What actually makes a house sell quickly

People search for the agent who will sell their house fastest, which assumes the agent is the variable. Usually the agent is not the variable. The price is.

The first fortnight does most of the work

When a property is first listed it is shown to everybody already looking in that area and that price bracket. That audience has been waiting, it looks immediately, and it is the largest audience the property will ever have at once.

After that initial burst, you are relying on new buyers entering the market, which is a slower trickle. This is why a property that is priced to sell tends to go quickly and one that is not tends to sit, and why a reduction after three months rarely recreates the attention the launch had.

The practical consequence: the price at launch matters far more than the price you would accept. Being ambitious for the first fortnight is the most expensive form of optimism in the whole process.

The photographs are the viewing

Almost everybody sees your home as a thumbnail on a phone before they see it in person. The first photograph decides whether there is ever a second look. It is worth more attention than almost anything else you could do.

Practical things that help: daylight rather than lamps, curtains fully open, cars off the drive, bins out of shot, and the front of the house photographed on a day when the light is on the front of the house. If the exterior faces north, morning or evening light is kinder than midday.

Fixing what a buyer will notice in ten seconds

You do not need to redecorate. You do need to remove the things that make a buyer start subtracting.

• Front door, path and garden. It is the first and last thing they see and it sets the reading for everything after it.
• Smell. You cannot smell your own house. Ask somebody who does not live there.
• Clutter on surfaces, which makes rooms read as smaller than they measure.
• The small broken thing you stopped noticing two years ago. A buyer notices it in the first minute and wonders what else there is.

Being ready is underrated

A sale can be agreed quickly and still take months, and much of that delay is paperwork that could have been started earlier. Instructing a solicitor before you have an offer, and getting the property information forms filled in while you wait, removes weeks from the back end. If the property is leasehold, requesting the management pack early is one of the highest value things you can do, because it is frequently the slowest item in the whole chain.

Being flexible about viewings

The buyer who can only come at six on a Thursday is not less serious than the one who can come on a Saturday morning. Refusing evenings and Sundays narrows the audience at exactly the point when the audience is at its largest.

What does not work

Instructing more agents rarely produces more buyers, because they are all showing the same property to the same audience through the same portals. What it usually produces is a higher fee and a property that appears repeatedly in a search, which reads as one that is struggling.

What we would say

Get the price right at launch and the photographs right before it. Almost everything else is a rounding error next to those two.