The days of 3 cash offers over asking are over! As the Real Estate market shifts across the country, sellers agents are going to have to get aggressive in terms of marketing their listings. Here are some tips for making sure your listings sell fast!
1. Pricing
Every good business owner or seller understands that it’s necessary to price things right because in today’s market no matter how much one markets their products or in our case homes, if the price is not right you can’t sell anything. So understanding and having a keen knowledge of pricing your listing is a must in this business.
As the current market is going through a monumental shift, prices of homes as well as the behavior of potential buyers has changed drastically. Therefore, one needs to take a different approach in order to fit into the new market conditions and in the current market situation. You should shift your mindset to price your listings as aggressively as possible, and set the expectations of your clients accordingly.
Potential buyers will likely wait if you’re listing at a higher price, make sure your clients expect aggressive price cuts if the property fails to move within a few weeks.
2. Preparation:
In order to avoid mistakes that may end up being costly, it’s better to be prepared and have things sorted/planned out beforehand. Having a clear goal towards what outcome you desire is a plus, when selling a house, you must have a good strategy to achieve such outcome.
For instance, homes that are in good condition sell in any market and there are plenty of buyers who will lean towards buying a home that is already well maintained rather than having one that requires a lot of work. Make sure you’re among the agents in your area who sell well maintained homes. Not only does it boost your statistics with regards to things like days on market and list to sale price ratio, it also increases your chances of being approached by potential sellers, since you will have a reputation in the market for selling quickly and for top dollar.
Your strategy must also include preparations before putting up a house on the market. Like figuring out what to repair and what not to, sometimes sellers over renovate or don’t bother much with fixing or repairing small issues with their homes and that never helps. Understanding if staging or cleaning has to be done for a home is part of your job. A clean home would obviously have a more favorable environment for you during showings at the house and even when you market it online.
Make sure you always depersonalize your listings and ascertain that they are welcoming and feel inviting for a diverse range of potential buyers.
3. Showings & Open House:
Traditional methods like giving tours or open houses are still a great way to gather a lot of people that may not only be interested but may have other friends and family members that are looking for exactly the house you’re trying to sell. A great way to drum up potential buyers is to have open houses, where neighbors and online viewers might visit the home and get a first hand look at the property..
Open house once per week on a property that you have recently put on the market is a great way to make sure others know about it. When you have an open house you can’t expect a lot of people to show up if you’re just holding the open house and not marketing it. Make sure to market the open house on your Social Media as well as to your SOI.
Make sure you are flexible with your timings and coordinate with your clients and have open houses accordingly. One thing that sellers need to be reminded of is that it usually takes about 10+ showings for 1 offer in normal market conditions.
4. Give Buyer Incentives:
In this market situation, your potential buyer could be looking at 5 other properties alongside yours, your property must have a special something or a hook that appeals to them. This is where buyer incentives come in and they are a great way to push your listings up in the minds of your potential buyers.
You can offer them to cover all or part of a buyer’s closing costs. This very well may be the difference maker between you and other listings when it comes to which one they submit and offer to as this may appeal to the buyer with less operating capital.
Additional incentives may include offering homeowner’s insurance through a partnered insurance company, offering furniture or appliances as part of the closing or even offering to cover additional HOA or landscaping costs. These might help your offer be remembered by the potential buyers more distinctively than other offerings they may have come across.
Making yourself stand out using such tactics will help you increase the amount of potential buyers and will also help you in the long run as buyers often remember such gestures from sellers and will also talk positively about them with their acquaintances, friends and family members, which might indirectly result in you getting more clients.
5. Do Professional Photography & Videography
Need to gain the attention of any audience? Everyone today uses their phones, tablets and computers to find what they are looking for and they are most intrigued when looking at pictures or videos of the product they are interested in. The same goes for a home.
A potential homebuyer’s first instinct is to go online and start searching for their next home using online websites such as Zillow and Realtor.com. It is crucial that your property is presented on these websites in the best light possible, for it to attract potential buyers. Customers might not be interested in a house if the images or videos don’t do justice to the home and if they are presented in an unprofessional or unpleasant way.
