Tips For Selling a Property on lake Como Italy

When you decide to sell your home on lake Como what should you do before putting it on the market?  These steps will allow you to sell your property faster and at a higher price:

1. Prepare your house for sale

• Remove clutter and depersonalize. Sometimes in the houses where nobody lives, we advise to bring away everything including the furniture and just paint the walls.
• Refresh the walls or paint them in neutral colors. 
• Make minor repairs, for example, fix the doors and fix leaky faucets.
• Keeping the lawn trimmed and the house cleaned is a must.

The state of abandonment, bad smells, dampness (even the old one, the cause of which has already been eliminated) will push the buyer away.

Photos and videos are best taken in a tidy house. It seems obvious but still often the vendors are inviting us to take pictures of the houses not in order. This is an invitation to the potential buyers to negotiate the price. 

Please consider also a possibility to involve the home stager. This is rather new profession for the Italian market but we have contacts of the local home stagers. 

2. Prepare the documents

Just consider that to get some documents from the Municipality needs weeks. 

If the buyer chooses among many similar properties on the market, he will quickly choose the one in which the transaction is safer. A sense of security is provided by a pre-prepared set of documents when there are answers to all questions of a potential buyer that can be checked providing these documents.

• What is the date of construction?
• How much is spent on heating? (for advertising, an energy certificate is required)
• What are the condominium expenses and are there any restrictions for those who rent out by weeks?
• Is property protected as a cultural heritage?

A list of documents that need to be prepared for the sale of your property in Italy please find here. 

3. Price the home correctly

The real estate market of second houses on Lake Como is characterized by a long transaction cycle, on average, from 6 to 9 months. Even the correct pricing of the property does not guarantee instant sale.

Only for unique real estates the prices are decided by the seller. George Clooney is rumored to have asked for 99 million euros for his villa Oleandra in Laglio. If you are not George Clooney, your personal pricing of the property from the position “this what I want” will cause that the property remains on the market for years, and you will lose a lot of nerves, maintenance costs, and missed other opportunities.

Proper pricing of real estate will allow you to sell with a reasonable period of sale.

4. Hire a local real estate agent

Local real estate agent

• quickly organizes the collection of necessary documents
• is always on the lake to show your property to potential buyers, also at weekends
• knows the statistics of past sales in the market which allows correctly evaluate the property
• sends your property to potential buyers who searched for similar properties earlier

5. Promptly arrange a viewing

Leave a copy of the keys to the agent for organizing the viewings, or the phone number of the authorized person who will quickly give the opportunity to show the house upon request. Potential buyers come from around the world, on weekends or holidays, and are not always ready to adjust themselves to your schedule.