Marketing

Selling in 3 easy steps (& 7 things NOT to do!)

by John Rice

A life long friend of my family asked for advice on selling her daughter’s house as quickly as easily as possible. Check out what I told her about price, condition and presentation:

“Price is the most important part of selling. Price it too high and no amount of marketing or quality pictures matter….it won’t sell. Heck, I’ve even seen poorly presented listings sell quickly because the price was accurate.

If she is going to list with a realtor, she should find one that does a lot of work in her price range. Ideally an agent that works with as many buyers as sellers. Agents that primarily list houses only see one house per client. An agent that works with a lot of buyers sees multiple houses per client. Seeing more houses (especially in the same area and/or price range) make the agent familiar with what is normal and how buyers will respond to her house.

I would price it slightly above the market value so it sticks out among the competition. The trick is to know within 1% either way what the house is worth. That is the hard part really. I don’t know what the market is like where she is. Around here, we try not to price them where there is a lot of room for negotiation. In some rural counties around us it is normal for a house to sell for way less than the asking price. Here, the average list to sale price is 96.5%. I usually get about 98% of my list prices because I can ((usually)) determine what a buyer will be willing to pay.

Next is to present it well online. She will want EXCELLENT pictures. I pay for a pro. It is well worth it. People make the decision whether to see the house or skip it based on the online presentation. It has to be done well. I try to find out what is unique about the property and write my description accordingly. People want to know what is special about a house, not that it has all the same stuff as every other house in their price range. If a house doesn’t feel special in some way, then there is no reason to come see it in person.

Then there is how the house looks when they get there. The house really has to deliver what the pictures and marketing remarks promised. There is nothing worse than a buyer who is let down once they get there.

The buyer needs to see something they like as soon as they enter the house. If the buyer likes what they see once they step in, they are more forgiving of things they see later that they do not like. If they do not like something as soon as they walk in, they are critical of everything. I see this all the time with buyers.

She will need to get the house ready. I haven’t seen the house so I have no idea what it specifically needs, but a deep cleaning, fresh paint, decluttering and fixing visibly broken things really helps to catch a buyer. If she can’t deal with many issues, work on the 2-3 biggest ones. You would think buyers would balance the good and bad, but they don’t. If there are a few major negatives no amount of positives will make them pull the trigger and buy it. I tell sellers there are two ways to do this unless it is just an awesome Seller’s Market. You either put the effort in up front and can usually sell quickly, or you leave your house on short notice for multiple showings, get negative feedback and no offers, then end up doing everything you should have done in the first place.

Turn on every light in the house and open every blind unless it shows an ugly view. Take out the garbage. Keep the yard looking good. New mulch is like paint for your yard….it really gives it a fresh look. Make the front door area look good since that is what the buyers will be seeing while the agent is trying to open the lockbox.

Some things NOT to do:

1. Don’t run the dishwasher or have laundry going during a showing.

2. Don’t cook stinky food before a showing.

3. Don’t play music. Often people with fancy audio equipment want to show it off. It is distracting to have music playing in every room.

4. Don’t put out potpourri or those nasty Glade plug in air fresheners. People with asthma will leave ASAP and everybody will wonder what odor you are trying to cover.

5. Don’t stay at home for the showings. LEAVE. Buyers always feel like they are crashing into your life if you are there and they will want to leave in a hurry. It is hard for a buyer to decide if they want the house when they feel like an intruder.

6. In case she will have the house vacant while on the market, don’t do something like keep the thermostat too high or too low. People that are too hot or too cold don’t stick around much either. And don’t turn off the water. Somebody will use the restroom and won’t be able to flush.

7. If she comes home and a buyer is still there, don’t run them off. It typically means they were running late or they are past their appointment time because they love your house and don’t want to leave. Drive around until they leave or park way down the road. Just don’t make them leave……it would be like a movie scene where two people about to kiss get interrupted.

That is about it. I needed to blog today so I may just cut and past this!!”

Better to add a positive or eliminate a negative?

by John Rice

I spent like an hour in a vacant listing today. This is a nice house. The location is great. The issue is that it isn’t extremely nice and it isn’t subpar either. See, if it were extremely nice, it would have sold by now. And if were really subpar, the price would be low enough to attract a buyer looking for a deal…..but what I have is an average house with an average price for the neighborhood. Sometimes those are the toughest ones to sell.

This house could use more fresh paint. The hardware and most of the lighting are outdated. I think a lot of realtors and sellers look at a house like this and think of ways to add a WOW factor. Wow is fun. Wow also costs a lot of money. Wow also doesn’t erase the negatives. It has been my experience that you can have a lot of recent updates, but nobody will buy it if there are still several negatives. Granite won’t sell a house with stained carpet. New stainless appliances won’t make up for the worn out vinyl floor in the hall bath with the seam curling up.

So, what should you do? Focus on eliminating the worst offending negatives. Buyers come to a showing hoping this will be the house they will fall in love with. Most buyers can overlook a few minor things because they know they can’t get 100% of their dream house. As they walk around the house, the negatives slap them up one side of the face and down the other……It’s like seeing somebody dressed really well and all you can focus on is the stain on their shirt. It is just too hard for buyers to get past that. The more negatives you have, the harder it is. You don’t have to be an experienced realtor to know that, just watch an episode of House Hunters on HGTV.

