When your home goes on the market there are basically only three things that happen during the marketing period. Depending on which of the three categories your home fits into, you can diagnose and predict your chances of selling. 1. Your home is almost never shown and you get no offers. This is serious! *Your agent is failing to make the home available or failing to promote the home and nobody knows it is for sale. *Your home is situated in a very unmarketable location. On a busy street, in an industrial zone, next to the local power plant, etc. *Your home is grossly over-priced for the neighborhood. You normally can’t sell a home priced thousands of dollars higher than other similar homes in the same neighborhood. Today’s buyers do lots of comparison shopping. You can’t fool them. 2. Your home is shown quite often (10-20 times per month), but you receive no offers. This indicates some minor problem which can usually be easily cured. This is where honest feedback on what the buyers are thinking is critical. Buyers won’t normally tell the owner of a home that they think something is wrong with the home. They’re usually too polite. We can only tell you what we do in this case: We aggressively pursue all agents who have shown our listings until we get feedback from them. They’re more likely to tell us, the listing agents, that something turned their buyer off. We provide weekly, written, feedback-reports to our sellers. If we see a consensus of opinion from several agents, this lets us know what needs to be done to improve the home’s chances. There are usually only two types of problems. *Some cosmetic feature of your home does not excite buyers. Perhaps it needs new paint or new carpet. These are easily fixable. *The home is slightly overpriced compared to the competition. Buyers are looking but then buying the competition which is perceived as being a better bargain. Usually a small price reduction will cure this problem. We know what sized price reductions are needed in our market from our extensive experience. How much you should reduce your asking price depends on the price range of your home and your local market. 3. Your home is shown often and you receive offers. This is what we all hope will happen. This happens when the home competes well against the other homes on the market. While no one can predict how many buyers will have to look at your home before it sells, if you are in this position, you can be assured that your home will ultimately sell. It might be the 1st or the 51st buyer through the door, but you’ve done everything correctly and you’ll benefit. Placing our seller and their homes in this position is the single biggest step in marketing and it is largely responsible for our personal success in representing sellers. We usually know within 3 or 4 weeks whether or not the homes we have listed are in this position. |
