You may have a lot of questions when it comes to preparing a home to sell.

You first need to get all the necessary inspections; home inspection, roof inspection, and pest inspections. If you are on septic or a well, you will need those inspected.

This is very important because you want to avoid having any surprises. Surprises can be costly and can cause you to fall out of contract, and then you have to re-list, and you don't want to do that.

So, get your inspections done. Even if you're not going to do the repairs, you need to know in advance what repairs are necessary to get the home to a hundred percent market value. That's going to help you after you get your house into contract because after the house is in contract, the buyer is going to come in and do their own inspections, and based on the report they get back, they're going to come in and say, “Hey, look. We found these things that need to be repaired.” And believe me, there are going to be lots of things. That's going to give them leverage.

You didn't know that you needed all these repairs, but they do, and they came in with an offer based on no repairs needed. So now they have the leverage to ask for credits at closing. Suppose you had the inspections done and you disclosed to them all the reports along with estimates for repairs. In that case, that actually takes that their leverage away because they went into contract, knowing these things existed.