Selling A Home?
Straight Talk About Selling Your Home!
This page looks long but if you are thinking about selling your home, this may be the single most important page you have found or will find on the Internet. Take 5 minutes and you will be in a position to save thousands of your equity.
Unfortunately for sellers, agents receive the same basic training and attend the same seminars on how to sell homes. There are 1001 gimmicks and even more magic marketing pills but at the end of the day 99.99% of the agents I talk with believe the same thing... Pricing Low is the single most important key to selling a listing. They couldn't be more wrong!
The gist of how agents are taught: Get all the listings you can, take them at almost any price, pray that someone sells it quickly and makes you a hero. If that doesn't work, convince the seller to keep lowering the price until it becomes a big enough bargain for someone to buy it. The problem with this approach is that the longer a property sits on the market, the lower the selling price. The problem is the belief that lowering the price is the only way to generate increased showing activity. It's certainly one way to sell a house but comes at great cost to the seller, not the agent. When you reduce your price $20,000, you lose $20,000, the agent loses only a fraction of that in commission. WalMart has done very well selling at a discount but they make it up in volume, you likely have just one home to sell, do you really want to rely on a low pricing strategy? Of course not.
Sellers regularly leave thousands of dollars on the table because they followed the advice of the trusted professionals. We're not suggesting that Realtors are deliberately trying to deceive anyone, most would love to do better for you, they just don't know how. They are simply following what's always been done and what they were taught, lowering the price will stimulate activity.
If not lowering the price, what else can be done? Increase the ACTIVITY...Increased Activity (traffic) is the key to selling anything faster for a higher price. It doesn't matter if you are selling houses, apples, furniture or cars, more traffic is the key to selling anything faster, for a higher price. If you have 50 people look at your home, you will sell it faster for a higher price than if you have just two people look at it.
Can activity be increased by the use of Color Flyers, Color Magazines, Massive Internet Advertising, Directional Signs etc...? Unfortunately NOT MUCH! We do all the above and more; in fact we probably spend more time and money on marketing than most agents in Clark County yet the large majority of our listings are sold by another agent. To let you in on a little secret, that's the way it is for all agents. No agent I've ever met could spend enough money on advertising or personally manage working with more buyers than the combination of the other 2200+ agents in the county.
If those things don't increase showing activity, why do we spend money on them? Sometimes we ask ourselves that but the truth is that it helps us sell our own listings and keep more of the commission. This may sound greedy but there is a benefit to you. First - When we sell our own listing, we discount the commission by 1% which saves you money. Second - When we control both sides of a transaction, things go smoother because we aren't relying on an in-experienced or part-time agent.
How do we generate more activity (showings)? The answer you are about to read will frustrate you and may even make you suspicious of our methods; for the sake of your equity we urge you not to click away without reading a bit further, it will make good sense and save you thousands of dollars. We can only reveal our activity boosting secret in person, face to face with people who are contemplating selling. Hold on, take a breath and at least find out why.
Real Estate is incredibly competitive, most of us spend thousands of dollars a year trying to find an edge, something to make us stand out and sell more homes. For 20+ years we were very successful doing the same things that everyone else was doing, we just worked harder and took our business more serious than most. When the market took a turn in 2006, we suffered like all other agents and were selling fewer homes... we tracked down just like the rest of the pack. THEN IT HAPPENED - a random conversation with an agent on the East Coast knocked us off our feet. This guy had been in the business for 3 years and was doing more business than anyone in his market, his listings were selling in half the time of the MLS average, for 5-10% more. And he wasn't spending a fortune on marketing that was not producing results. It was one of the most humbling experiences ever, some new agent figured something out that was so simple and obvious, we felt like complete idiots for not doing it ourselves years ago. How could tens of thousands of agents across America not have figured this out?
We instantly implemented this new found secret and saw huge results. Listings that were getting few or no showings instantly were getting traffic. Listings that had been sitting idle actually SOLD for more than we thought possible. We were able to stop thinking price reduction first. It became an overnight edge like we have never seen before, agents all over town are complaining about the bad market and we are busier in a down market than we've been for years.
In time, the rest of the pack will figure out what we are doing and the playing field will be level again, for now our sellers are enjoying the success and we want to protect their edge. If you were a client, you wouldn't want everyone else to know what we're doing because your advantage would quickly be lost.
Hopefully you can understand why we don't want to place our secret on the Internet for every agent in town to get their hands on?
In Closing: If you are thinking about selling and would like to know what our competitive edge is, give us a call or e-mail to make an appointment. We won't bite, we won't strong arm you into signing a listing or anything else uncomfortable. We'll simply look at your home, tell you what it's worth in today's market, show you what we do to get top dollar for our clients. You may decide to hire a traditional agent that use the price approach or you may like our increased activity approach, it's your choice, no hard feelings either way.
Thank you for your time.
If you would like to make an appointment to see what you home is worth and learn about our exciting activity edge simply complete the form below. There's no obligation, and we promise to get back to you quickly...
