Steps to List Your Home for Sale

Before you start looking for a home, you will need to know how much you can actually spend. The best way to do that is to get prequalified for a mortgage. To get prequalified, you need to provide some financial information to your mortgage banker. Your lender will review this information and tell you how much they can lend you. This will tell you the price range of the homes you should be looking at.

The best way to determine your home’s value is to ask a real estate agent to run a comparative market analysis (CMA). This free report compares your home to other homes near you that are comparable in size, have similar features, are currently on the market, or have sold in recent months. The comparison allows your agent to more accurately predict what buyers will pay for your home.

After you have found your home, your real estate agent will help you decide how much money you want to offer for the house, along with any conditions you want to ask for. Your agent will then present the offer to the seller's agent; the seller will either accept your offer or issue a counteroffer. You can then accept, or continue to go back and forth until you either reach a deal or decide not to accept a deal. 

After you reach an agreement, you'll make a good-faith deposit and the process then transitions into escrow. Escrow is a short period of time (often about 30 days) during which the seller takes the house off the market with the contractual expectation that you will buy it—provided you don't find any serious problems with it when you inspect it. You will then have the home inspected. Home inspection is a physical examination of the condition of a real estate property, is a necessary step to know about any problems with the property and get a look at its surroundings. If you find a serious problem with the home during the inspection, you’ll have an opportunity to back out of the deal, ask the seller to fix it, or have the seller pay for you to have it fixed.

One of the last steps before you sign your closing papers should be to walk through the property one last time. You want to make sure that no damage has occurred since your last home inspection, required fixes have been executed by the seller, no new problems are found, and nothing has been removed that is included in the purchase agreement.

Closing is the very last thing to do in the home-buying process. This is when you sign the paperwork the lender requires, pay your closing costs and collect your keys.

In terms of closing costs for buyers, these may vary depending on your loan. Your lender should tell you beforehand exactly how much you need to cover the various fees required to finalize your loan.