The following is a guest post by Cyrus Vaghar
Five years ago, I wrote an article titled 4 Tips for Selling Your Home in Newton, MA. At the time, COVID-19 was on everyone’s mind, and the market was exceptionally strong as people fled Boston for the suburbs. Since then, it feels as though we have experienced every possible market condition, ranging from rock-bottom interest rates and surging demand to higher rates and a noticeable cooling effect.
Let’s be honest, demand in Newton has always been strong. The Greater Boston area has far more buyers than available housing supply, and people always need places to live. However, the confidence to sell your home should never lead to complacency or its dangerous cousin, arrogance. Here are some updated tips that can help you save time, potentially increase your final sale price, and make a much smoother transaction more likely than not.
Know What You Have
Your home is worth exactly what the highest bidder is willing to pay for it. But who is that highest bidder? Is it a developer, an end-user, or an investor? I have seen countless homeowners sell to developers at a steal because they did not realize the true value of their property. On the flip side, I have seen sellers with challenging lots hold out for a developer premium, convinced they were sitting on a gold mine when local zoning laws actually made a new build impossible.
Never make assumptions about your property’s potential. Start by consulting a knowledgeable real estate agent and a trusted land-use attorney. You can also take charge of the initial research yourself. Pull your public plot plan, find your deed online, review the local zoning code, and feed that information into a Large Language Model (LLM) like Gemini to get a solid baseline understanding of what you actually own.
Listen to Your Trusted Advisors
Whether it is your agent, your attorney, an appraiser, or any other professional working on your behalf, listen to the experts you hired. It sounds like a simple tip, but it is one that gets ignored far too often. Friends, extended family, real estate agents from other states, and well-meaning acquaintances constantly try to interject themselves into transactions. I recently spoke to a fellow agent who had a perfectly smooth deal completely derailed because the buyer’s family member, a lawyer based on the West Coast, tried to insert themselves into a local real estate negotiation. Stick to the professionals who actually know your local market and you are paying to represent you.
Less Furniture is More
I am reusing this tip from five years ago because it remains as relevant as ever. No, prospective buyers will not be able to see past your oversized dining room table just because you used virtual staging photos online. In almost all cases, a completely empty home is significantly easier to sell than one filled with decades worth of personal possessions.
You also need to be careful with what you leave behind. I recently showed a home where the seller had left their tax returns sitting out on a desk for everyone to see. Naturally, it completely distracted the buyers from what we were actually there to do, which was evaluate the house. When it comes to staging and presenting a home, less is always more.
If there is one overarching theme I can offer every seller, and buyer for that matter, it is to work smarter instead of harder. The digital tools available today can save you a tremendous amount of time, but always remember that the person sitting on the other side of the negotiating table has access to those exact same tools.
About the Author Cyrus Vaghar is a licensed real estate agent (License #9557783) at Coldwell Banker in Newton, Massachusetts. He is a proud member of The Vaghar Team and the founder of Find Agents Now, a national referral network powered by Coldwell Banker Realty that connects clients with top-tier, data-vetted real estate professionals across the United States.
