sell

Common mistakes sellers make

by John Rice

Besides thinking the people on HGTV really know a lot about real estate, below are the most common ways sellers shoot themselves in the foot.  Granted, we are in a hot market and buyers are easier to please these days, but there are 228 houses in Lexington in the $100-500k range that have been on the market for more than 60 days…..not EVERY house in town is selling in multiple offers the first day on the market.

Here goes:

1. When sellers don’t finish moving out. If you are no longer living in the house, get ALL of your stuff out. You know you are going to have to do it anyway, right? It will make your house look better. Better looking houses sell quicker. Time is money.

2. When you don’t paint because you think you are somehow doing the buyer a favor by leaving it up to them to paint. I hear this a lot: “I don’t know what color the buyer will like and most buyers always paint after they move in anyway.” I can tell you that bad paint keeps a buyer from making an offer. If it doesn’t look good, they don’t want it. Fresh neutral paint is the cheapest thing you can do you make your house easy for a buyer to say YES to.

3. Leaving a lot of room for negotiating. An over inflated price usually drives buyers away. I see all the time where a seller will list for far more than the house is worth and eventually sell it for a little less than it is worth. The best model is to price it right from the start. If a house has been on the market for a long time, buyers assume there is no risk of losing it so they make a low offer just to see what you will take.

4.  Not doing any obvious repairs.  As a seller, your goal is to make it easy for a buyer to say yes to your house.  You want them to be excited and fall in love.  If a buyer walks in and immediately sees work that needs done, they begin to subtract whatever they think it would cost to change it, and they usually overestimate the cost.  You want your buyer to be walking around your house falling in love with it rather than subtracting repair costs off your list price.

I hope this helps you when it is time to sell.  The worst thing that could happen if you did all of this is that you sell your house for top dollar in multiple offers the first day on the market.

Was it me or St. Joseph?

by John Rice

Benz on snow

Back when the market was terrible and buyers had a ton of choices in any price range, I said that you had to have the online presentation perfect because buyers would not take the time to come see the house if you didn’t.  I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I also thought that if we ever had a hot seller’s market again that buyers would come see any house that was in an area they liked, regardless of the presentation.  I was wrong.

Here we are in such a market.  Good houses are selling very fast.  Overpriced houses and ones poorly presented are collecting dust.  It is like buyers are not willing to go backwards in their searches.  Like they see a new listing and either go see it or totally forget it forever.  I think some of this is because buyers are setting up saved searches on sites like Zillow or realtor.com.  They are only really looking at the new listings.  In the old days, you know, around 2011, people would scroll through all the listings everyday just to see the new listings.  You really need a price reduction or status change to get back in their portals.

Here is an example:  I’ve got a listing that we put on the market during all the snow we had this past winter.  The seller wanted me to wait to update the pictures until a certain tree was in bloom.  We hardly had any showing since the outside picture had snow on the ground.  This house has an amazing backyard.  Mentioning it in the marketing remarks did not matter much without a picture to show it.  The picture above was taken the day my photographer did the shoot.  There was nowhere to park so I made my own space.  Once the snow melted, we had maybe 3 showings in 45 days.

Finally, the seller agreed that it was time to update the picture.  The tree had pushed out it’s blooms.  I got my photographer back out.  I deleted the listing and put it back on as a new listing with the new pictures.  That was less than 48 hours ago and I have confirmed 4 showings since then.

The seller, a good friend of mine, credits the statue of Saint Joseph she buried.  I get no respect ;-(

Reading the tea leaves when your house isn’t selling

by John Rice

House not selling? Wondering how to interpret what is going on? Here are a few of my thoughts on some common situations. The following assumes your house is being presented well online with plenty of good pictures and marketing remarks that describe it with more than trendy generic AI generated verbiage.

The house that gets lots of showings but no offers

Assuming that you don’t have some negative that wasn’t obvious like backing to a highway, apartments, or having an Eiffel Tower looking electrical thing in your yard, this situation simply means that the house doesn’t live up to what buyers expected. The good news with this one is that buyers think the price for what they thought the house would be is okay or else they wouldn’t come at all. The solution here is to either lower the price or improve the house so that it meets the expectations buyers have. Whichever is easiest.

I once had a condo that got tons of showings. I kept encouraging the seller to paint. Once we did, it sold. I recently had another listing that was getting tons of showings. It was a nice place, but just felt like a 15 year old house that needed a fresh vibe. The seller did some painting and replaced the flooring in all the bathrooms. As soon as it was done, it sold. Both of these places looked great online, and just needed to match what buyers thought they were getting. Both were improved for far less than the price reduction we would have needed, so both sellers actually came out better by going that route.

The house that gets no showings

This one is easy, but hard for sellers to accept. The price is too high. If a house is presented well on the MLS, and still nobody comes to see it, all you can do is lower the price. Real estate is all about price, location, and condition. You can’t change the location, but the other two you have some control over.

Also something to think about is this: If you have a $400k house and you’re asking $475k for it, buyers are comparing it to other houses that are really worth the asking price. The buyers who are going to spend what your house is really worth aren’t even going to see it since the list price is over their budget.

The house that gets the same bad feedback over and over

This is the least fun thing that can happen to a seller. I mean, they get kicked out of their house for showing after showing with no offers AND get to hear what people hate about their house.

Several years ago I had this really cool older house that had been mostly remodeled. It had the smallest living room I have ever seen……must have been the smallest anybody had ever seen since that is all I kept hearing after the showings. I’d ask for feedback and the buyer’s realtor would go on and on about how beautiful the place was, how unexpected it was to have walk-in closets in such an old house….then they would say their client wasn’t going to buy it since the living room was so small.

We tried putting in smaller scale furniture, but that didn’t help. After that, all we could do was drop the price. A price reduction opens the house up to a larger pool of buyers as well as enticing them to overlook a shortcoming if they are getting a better deal. We got that one sold too.

If you have a situation that doesn’t fit into these scenarios, give me a shout and I’ll let you know what to do.