For that, you can hire a professional photographer (or even learn to do it yourself since there are tons of tutorials on Youtube and it’ll save you some cost) and have the photos professionally edited as well. This certainly gives you an advantage over other sellers who often don’t put in any effort with regards to photography. With professionally shot and edited photos you’ll already be way ahead of them in terms of attracting more clients.
When adding photos into your MLS, make sure the first photo of your property is a shot from the front of the house and presents it in the best light possible. (Note; There may be limitations imposed by your MLS on what the first photo can be, make sure to remain compliant!)
Beyond photography you can also do guided video tours of the property – these will further allow you to stand apart from every other seller on the market. You can hire a professional to do all the recording sessions with you or learn to make them yourself. Make sure the videos are professionally edited and remain compliant with your MLS’s branding requirements.
6. Do Professional 3D Tours
While we’re talking about the power of photography and videography and how effective it can be if done right, the modern era has made things more flexible and accessible to everyone. On top of good images and videos you can also do 3D tours to show off your listing to potential buyers and they can use it to explore your listing from the comfort of their homes.
This will help your potential buyers understand the layout of the home they are looking to buy more effectively without even having to actually visit the home. In cases where people live far and are trying to find a home in your area this will help them greatly and might open you up to a larger pool of potential buyers.
There are many services that will do 3D tours for you (you can search for them in your local area) and your brokerage might also offer that service. Zillow also offers their 3D home service which allows you to capture a 3D tour of your listing with only your phone, it’s as simple as that!
7. Increase your Selling Agent Commission Incentives:
A great way to increase the chances of your sales is to motivate the selling agent: You can start by offering selling agents an additional commission which will probably result in more showings than one with a standard commission split. Make sure you stipulate that the commission will be paid at the time of a successful closing to the selling agent and not to the brokerage.
This will not only motivate selling agents but it’s also a way for your listing to stand out amongst other comparable listings. A lot of selling agents are looking for these additional incentives and they might market your listing to their database of buyers.
8. Harness the power of Social Media
In today’s time there’s hardly anyone that’s not on social media. Social media should be the go to for any business to promote and market themselves over the internet, as it gets your business a ton of attention through posts and ads. The same is true for selling homes.
Marketing your listings over social media can be a great way to further boost them and increase your online exposure. Getting views on your posts or ads will surely result in attracting more buyers. Use your own business and personal profiles on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Youtube to promote your listing. By making an effort to post multiple updates about your property you will most likely gain an audience which will result in getting more views hence resulting in more sales.
Posting photos, videos or even going live over social media and livestreaming open houses will grab the attention of many potential buyers. This is especially potent in markets where the average age of home buyers is weighted towards the younger side as young people are, on average, more engaged with social media than traditional marketing.
Any form of marketing on social media, needs to have the purpose of putting your image into the potential buyers’ minds. Whenever they think of buying a home you pop in their heads instantly.
9. Don’t forget traditional marketing
Using all these new modern & fancy marketing methods can make it easy to forget the basics but these methods are far from obsolete. All the old methods still work phenomenally well and should not be overlooked. They still help a ton when it comes to making a sale even in these times.
Make sure you have a yard sign up as soon as you have the listing agreement signed and start marketing to the neighbors. It may very well be that the neighbors have a family member or a friend looking to move closer to them and you might end up getting a quick deal out of it. Market to the rest of the neighborhood as well by using flyers and postcards. These old methods might feel outdated but they work like a charm to this day. Sometimes a person might pass the flier or the postcard to someone who might be looking for a listing like yours.
Door knocking isn’t something most people like doing but there are alternatives available, for example, services such WisePelican or TPMCO allow you to design and deliver postcards to the entire neighborhood. Depending on the property and market conditions, it may even be a good idea to put out an advertisement in a magazine or newspaper. For example, if your listing has a horse stable and field attached, it might be a good idea to put an ad in an equine magazine!
Where the younger generation looks towards social media, the older generation to this day read newspapers and magazines and marketing this way will help you gain more exposure.
10. Market to the web
Another thing you can do is create a custom web presence for your property. This works better for higher end listings but if you can put in the effort, it will surely help you gain more exposure for any listing. The best way to go about marketing to the web is to set up a custom website and then run advertisements on places such as Facebook and Google linking people to your listing’s custom website.
From there you can also set up custom lead capture funnels that route to touchpoints that will help you get in front of a much larger audience.
Add a Comment