Selling our house

I just had another thought about photos. I have noticed on rightmove etc that photos are stretched to make the rooms look spacious which only leads to disappointment.
It might be an idea to get the photos taken on a beautiful day showing the house at its best.
Looking in estate agents windows today, there are still photos of snow and ice!
My DS had to make his agent redo the online brochure as it didn't make the house look appealing. It worked for him and he got his first offer.

We have been on the market 9 months. In our area though they are digging up the lovely green belt land and house builders are offering help to buy deals . Which does not help people with lovely houses that cannot offer deals. The right person will come along we have someone who wants ours but cannot sell theirs. We are not desperate to sell luckily so we are thinking of taking it off and try again in a couple of years when the new estates are established.

It could because London housing market is collapsing. Which is not a bad thing as massively overpriced. But knock on effect with holiday homes in Cornwall etc. Hold your nerve. If it’s a nice house, it will sell.

Thank you for the comments. No, it isn't a holiday cottage. There is a bus service and a train five minutes drive away. We've done lots of decluttering. I think we just need to be patient. If I can find out how to do a link I will. The agents give us feedback and email feedback after each viewing. I have some nice camellias to put out tomorrow.

Three weeks is very early days. Things are just picking up in the property market in April.
Two of my daughters are trying to sell at the moment. They both received full asking price offers this week, one after a week on the market the other after two months.
One daughter and husband made an appointment to see a house last Monday, the day it came on the market, by the next day (before they had seen it) it had been sold to a cash buyer!
The property market is very unpredictable. They make it look like an easy money spinner on some TV programmes!
Your cottage sounds lovely, a bit of patience and some luck and you’ll find the right buyer.

Can you put a link up?

When you say quirky is it cluttered? Many people are put off by cluttered rooms as they look very small. Might be worth decluttering. I would not have thought the garden is putting people off by being too big. Maybe the cottage is too small? 3 weeks is not long.

Only 3 weeks. Our house was on the market for 5 years before it sold at a much reduced price!

Has anyone mentioned Pets? I'd be very put off by pets smells....

We had a converted stables in Chester and it took two years to sell. We had 85 viewings in that time. It got so bad with nosey people that I felt like charging admission
Just remember that YOU liked it enough to buy it in the first place, so there will be someone out there who will like it too!

I would normally agree with those who say you should insist your agent only sends people who are in a position to proceed but a house near us recently sold to someone who had not yet even put their house on the market. They wanted it so badly that they put their house up for sale at a low price and it sold quickly.

Too soon to worry but keep on at the agents to make sure they catch the ones who are interested. If there are others locally on the market they might be inclined to steer them towards properties which have sat for ages.

I'm no expert and I think you've had good advice but certainly bad photos can be a turn off. Looks like you've had loads of viewers. It sounds lovely btw and I would look at it too if I was in the area.

We once sold a house when we'd all but given up and stopped bothering with fresh flowers, the smell of new bread and coffee. We were in our jammies and someone knocked because they saw the sign and had been looking at another house in the street. They bought ours!.

rubysong,

We have moved many times and sold a lot of properties over the years. Best approach is to pretend it's someone else's house. Put yourself in the place of a would be buyer and re-assess from there. For this exercise you must be objective and brutally honest with yourselves.

Momentum is everything especially in a sluggish market. Initial foot traffic is the usual lot of people who are in the market for a house at a given time (hence the high volume of 'walk throughs'). In bad markets, some unscrupulous realtors will even bring other realtors just to show a good turnout. A good realtor can identify potential pitfalls prior to the first showing and will present you with strategies so your house presents in the best way possible.

Ask your realtor which one of his/her clients showed more than a passing interest. Who, if anyone has mentioned coming back for a second look? If the answer is no, then something is amiss. If there is a problem with your house, you need to find out what that is ASAP. If it can't be fixed, then you need to reconsider your asking price.

Selling real estate is also about good timing and momentum. When a property languishes for months, people get the impression something is wrong with it, hence its value dimishes.

