How to Sell a Listing for an Extra 5.5%!

I made my sellers an extra 5.5% on their sales price!

Several other agents had told my clients that they couldn’t sell their home for more than $500,000!  I thought we could!  My CMA (Competitive Market Analysis) indicated that we could sell for somewhere between $500,000 & $540,000, so we listed it at $539,000 and went to work.

My team prepared our standard Big WoW Marketing Package (www.6243Rohnerville.com) and put the home on the market.  Within 2 weeks we had four showings and 2 offers. 

The first offer, from buyers in Portland & Santa Cruz, came in below $500,000.  When I presented the offer to my sellers, they wanted to know everything they could about the buyers’ interest level, and when I showed them our custom website hits by city, with Santa Cruz and Portland at #1 & #2, they realized that our buyers were very interested in their property.  We knew we had a 2^nd offer coming, so we prepared a counter offer at $535,000 and waited. 

When our 2^nd offer came in the next day under $500,000 as well, we decided to continue with our counter offer to buyer #1, and let them know that we had received a 2^nd offer.  When our first buyers heard that there was another offer on the table, they couldn’t sign our counter offer fast enough!  We opened escrow, and after our inspection period and some negotiations for repairs, we closed escrow at $527,500!

After the initial photos and the placing of a home in the MLS, most agents rely on the price reduction as their main tool to sell a home.  Hence, most agents thought this particular home would sell for under $500,000.  By engaging the buyers’ hearts and minds with our Big WoW Marketing Package, we were able to coax an additional $27,500 out of their pocket!  That’s an additional 5.5% of the expected value of the home!

So if you truly want top dollar when you sell your home, Big Wow Marketing is the ticket!  Obviously, I can’t guarantee you a specific sales price, but I can guarantee you the best marketing available in the real estate industry today!  And it won’t cost you a penny extra!

Is Print Advertising Dying?

One of the hot questions in real estate is this: “Is print advertising dying?” While many think so, I don’t. What is dying is “traditional” advertising. What’s the difference?

Traditional advertising is more of a mindset rather than a medium. Take the standard glossy real estate magazine. It will have 48 pages of ads from different Realtors, each page filled with a small photo of a home and 20 words or so of text. The debate rages about whether addresses should be added or withheld in order to get the buyer prospect to call the Realtor. Can a small photo and 20 words of text, address or not, really help to sell a house?

Similarly, many agents use a local real estate cable channel to advertise their listings. Ours uses 3 photos and a 21 second voiceover. Certainly 3 photos are better than 1, but could you adequately describe your home in those confines?

I practice “Non-Traditional Traditional Marketing,” a concept I’ve developed to use traditional media in a non-traditional way. With the advent of the internet, I can use a traditional newspaper ad, a Home Magazine ad, or a real estate cable ad to direct potential buyers to a custom website of your home, where we have all the time and space and photos and floor plans and virtual tours and voice-overs…anything we want to tell buyers about your home, we can tell them! And all beginning with one photo, a couple of selling features, and a web address in a print or broadcast advertisement. Heck, I can put more information about your home, via a web site address, on the back of a business card than a “traditional” Realtor can put in a full page magazine ad!

So the question is, “What kind of mindset do you have?” Are you happy with “traditional” real estate marketing, or do you and your home deserve cutting edge, “Extreme Marketing?” I’d love to visit with you and share more of the difference.

Virtual Tours Help Sell Homes

“Wow!” I regularly hear clients say that when I show them a virtual tour of one of my listings, yet I’m surprised that so few Realtors use them. They’re relatively cheap, easy to produce, provide tons of info to potential buyers, and wow potential sellers. And the bottom line – they help sell a house.
Through advanced computer software, I can take a series of photos and stitch them together to make a panorama of a home, up to 360°. I can link these panoramas together using hot spots to enable buyers to walk through a home on their computers any time of the day or night.

Normally I will make a panorama of the front of a home, and put a hot spot on the front door. That hot spot will be linked to another panorama taken just inside the front door, with hot spots on it linked to each of the doorways seen from there. Buyers can click on the hot spot to the living room and see a panorama. Then they can click the hot spot in the opposite corner, walk across the living room, and look back across to where they were. They can click on the hotspot that leads through the door to the dining room, or they can go back through the front door back outside the home. In this manner, buyers can virtually walk through an entire house on their own computer, from the comfort of their own homes any time, day or night, from anywhere in the world!  (See here for an example: http://www.visualtour.com/applets/flashviewer2/viewer.asp?t=1965973&sk=30)

I have taken virtual tours of neighborhoods so that prospective buyers can “walk through” the neighborhood to see if it suits their tastes. With large acreages, I will make virtual tours from each of the property corners or other property landmarks so potential buyers can “walk the property.” I can even take vertical tours of features like stone mantles, vaulted ceilings, or redwood trees in the yard.  (See here for an example:  http://www.visualtour.com/applets/flashviewer2/viewer.asp?t=1423875&sk=30&dm=290barley.com)

The primary benefit of virtual tours is that potential buyers get a very clear view of the look and layout of a home any time and from anywhere they want. Secondarily, I have the ability to “show” a home without my sellers having to spend hours cleaning it and getting it ready to show. The actual showings we receive are from people that have already walked through a home virtually, have liked what they have seen, and are ready to see if it looks as good in person as it does on the computer. I’ve actually spoken to one client who found his home through web searches, and didn’t look at any listings that didn’t have virtual tours. So when you decide to list your home, make sure you demand virtual tours from your agent. Your buyers will love you for it.