly will be able to explain how actively they are marketing your home, what they will do to make all open houses and showings effective, and how they are making your sale a priority. If they aren’t doing this, you can explain your concerns and choose to work with someone else! Just make sure you understand what you’ve signed with any contracts and that you are ready to accept those consequences when firing an agent.

Your Listing/Photos Aren’t Drawing Folks In

If you cut corners with how you wrote your listing description or the photos aren’t professional, that can really impact how many people give your home a second look. This is easy to resolve: get a professional real estate photographer and rewrite that description to make sure it puts the wow-factor back in to the minds of any buyer.

Your Price Point is Too High

It could be that some people are walking away from your listing, wishing it was just a smidge less expensive so it was in their budget. A very common choice when a home isn’t moving is to drop the price: you’ll get anyone who was almost ready to put in an offer to take another look, and you’ll draw the eyes of anyone who was also interested in getting a deal.

You’re Not Marketing a Quirky Feature Quite Right

Many homes have something that isn’t preferable – 5 bedrooms with only one bathroom? – or just unusual – small house with a three car garage. Make sure that anything that would turn away some buyers is marketed in a positive context, with the potential for where a new bathroom could go or how part of the giant garage could be turned into semi-finished living space.

Something is Throwing Off the Curb Appeal

Before you make any huge changes, have a friend or family member come pretend to be a buyer and see if they notice any bad first impressions when they pull up to the house. Anything from landscaping to paint to a few untidy items nearby can be enough to put a bad taste in a buyer’s mouth, so make sure all those issues are resolved before assuming that there’s a deeper problem!