The emails go out Thursday morning, early, to catch your early-morning eyes. A search portal from your agent? An auto-search you set up yourself on a real estate website? However you arranged things, that email is there to help you plan your weekend home search. And, of utmost importance, the newer listings are flagged with some form of eye-catching text like “NEW!”
And the emails go out again Friday morning, and you pay special attention to the “NEW!” listings because you’re not enthralled with the list you made Thursday.
And the emails go out again on Saturday morning – to go unread or to be set aside for later consideration. Come Saturday morning, you’re looking at houses, not listings.
And if a home was newly listed after Friday’s emails went out? It has, just by that one false move, lost two-thirds or more of the selling power of the word “NEW!” If you jumped on the grenade while the general was golfing, you didn’t get the medal. And if you moved heaven and earth to list a property for sale on the wrong day, this error alone is likely to have enduring consequences.
I’m belaboring this for two reasons:
Second, there were ten brand new listings in Sun City from 1:22 am Friday to 2:52 am Saturday. That’s a lot for any day, and it’s very likely that most or all of them missed out on Friday’s emails. They will not be showing today, Saturday, because the buyers didn’t see them when they were looking for homes to visit today.
But first, this mistake (there will be new listings tomorrow, Sunday, the worst day to be “NEW!”) goes to everything I talk about. EVERYTHING counts in a new listing. The list price matters most, but absolutely everything matters.
The reason is in the headline: You will never have more attention, more excitement, more follow-up interest in your MLS listing than you will have over the first weekend. It is your magic moment to shine, with everything in the listing as close to perfect as you can make it – the wishbook page of your buyer’s idealized future, a breathtaking rhapsody to be heard only within the confines of this one perfect space…
If the price is right – if the value is right – you will excite all the interest you need to sell the home from Thursday to Tuesday – at, near or above list price. The first weekend is your best and perhaps your only chance to ‘beat’ the Fair Market Value of your home. Not by much – everyone is doing the same math – but an irresistible listing can beguile more than one buyer, resulting in a bidding war, which is unlikely to happen later.
Everyone makes mistakes, and you fix what you can when you realize your errors – or when very generous buyer’s agents point them out in showing feedback. But: You never get a second chance to make a first impression. By the time the “NEW!” is off your rose, you may already be doomed to sell below market – no matter where you started.
Everything matters – price first – because you never get a second chance at the first weekend.
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