1. Price it against real comparable sales
Pricing is the single decision that determines whether your home sells, and it is the one most owners get wrong. The instinct is to start high and "leave room to negotiate." In practice a home that launches above its market lands in a dead zone: the buyers who could afford it filter past it, and the buyers browsing your actual price band never see it.
What you want is three to five genuinely comparable sales — same neighborhood, similar square footage, similar condition, closed in the last six months. Not listed, closed. Asking prices tell you what other owners hoped for; closing prices tell you what buyers paid. Adjust up or down for the obvious differences: a finished basement, a new roof, a bad layout, no off-street parking.
Watch the first two weeks closely. A listing that gets heavy view counts but no showing requests is usually priced slightly high. One that gets neither is priced well above market. Views and saves are shown on every LiNK listing precisely so you can read that signal early, while a price correction still looks like a decision rather than desperation.
Find a Richmond appraiser or valuation service →
2. Prepare and stage the house
Preparation is the highest-return work in the entire sale, and almost all of it is free. Declutter ruthlessly — buyers read a full closet as "not enough storage," not "this family owns a lot of coats." Depersonalize enough that a stranger can picture their own furniture in the room. Clean at a level you would not clean for guests, including windows, grout, and the inside of the oven.
Then fix the small things that read as neglect: a dripping tap, a sticking door, a cracked switch plate, scuffed baseboards. Individually trivial, collectively they tell a buyer the house has not been maintained — and that suspicion gets applied to the roof and the furnace too, where it costs you real money.
Staging matters most in two cases: an empty house, where buyers cannot judge scale, and an awkward layout that needs furniture to explain how the room is meant to be used. Otherwise your own furniture, thinned out, is usually enough.
Find a home stager in Richmond →
3. Get listing photography right
Photography is the one place where hiring a professional is close to mandatory. Almost every buyer meets your house as a grid of thumbnails on a phone, and the lead photo alone decides whether they tap through or scroll past. Phone photos with sloping walls, dark corners, and a toilet seat up are the most expensive money you will ever save.
A real estate photographer shoots wide but not distorted, brackets exposures so the windows aren't blown out, and knows to shoot the kitchen from the doorway rather than the corner. Expect a few hundred dollars — against a five-figure commission, it is not a close call. Ask for a floor plan and a walkthrough video in the same session if the budget allows; both cut wasted showings by letting people self-select out before they arrive.
Shoot on a bright day, with every light on, every blind open, and the cars off the driveway.
Find a real estate photographer in Richmond →
4. Write and publish the listing
A good listing description answers the questions a buyer would otherwise have to ask you. Lead with what is genuinely distinctive — the walk to the park, the south-facing garden, the year the HVAC was replaced. Skip the adjectives that appear in every listing ever written; "charming" and "must see" carry no information.
Be specific and be accurate. Square footage, lot size, year built, school zone, HOA fee, tax assessment, and the age of the roof, furnace, water heater, and appliances. Every fact you publish is one fewer round of back-and-forth, and one fewer chance for a buyer to feel misled later — which is how deals die at inspection.
Virginia requires a residential property disclosure. Complete it honestly. Concealing a known defect is not a negotiating position; it is a lawsuit that arrives after you have spent the money.
5. Market it beyond the listing
Publishing is not marketing. The listing does the heavy lifting, but the first seventy-two hours decide how much momentum you get, and momentum is what produces competing offers.
Send it directly to people who already know the house — neighbors with friends looking to move into the area are a genuinely strong channel, because they are pre-sold on the neighborhood. Post it where local people actually look. Put a sign in the yard; low-tech, still effective, still generates calls from people driving the streets they want to live on.
On LiNK, buyers who have saved searches matching your price band and neighborhood are alerted the moment you publish, which is why the listing quality in step 4 matters — the alert is only as persuasive as the photo and price attached to it.
6. Run your own showings
This is the step owners dread and it is genuinely easier than it sounds — with two caveats.
The first is safety. Never show your home to someone who has not identified themselves. Requiring a LiNK account before a showing request means every visitor is a verified user with a transaction history, not an anonymous phone number. Have someone else in the house with you. Put away jewelry, prescriptions, mail, and anything with an account number on it.
The second is restraint. Owners oversell. Let people walk the house at their own pace, answer questions directly, and resist narrating each room — buyers need quiet to imagine living somewhere. Answer honestly when asked about a flaw; every experienced buyer knows a hundred-year-old house has problems, and a straight answer buys more trust than a deflection.
Group showings into blocks rather than scattering them across the week. Several buyers seeing each other in your house is the most honest scarcity signal there is.
7. Evaluate and negotiate offers
The highest number is not always the best offer. Price is one term among several, and the others decide whether the deal actually closes.
Read the financing first. A cash buyer or one with a full underwritten pre-approval is far more certain than a higher bid resting on a pre-qualification letter. Read the contingencies next — inspection, appraisal, financing, and the increasingly common home-sale contingency, which makes your closing depend on a house you have never seen. Then read the dates: a closing timeline that matches your own move is worth real money.
When a buyer's agent is involved, their commission is now an explicit negotiation rather than an assumption baked into the listing. Decide in advance what, if anything, you will contribute, and treat it as one more term to trade against price and dates.
If the inspection turns up problems — it will — you can reduce the price, credit the buyer at closing, make the repair, or decline. Get a real quote before agreeing to a number; buyers' repair estimates run high, and a written quote from a contractor ends the argument quickly.
Find a real estate attorney to review your contract →
8. Close the sale
This is the step you should not do yourself, and the good news is that it is also the easiest one to hand off. In Virginia, settlement is conducted by a licensed settlement agent — in practice a real estate attorney or a title company. They order the title search, resolve anything the search turns up, prepare the deed, produce the settlement statement, and disburse the funds.
Between acceptance and closing, expect roughly thirty to forty-five days for a financed purchase. The appraisal happens in that window, and if it comes in below the contract price you are back in negotiation — the lender will only lend against the appraised value, so the gap has to be closed by the buyer's cash, your price, or both.
Bring government photo ID and your payoff information. Read the settlement statement before you sign it, and query anything you do not recognize — this is the last moment where a number is easy to change.
Find a closing attorney or title company in Richmond →
What this actually costs, versus a commission
A traditional sale at 5–6% on a $425,000 home costs roughly $21,000 to $25,500. Selling directly, your costs are the specific services above — photography, possibly staging, the settlement fee, and any repair credits you negotiate — plus the seller-side closing costs you would pay either way.
The honest trade is time. You are taking on pricing research, preparation, listing, marketing, showings, and negotiation. For most sellers that is a few evenings and two or three weekends, in exchange for five figures.
[ VERIFY: LiNK's own fee schedule before publishing a total or a savings figure. Commission percentages above are general market ranges, not a LiNK quote. ]