Selling a home: the sequence

Selling has the same skeleton as buying, but the effort sits in a different place. A buyer spends their energy searching and deciding. A seller spends theirs preparing, pricing and answering questions — and the answers are almost always documents.

Preparation, before anything is marketed

Almost every delay later in a sale is caused by information that could have been assembled at the start. The paperwork a purchaser's solicitor will ask for is predictable, and gathering it before marketing turns a three-week enquiry round into a three-day one. It typically includes proof of title, any lease and related management information, guarantees and warranties for past work, consents and completion certificates for structural alterations, service and maintenance records for heating and drainage, boundary information, and details of anything shared — a drive, a drain, a wall, an access.

Preparation of the building matters too, but less than people think and differently from how they think. Large speculative improvements shortly before a sale rarely return their cost. What does return is removing reasons to hesitate: fixing the things that look neglected, making rooms legible by removing enough furniture to see the floor, and ensuring the house is warm, dry and light when people walk in.

Pricing, which is the whole negotiation

The asking price is not an opening bid in a haggle. It is a filter that determines which buyers ever see the property. Set it too high and the home is shown to people looking for something larger or better, who reject it by comparison; the listing then ages, and an ageing listing invites lower offers than a fresh one at the correct figure. Set it slightly below the obvious threshold and it appears in more searches, is seen by more of the right people and attracts competing interest.

The most useful evidence for pricing is what genuinely comparable homes completed at recently, not what similar homes are currently asking. Asking prices record hope; completed prices record agreement.

Choosing between offers

The highest offer is not automatically the best one, because an offer is a proposal about money and about certainty at once. The questions that matter alongside the figure are how the buyer is funding the purchase, whether their borrowing has been agreed, whether they have sold, how many transactions sit beneath them, and what timetable they need. A slightly lower offer from a proceedable buyer with nothing beneath them is frequently worth more than a higher one that depends on three other households.

The middle stretch

Once an offer is accepted, the seller's job becomes answering. Enquiries arrive in batches, and each unanswered one holds up the whole file. Where the honest answer is that a document does not exist — a consent that was never obtained, a guarantee that has been lost — saying so quickly is far better than a long silence, because there are established routes for dealing with a known gap and none for dealing with an unexplained delay.

If a survey raises something

A buyer's survey will find defects. All buildings have them, and a report that found none would be more worrying than one that found several. The question is only whether what was found was already reflected in the price. When a renegotiation follows, it is usually resolved by a quotation: an actual costed figure for putting the item right narrows an argument that will otherwise run on feelings.

To exchange and completion

The final stage is coordination. A date has to suit every household in the chain, removals have to be booked, meter readings taken, keys accounted for and utilities and local authorities told. It is administratively dull and it is the part most likely to be left too late, because by then everyone has been concentrating on the sale for months and has stopped thinking about the move.