Three weeks is still early! You still have time to overcome potential objections from buyers. For example, instead of lowering your asking price, why not offer to 'sweeten' the transaction with a trade off (i.e. offer to subsidize the cost of new steps along that steep path)?

Remember, also that it all boils down to one person......the one who is going to buy your house!

Best of luck to you!

Not many diffusers though.rubysong When we were house hunting we were knocked back by the scent in some houses. What were they trying to hide?
Good luck, I'm sure you will sell soon

I would say that 3 weeks isn't long to have a house on the market but if you've had 20 viewings that is quite substantial in a short space of time. (I work for a firm of Solicitors doing residential conveyancing!) Your estate agents are really the ones who should be helping you here, if you've had 20 viewings you should be getting feedback from each one. If prospective purchasers aren't putting an offer in why not? What is putting people off? Is there off road parking or is this a problem? When selling one of our houses we had all sorts of people turn up to view from whom the property was totally unsuitable. Ask that your agents only send people to view with a genuine interest in the property. At the end of it all, your agents will be getting a substantial amount of money for selling your property, make them work for it!

Your cottage sounds lovely. I would not worry yet, it’s early days and you’ve already had a lot of interest.

I moved last year so it is still fresh in my mind. 3 weeks is nothing, it took us 2years and six months! Ignore comments made, if they don’t want it they have to think of something to say and if you take it to heart you’ll soon get down in the dumps. You loved the cottage when you bought it and someone else will too. A couple of things that put us off when viewing to buy were any smells- so have some diffusers in place and secondly, when the agents photographs made the place look twice the size- disappoints before you’ve even looked. Good luck, it will sell eventually.

I sold last year in the dreary winter in 5 days. My advice apart from spend money on any jobs that need doing is clear EVERYTHING away. You declutter then ask a friend to come in and be ruthless. Don't even leave out your toaster! Put all your photos away and niknacs...take up rugs as it makes the rooms look smaller. I left it to my agent to show people around and made sure I left the radio on quietly and had some electric aromatherapy oils things going. He arranged for 2 days of viewing with people booked in one after the other so they saw other people interested! Put some lovely Spring flowering tubs by the door and buy a new door mat so everything looks fresh. Good luck.

It took a year to sell my mid terrace house in Dover - even though it was freshly decorated in neutral colours and had a new kitchen/bathroom and gas boiler installed just before I had to put it up for sale. Had lots of viewings but I asked the Estate Agent to ask for feedback, found out that lack of parking (on street only) and the rear garden (on three levels due to us being on a hill) were things that people were put off by. Might be worth asking your estate agent to ask for feedback too?

Estate agents are way of offending, tell them you are not sentimentally attached to the property and would welcome their honest opinion about what you can do to make it more salable.

We took ours off the market last year because life was just too difficult and we were not happy with the agent. It is about to go back on the market but this time we have written the blurb so that anyone seeing it on Rightmove will know what to expect and we hopefully won't get the same rubbish reasons why people didn't want to buy.

Do check the blurb very carefully and see what sort of person it might attract. The bit that comes at the top on RM is most important. Last year ours mentioned an en-suite but no other bathroom and had our EPC as D when it was actually C. Agent changed it in the paper but not RM or their window. If felt as if we had to continually check up on them.

I think you need to be patient and give it more than 3 weeks!
Our lovely place in Bath has been on the market with various agents, but with very few viewings for over a year. It is priced correctly and well presented. It is early days for you but I sympathise. It is so frustrating to put future plans on hold indefinitely pending some progress.

ruby song.....I’ve assumed, and maybe quite wrongly that this is a holiday home.?. Is it, or is it you’re main residence?.

Very early in the year for Cornwall, wait until after witsun and I bet it will fly

Have you got a link to the ad?

Your cottage sounds lovely and I'd buy it if I could!
I think three weeks is too soon to start worrying. It took me 18 months to sell my last house. All you can do is make it look inviting and as tidy as possible. Good luck, it is stressful trying to sell property.