Eliminating the worst negatives is by far cheaper and more effective than spending money on one Wow feature.

Will THAT house sell??

by John Rice

I’m going to let you in on a secret. Ready?

Here it is: There is a buyer for every house.

Yeah, really. No joke.

I’ve seen some unusual houses in the past 9.5 years of being a realtor. The more unusual thing is that I’ve seen a lot of them sell. I can’t tell you how many times I am scrolling through the newly sold listings and say to myself “I can’t believe somebody bought that house??”

How is this for unusual:

Half million dollar townhouses in a rural neighborhood with a view of a farm? Townhouses that are not…..in high density areas. Interesting. There are still a lot of them for sale, but many have sold. One for over a million bucks!

A duplex on a busy road that looks like a space ship? I am not making this up. I’ve actually been inside this one.

Worn out old houses that have been renovated with scrap wood and recycled bits? There is a company in town that flips a lot of old houses this way. Their end product is…..interesting. It isn’t my cup of tea, but many of my buyers have really liked them. I’ve always joked privately that these flippers raid construction site dumpsters, smoke a little crack, then devise their design. I guess I just went public with my opinion. Oh well, but the point of this post is that there is a buyer for everything. What one person sees as undesirable is the exact thing that attracts another buyer.

One of my more interesting listings was an old house, that had been made new inside, on a few acres, located on the edge of town. To complicate matters, neither the master bedroom nor master bathroom had doors. So, I needed a buyer who wanted an old house on land, that was like a new home inside and was not in the country, and who didn’t care about privacy. It took a while, but we found such a buyer, who told us at the closing they had been looking for the right house for years.

Sooooo, when I get a unique listing, I try to market what makes it unique rather than hide it…..and remind myself that it too will sell since there is a buyer for every house.

Any Realtor can sell a good house fast

by John Rice

I don’t brag when I sell a good house quickly. In a market where the best listings sell fast regardless of who the listing agent is, it is pointless…….Yes, you can have lousy pictures, generic marketing remarks and a dingbat realtor. If your house has the right location and is updated, it will sell fast these days. No point in trying to claim it as a personal victory any more.

But, what if you don’t have one of those houses? What if you get a contract really quick and your dingbat agent doesn’t know how to keep it glued together after a rough inspection, appraisal issue, or any other problem that often happens in real estate deals?

I don’t know about other agents, but these situations are what I use to test my mettle.

I just closed a deal earlier today that was a challenge. It was a great house. So great it sold the first day on the market for the full asking price. Then it fell apart due to the inspection. But guess what? I had an agent on the back burner with a buyer who wanted it. I had them write a back up offer hoping that it would encourage the primary buyer to accept my seller’s terms. They wrote it for $1000 over the asking price. When the first deal finally did fall apart, we jumped right into the new deal. Then this buyer got skiddish after the home inspection just like the first buyer. Knowing the odds of having a back up buyer for the back up buyer were slim, we had to work with this current buyer. Long story short, after a lot of negotiation and many estimates to fix a problem, we got it worked out. It was extremely volatile. I was really pretty nervous….more so than I am sure I let on to my sellers!

I got lucky though. My sellers took the advice I gave them. Sometimes people do and sometimes they don’t. It usually goes much smoother when they do. I’ve got nearly a decade of experience in walking the tight rope of getting deals to the closing table. I think I used every bit of my experience on this deal. So I will boast not about selling it so fast, but about the fact that my sellers are now moving on to where they want to be and are happy.

These sellers wished they had called me FIRST!

by John Rice

I’ve had 5 deals this year that all had something in common. I was the 2nd agent to list the houses. They did not sell the first time they were listed.

One of them was in Winchester. It is a nice house. Like most houses, it needed a few tweaks to make it sell. The previous agent didn’t offer the seller any advice. The presentation was terrible. The pictures looked like they were taken with a cell phone, then printed, scanned and uploaded. I’ve had granola bars that were less grainy.

We did some painting. Moved some furniture, replaced a counter top. I presented it well. I even raised the list price by $1000 compared to the last agent. Within 7 days, it sells.

The next one actually sold before I had time to make pictures. I got two showings on this place before I listed it just from networking. I was so relieved because I didn’t have to pay my photographer to shoot it! I listed it for $600 more than the last agent.

Another one took a while to sell since it was a unique property, but I got it done. This was an older house in an area where a lot of younger people are buying. It came across a little dated, so we spruced it up, did my old “Two Adirondack chairs and a firepit” trick in the backyard and sold it.

I sold another one by word of mouth. I was actually presenting the offer at the same time the seller was signing the listing docs.

The last one was on acreage in Jessamine Co. It was a nice house, but was presented terribly. The previous agent was so sorry she never came back to get her lockbox off their door.

All of these were sellable properties. On a couple of them, the first agent just didn’t know how to price the house. On others the first agent didn’t know how to make the house appealing both online and in person to buyers. And on all of them, according to the sellers, the first agents never gave them any feedback on why their house was not selling. All of these sellers were willing to make needed adjustments. I think it is a shame they had to suffer with their house on the market for 6 or more months like that.