5 Tips to Sell Your Home In a Hot Real Estate Market Javascript must be enabled to use this site. Please enable Javascript in your browser and try again. × Search search POPULAR SEARCHES SUGGESTED LINKS Join AARP for just $9 per year when you sign up for a 5-year term. Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. Leaving AARP.org Website You are now leaving AARP.org and going to a website that is not operated by AARP. A different privacy policy and terms of service will apply.

5 Tips to Sell Your Home for Top Dollar

How to get the best price for your house when you downsize

E+ / Getty Images Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know just how red hot the housing market has been of late. The — half are higher, half are lower — is $375,300, according to the National Association of Realtors, up 15 percent from a year earlier. It’s hard not to think about taking some profits and retiring to a smaller and less costly home.
Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. If you’re thinking of selling your house, May is the best month to list it, according to ATTOM Data Solutions, a real estate research firm, followed by June and July . You’ll find more interested buyers in those months and, potentially, more lucrative bids. The worst months to put a house on the market: December and October. For many homeowners, the decision to sell is typically followed by thousands of dollars of updates so the new homeowner can enjoy things you’ve denied yourself, such as a new kitchen floor or a deck that doesn’t have a raccoon family underneath. This is not altruism: You’re hoping that shining up the place will bring a higher price. Flowers & Gifts 25% off sitewide and 30% off select items See more Flowers & Gifts offers > And that’s a good instinct. But the question is: What can you do to ? And what else can you do to get top dollar for your house? Here are five steps to consider taking:

1 Figure out what it s worth

A real estate agent can show you recent selling prices of comparable homes. But it doesn’t hurt to look around yourself, just so you both can have a similar starting point for setting a sale price. You can find current asking prices for homes on a number of websites, such as Zillow and Opendoor. Bear in mind that these are what owners want to get for their houses, not necessarily what they will get. A better method is to look at recent sales prices, which you can typically get from local government websites or the newspaper. You may have to pay capital gains taxes on the profit from the sale of your main home, but only if you make a bundle. Single individuals can keep up to $250,000 of the gain on the sale of their houses tax-free; married folks can keep $500,000 of the gain. AARP Membership — $12 for your first year when you sign up for Automatic Renewal Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. , either. If you’re planning on downsizing for retirement, get cracking. Start with the easy decisions: If you’re going from a four-bedroom ranch to a two-bedroom condo, you’ve got two rooms (at least) of furniture to dispose of as well as lawn mowers and dozens of yard tools. Then move on to the harder stuff: Your grandfather’s stuffed moose head, your kids’ trophies and that lamp your spouse loves but you loathe. You might consider hiring an estate agent to help you select what you want and sell the things you don’t. “People think of an estate sale when somebody dies,” says Bob Lang, president of Blue Moon Estate Sales. “That’s a very common mistake. Estate sales are good way to help people downsize.”

3 Depersonalize

Sure, you’re daring with paint, and those green accent blocks in the family room are the talk of the neighborhood. To a buyer, however, those walls say, “You’ve got a big paint job ahead of you.” Political paraphernalia? Take it off the mantle and put it in a drawer somewhere. And doesn’t everyone love the Mets? Why, no. No, they don’t.

4 Make strategic home improvements

According to Remodeling magazine’s 2022 “Cost vs. Value” report, you don’t have to add another wing to the house to improve its value. Top on the list of : a new garage door. Real estate agents often talk about a house’s “curb appeal” — how it looks as customers first pull up. A tattered garage door does not have a lot of curb appeal. Big remodeling jobs are a gamble. You might love an ultramodern kitchen with gleaming white marble counters; buyers might like something a bit more rustic. You might be wiser adding a neutral shade of paint and let your buyer do the remodeling. A major kitchen remodel was near the bottom of Remodeling’s resale value list; only bathroom additions and master suite additions were lower. AARP Membership — $12 for your first year when you sign up for Automatic Renewal Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. More on money AARP Membership — $12 for your first year when you sign up for Automatic Renewal Get instant access to members-only products and hundreds of discounts, a free second membership, and a subscription to AARP the Magazine. AARP VALUE & MEMBER BENEFITS See more Health & Wellness offers > See more Flights & Vacation Packages offers > See more Finances offers > See more Health & Wellness offers > SAVE MONEY WITH THESE LIMITED-TIME OFFERS