Pre-Closing Tasks When Selling Your Home

Love Selling Your Home – Week 9

This is the ninth article in the series called, Love Selling Your Home: Minimize Your Stress, Maximize Your Profit, a step-by-step guide to selling your home. This series takes you through the entire home-selling process- from finding a real estate agent to closing day.

You’re now one step closer to officially selling your home! Hooray!

Even though you have a contract with buyers, you’re not done yet.

As the saying goes, “It ain’t over ‘till it’s over,” and nothing could be truer when it comes to selling a home.

There’s a lot to get completed before closing day, and you might feel like your “to-do” list keeps growing and growing.

Keep in mind that no one wants the transaction to fall through or be delayed at this stage because of a mishap. Here’s what you need to focus on:

What to Expect

Make sure you focus on the things you need to get done in your home and also the items that need to be prepared for the actual closing. 

Most importantly, you don’t want anything missing or forgotten, especially any important paperwork when you transfer your home to the buyers.

Depending on your contract, you may or may not need to be out of your home by the agreed upon closing date. For example, we may have negotiated a “rent- back” with the buyers that allows you to stay in your home after closing for a short period of time.  

Here’s what needs to get done right before closing:

You’ll likely face three different steps in these pre-closing days – a home inspection by the buyers, any home preparation or repairs completed by you, and the gathering of any documents for the actual closing day.

Home Inspection Repairs

If you agreed to do any repairs after the buyer’s home inspection, these will need to be completed prior to the buyer’s final walk-through, which typically happens the night before or the morning of closing. 

Don’t worry, I can coordinate these for you and even suggest contracts to make the repairs.

We’ll save receipts and information on this work to prove you have satisfied any inspection agreements.

Preparing Your Home

It can be a whirlwind of activity in the final days of living in your home. However, you do want it ready for the new homeowners and not have any loose ends. You may be moving out… but they are moving in!

• Disconnect the utilities on closing date, even if you are moving out on a different day.
• Contact your insurance company to turn off your homeowner’s insurance coverage for the day of closing or you move-out date, whichever is later. If you have a rent-back agreement to stay in your “old” home after closing has occurred, be sure to be in touch with your insurance provider to let them know when your ownership has changed and you only need renters insurance as well. 
• Forward your mail with the post office. Notify any relevant parties (friends, family, accountant, financial advisor, etc) of your change of address.
• Organize any information to pass on to the new owners about the home, such as appliance information (receipts and manuals); warranties; repair records for appliances, water heater, furnace, etc.; and any contractor dates of service. This is when your home maintenance manual comes in handy!
• Collect and label all keys to every door, any mailboxes, garages, outdoor shed, etc. Plan to bring them to closing to hand over to the buyers. 
• Make sure the house is in “broom swept” condition after you move out.  Usually, the buyers will complete a walk-thru before heading over to where you’ll meet to close on the home.
• Think through any additional items you need to “turn off” for the new owner, such as Ring Doorbell monitoring if you are leaving it behind.   Another one that comes up is alarm monitoring—definitely shut that off effective the closing date!
• Be sure to turn off any automatic payments you have set up for your home such as your mortgage payments, homeowner association fees, etc.  

How to Prepare for Closing Day

• Call your mortgage company to make sure they have your new mailing address. They will need to send you loan information and the balance in your escrow account (a check!) to your new mailing address. 
• Bring information about where you’d like your proceeds from the sale to be sent to by the Title Company, etc. Typically, that means a voided check to the account you want your sale proceeds to go to.
• Bring all keys, garage clickers and house codes the new owner will need. 

I’ll be calling you a few days before closing to review your settlement statement with you and make sure the numbers all look good so we have that squared away before closing. 

The week before closing can feel stressful. There is a lot going on and you feel like you don’t want to forget a tiny detail that will “ruin” the sale. This is where I come in. I’ve got checklists to make sure nothing falls through the cracks and I’ll be sharing those with you and keeping in touch to see what I can take off your plate every step of the way.