Despite positive espousals from various sources concerning an increase in real estate market fortunes, it is up to each individual seller to market your home. Gone are the days of putting a sign outside of your home and sitting back on the sofa to wait for the doorbell to ring. A proactive and realistic approach is the only way for you to be successful; you need to influence all of the factors within your sphere of control to ensure you have the best chance of getting that allusive sale. To help you on this pilgrimage, I have put together some hints and tips to help you get there.

Be Realistic. The age-old real estate advice to wannabe sellers is to get real about. Before you even get to pricing, though, first you should get real about what your goals really are. Why do you want or need to sell?  And how badly - how important is it to you?  Your very next step is to look at your mortgage account statement and find out what you owe, and find out what your payoff amount would be.

Value. The price of something does not equate to its value. Value is what someone is willing to pay, and humans, being snow flake like in our individuality, put differing values on things and therefore what each of us is willing to pay for the same thing will differ. Get a reality-based idea of what your home is worth by talking with several local real estate agents who have a strong, recent track record of successfully selling homes in your area. Get real and stay there - don't fall prey to the fallacy that your home is worth more than others, for no substantive reason beyond the fact that, well, it's yours.

Know your local market.  Local blogs, websites and media outlets offer all sorts of useful advice about whether, how and when to sell your home, but there's one thing that sort of advice cannot convey: what's going on in your local market. Start talking with the real estate brokers and agents from your area who are actively blogging, listing properties and answering questions. They can give you the hyper local essentials you need to know.  Sure, it's a buyer's market globally, on average.  But if you live in Omaha, that may mean that homes sell at or near asking in 45 days or less; in Grand Cayman, your home could stay on the market 12 months and sell for 20% below asking. 

Formulate a marketing plan, this is crucial whether your selling your home through and agent or on your own. The marketing mix has more than likely changed from the last time you tried to sell anything. You should have an open house, advertise in the press, fliers, radio adverts and the usual mediums that you are accustomed to. A global recession does not help things either but here in Cayman we are seeing a new age dawn. That age being the internet, which already accounts for the majority of real estate sales or sales leads in Europe and USA. Now people are making virtual tours and videos of their properties and posting them on the web. You can reach a targeted audience on the web, people solely searching for property, you can measure in real time how many viewed your property or showed an interest and you can reach them in a cost effective manner, with the emergence of Facebook, Linked in, Twitter, Craig’s List to name a view, you can not only reach a local audience but a global one.

In essence it is not easy to sell real estate now, but you stand more of a chance of being successful if you stop bemoaning the market and start influencing the factors that you can.