No one is immune from mistakes, especially a person who does not have the necessary skills and knowledge in a specific area. Owning a house and managing it wisely are by no means synonymous concepts. Successful investors and entrepreneurs turn to real estate agencies not so much to save time, but for their safety. Issues of purchase and sale are clearly not an area in which you can completely rely on yourself. Of course, those who don’t take risks don’t drink champagne. But, as a rule, they only learn from their own mistakes...
Non-obvious seller mistakes
It’s worth starting with the most obvious one – money. The size of your profit depends on several factors at once: trends in the market, the location and size of your property, the availability of repairs and their quality, and most importantly, on your ability to correctly evaluate all these aspects, not to overestimate the cost due to your master’s pride and not to underestimate it because fears that a buyer will not be found. Without proper experience, you can only rely on the prices of similar objects, without taking into account the features of your own. A professional expert will certainly know how estimate your property so that the stated figures are acceptable to both parties to the contract. Surprisingly, not only your income, but also your expenses depend on the incorrect estimated value. You will learn more about this in the next section, but for now we present to your attention other mistakes that you may make:
- a house, apartment or any other object must be prepared for viewing. The buyer gives a visual assessment and, based on it, forms an opinion about the entire object. Professionals have learned to notice small defects that need to be corrected at first glance. Spending a few hundred on minor cosmetic repairs or replacing parts can save you a few thousand in profit.
- the legal side includes drawing up and checking a considerable pile of documents. Power of attorney, inheritance, co-ownership, ownership rights - in addition to the purchase and sale agreement itself, you will also need other documents, including both basic ones and those that are necessary only in specific cases. Are you sure that you are ready to retrain as a lawyer to conclude just one transaction?
- Before you sell your apartment, you need to find the right buyer. Where and how to place an ad, what photos to provide and what to write about the property - all these questions inevitably arise for the seller, and over time, more and more of them appear. Wrong advertising will doom even the best offer on the market to failure.
- guaranteed success your home you can get it from... scammers. Taking advantage of your poor knowledge, they easily win over you and provide plausible fake documents. Players in the real estate market are always on the alert, so fraud can affect you from the other side - seeing an advertisement from the owner, a potential buyer is inclined to think that it is you who are the wolf in sheep's clothing
- not exactly a scam, but still an unpleasant thing - dumping or duplication of your ad with lower prices. This is what unscrupulous realtors do, who seek to attract the attention of clients with a beautiful picture and then offer them a similar property from their database.
If this list of errors is not enough, we can provide you with another one. Any contract begins with communication. A real estate expert carries behind him not only a wealth of knowledge about the market, but also the skills of public speaking, persuasion, and building trusting communication. Understanding the client’s psychology sometimes plays a key role in the work of a realtor. Buying real estate is accompanied by large expenses and imposes considerable responsibility on everyone who takes part in this process. Therefore, it is important to be able to win over a person and convince him of the correctness of the decision being made.
Why should the seller pay?
It is better to learn about taxes from us than from intractable employees of the relevant service. Previously, we introduced you to the list of additional expenses that await the buyer. But the seller will also have to pay for the opportunity to earn money, no matter how strange it may sound. We recommend that you accept your fate and prepare for everything in advance because without paying the necessary taxes, the notary will not be able to confirm the legality of the transaction, and therefore it will never take place. Although this section did not start off as happy, the sales tax is not as scary as we make it out to be. In total, you won't have to pay that much. The joy of a successfully closed deal completely compensates for minor expenses:
- The state duty is 1% of the cost of the apartment, but there are some nuances... The result of the expert assessment may not always coincide with the amount that satisfied both parties to the contract. If you managed to sell your apartment for more, we can only sincerely congratulate you. But if the official price turns out to be lower than the estimated value, there is little joy and not only because of this fact itself - you will still have to pay tax on the larger of the indicated amounts
- Quite recent innovations also do not play into your hands - now military duty must be paid not only to the buyer, but also to the seller. Its size, as in the previous case, depends on the value of the property and is 1,5% of your profit. But, again, there are some nuances - the additional fee applies only to those who are obliged to pay personal income tax
- This same tax for individuals does not apply to everyone, so do not rush to count out the bills. You will only have to face it in a few cases: a) this year you have already managed to sell your other real estate (the tax rate is 5%); b) you hastened to say goodbye to the property without having lived with it for 3 years (tax rate – 5%)
It is worth noting that each tax has its own exceptions to the rules and special categories of the population who are bypassed by additional expenses.
As you can see, speaking about possible difficulties in independently conducting all processes associated with sale of an apartment or at home, we did not want to scare, but to warn. We hope that the knowledge we shared with you will help you avoid mistakes. We recommend not to test the patience of capricious luck and seek help from trusted to experts. With us, purchasing and selling real estate takes on a completely different meaning and turns from a labor-intensive process into a short moment from the first meeting with a realtor to the last signature on the contract.
