Pictures.  Some say they are worth a thousand words.  In real estate, they can be worth thousands of dollars.  They make the difference between getting showings from a few buyers who see your house online and getting showings from EVERY buyer.

See, few of today’s buyers will give your house the benefit of the doubt when they see it online.  I’ve had people not want to see a house because there were not enough pictures online-not enough info to decide if it was worth seeing or not.  I’ve also had people not want to see a house at all based on bad pictures.  The house might have been okay, but bad photography killed any chance of a showing.  My favorite example of this is a client who debated for over a week if she wanted to go see a certain house in a neighborhood she liked……which was a 15 minute drive from where she lived.  That seller lost a showing from somebody who wouldn’t make a 30 minute round trip to see if this house could have been “The” one…..that’s just how buyer’s are these days!

So what is a seller to do?  What I do has been pretty successful for me so far.  I use a professional photographer.  Everytime I meet her at a new listing, she alwaaaaaaaays like to pick on me for micromanaging her.  I am amazed she still answers the phone for me.  Before we meet, I try to think about how I want the house presented online.  I always like to show as much open space as possible.  A wide angle lense helps with that.  I often see pictures online where it take 2-3 shots to get what one shot with a wide angle lense can accomplish.  If there are any interesting details in the house, I have her get a close up shot.  Tiled backsplash?  Fancy faucet?  Exotic hardwood?  All get their own picture in addition to any taken of the room they are in.

The order of the pictures is important too.  Today’s buyers get bored easy.  If they see two or three pictures they don’t like, it is over.  They hit the back button and move on to the next house in their search results.  Gone.  Your house is forgotten.  I like to make a cup of coffee and look slowly through the pictures several times to get a feel for the best way to organize and present them.  I usually make the lead picture whichever one really popped to me.  That is the one picture you see that forces a buyer to decide if they want to quit strolling through listings and see the detail of your house.  If the house stays on the market long enough, I mix the order up so it doesn’t look stale to buyer’s agents who may have seen the listing when it was new on the market.  I then order the pictures from most interesting to least.  Secondary bedrooms are usually at the end of the order.  Sometimes if the house has a killer backyard, I may make that the 2nd picture before going to the inside ones just to keep the buyers interested.  People are into kitchens and baths, so I try to get those in pretty early.  Since a wide angle camera was used, the buyers can often figure out the layout of the house.  I’ll add commentary to each picture to help them out….something like “See that door on the left?  That is the HUUUGE pantry that you’ll see next!”

I’m not afraid to delete a picture.  Not all pictures are the most flattering.   That is why I have my photographer take pictures from every angle of the rooms.  If one doesn’t look as good as the other, it is trashed.  If one shot makes the room look too narrow or too small…trash.  I do all that because I don’t want to let any buyer have a reason not to come see your house.

Here is something else to remember.  The goal of the pictures and any marketing ISN’T to sell the house.  The goal is just to get buyers to come see it in person.  There is no need for 80 pictures of a 2000 square foot house or to describe every detail of every element of the house.   Just as too little info can turn people off from seeing the house, too much info can give people more things to possibly not like.

I’LL TALK ABOUT THE MARKETING REMARKS NEXT IN THIS SERIES 🙂

One of my favorite parts of listing a house is writing the marketing remarks and organizing the pictures.  I know I’ve got to keep it fun for a buyer to keep their interest or they just hit the back button and move on to the next one.  That’s why I organize the pictures from the best to the least rather than just dump them online in the order they were taken.

I recently picked up a listing that was referred to me from another client who has sold two houses with me…..I think this client thinks I am more of a magician than a realtor since I sold both houses in a terrible market and did it pretty quickly.

The new listing had been on the market right before I got it and received little interest from buyers.   Hard to believe since it is a beautifully decorated move-in ready house….they kind that you wish you could get your own house to look like!!  It also has the absolute best lot in the whole neighborhood:  At the end of a cul-de-sac backing to a farm.  Only problem is, the last agent didn’t really do much to let a buyer know all this.  It was as if there was just a template used  to market the house.  The problem with template type marketing is that it just doesn’t stand out, and you end up losing the soul of the house trying to squeeze it in the template.

They had 2 showings in 30 days during the last listing period.  I’ve had it on the market 11 days and had 3 showing and have two more already scheduled for this week.  We also got an offer on it last night that may (or many not) work out.  Just a few grand apart.  Crazy thing is that I told these sellers not to expect too much action since we put in on the market between Thanksgiving and Christmas, which usually is a pretty slow time of the year.

It’s the same house, what made the difference?  Marketing.  Most listing agents think like a seller.  I just try to think like a buyer.  A buyer is online asking each house they see “Why should I come see you?”  I just try to answer that question for them.

Use to be my thought on price reductions was to drop the price enough to attract a new pool of buyers to the house.  I use to tell my clients that what we want to do is lower it 2-3% at a time so that we’d lower the price to the high range of the buyers who were looking at cheaper houses.  Always worked.  Always made sense.  Now, about the only time I suggest a big price drop is if I did something like list it for what the seller wanted and wait for them to realize it was too high.  Some sellers are funny.  You can’t tell them what their house is worth…they just have to find out for themselves, and that is how you have to do it.

Why the change?  The market.  It is improving.  In a flat market, it is sooooo easy to figure out the right price.  When I got into real estate, prices were going up.  Before you’d list a house, you’d look at the comps and ADD 2-3%.  Then as the market declined, you’d look at the comps and list for just a bit less to stay ahead of the flatulence from the busted bubble.

So, now I’m taking the approach that I want to reduce it slowly, but regularly.  The forces of supply and demand might just make the market value vary like fresh seafood at Red Lobster.  I’ve seen some houses sell for far more than I thought they were worth just because there are more buyers for a particular property than there are houses available.  Case in point is a house in The Home Place.  It sold brand spanking new in 2009 for $176k.  It just closed last week for $180k.  Almost nobody is getting more for their house than they paid for it, yet alone a house that was brand new 3 years ago.  Another one in Andover Hills sold a few years ago for $205.5k.  It had been on the market for a long time.  Then, the folks that bought it just sold it for $219k.  I had been it in before they bought it.  Other than their furniture and paint, it was the same house.  I even checked the disclosure to see if they had done anything like put on a new roof or new HVAC.  Nope, still original.  See, more buyers for houses in Andover brought the price up!

This plan is nothing new really, banks have been doing it with their foreclosures for a while now.  For the banks, it is a way of getting top dollar for their properties.  They start high, reduce it every 2-4 weeks by the same amount until they have offers.   Other agents have used small price reductions to make their listing reappear in saved searches and land on the home page of LBAR when realtors log in.  It is a cheap way of buying exposure.  They don’t do that as much now because they can just delete the listing and make it pop back up on the MLS as a “New Listing.”  See, back several years ago, agents didn’t have easy access to deleting the listings and LBAR charged cash money to do it for you….but the agent could do a tiny price reduction pretty easily and for free!

Okay, I can hear you thinking “Won’t buyers and their realtors notice the price reductions happen on a regular basis and just wait until I practically give my house away?”  From what I have seen, the answer is no.  It is kind of like a reverse auction really.  Even if they notice the price going down systematically by small amounts, they’ll also be afraid that somebody else might beat them to it before the next price reduction.  It can create a sense of urgency.