Are you a professional practitioner or just an order-taking lackey? How to list a home for sale like you own the damn place

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve written a ton about how we list homes for sale (and not just in that post; surfing the archives repays effort). At Unchained I illustrated some of our ideas, and you can catch this show on the DVDs if you missed it live. Everything we do is about selling the house — not selling us as a brokerage or as agents and not attracting buyers for other listings. We reap a substantial secondary marketing benefit from listing as hard as we do — both the efforts we undertake and our victory dance when we succeed — but our entire focus is on selling the house.

There is more stuff I could talk about, and we are always playing with new ideas. It’s fun — for me at least — to work with buyers, but listing is a perfectible praxis: By the assiduous application of thought and effort, we can get better and better at it the more we do it. But there is a limit to that proposition: You cannot sell a house that won’t sell, and that’s what I want to talk about.

But first: Listing in Phoenix right now, and in many other markets, can be a heart-breaking endeavor. There is too much inventory and there are too few buyers, and even the most perfect home can come up second-best again and again. “If you list, you’ll last,” but it could be that you’ll last a little better right now if you focus your attentions on motivated, qualified buyers, rather than speculating on sellers. You don’t have to blow off sellers, but I think you might be wise to reschedule listing appointments in favor of showing appointments, if one has to give way for the other.

Here’s the real meat of the matter, though: How much will you get paid for a listing that does not sell?

We charge a $1,500 non-refundable retainer when we list, but that doesn’t begin to cover our costs before we even hit the MLS. I’ll come back to this idea, but the point for now is that we actually lose money if our listings don’t sell. Even if you aren’t doing the kinds of things we do, the same must be true for you. You’re out your time for getting the listing into the MLS, and you’re out of pocket for expenses like virtual tours. If your listing doesn’t sell, you’re not only working for free, you’re actually taking a loss for your clients’ sake. They will continue to own the house if it hasn’t sold, but your investment is gone.

(Just in passing, listing our way is a much bigger financial risk, but you stand a much better chance of actually selling the house — and hitting grand slam home runs will get you more listing appointments. It’s worth thinking about.)

But the most important element of listing a home for sale like you own the damn place is to take account of your own investment in that home. If you know for sure that it will not sell — that it is over-priced or under-maintained or if the seller is so obnoxious that you know you’ll end up hating each other — don’t take the damn listing!

If you list a home that won’t sell, you are not working for free. You are working at a loss! You can work for free by staying home and investing time in your social media marketing. You won’t make any money, at least not immediately, but you won’t lose anything beyond your daily bodily-maintenance expenses.

You may think you can cajole an obstinate seller into seeing things your way eventually. But what if you can’t? You’re not only out your time and money, you have advertised to all the neighbors, for up to six months, that you stink as a listing agent. That’s a loss that just keeps on losing.

We list on Price, Preparation — repairs and staging — and Presentation to the marketplace, and if we can’t have all three exactly the way we want them, we won’t take the listing. We will negotiate on smaller issues, but we won’t give any ground on our must-haves, and we’ll decline the listing if we feel we haven’t made it sufficiently clear why they are musts.

This is a place where our blogsite helps a great deal: We want to work with people who understand exactly what they’re getting by engaging us — and who don’t want anything else. We know from experience that our marriage to our sellers will never be happier than it is at the listing appointment, so we won’t list the home if we’re not in love with them and them with us. Yes, this is business, but it’s a very emotional business. As with a real marriage, if one party is looking for the exit on the way in, the relationship is not going to work.

And this is why the retainer is so valuable to us. It’s not a profit center: It covers some, not all, of our out-of-pocket costs and none of our labor. But it “pre-nups” the sellers: It puts them on notice that canceling the listing or blowing off less-than-ideal offers has a financial cost. We want for our sellers to have some skin in the game, so we make them write us a check before we will lift a finger in their behalf. Our listing presentation takes the form of a very friendly conversation, never the same thing twice. But if you want to find out if you can sell, sell the idea of an upfront retainer when all homeowners expect listing agents to work “for free” until close of escrow.

This is our attitude going into a listing appointment: We are going to do our work our way. The sellers are engaging us to sell the home, but we are engaging them as well. We’re going to have a long list of things we will want them to do, and, if they won’t do them, we won’t take the listing. We’re going to set the pricing strategy, we’re going to formalize it in the contract, and then we’re going to hew to it as written. We’re going to market the home our way, picking the arrows from our marketing quiver that are most appropriate for selling that particular home. And if we can’t have all of our must-haves the way we must have them, we walk away without a backward glance.

Are we mean about this? To the contrary. I might seem brusque to people, but it’s impossible not to love Cathleen. But we know from hard experience that yielding on any of our must-haves is a recipe for failure. If the sellers simply cannot let us do our work our way, we let someone else lose his or her money and reputation failing to sell that home.

We’re working all of this out at just the right time — I hope. We turned down many millions of dollars of listings in the last eight months. It’s possible we might have sold some of them — but the agents who got the listings instead have not sold those homes. We’re not hitting home runs on every home we did list in that span of time, but we didn’t list a single home we didn’t believe we could sell. And if we’re right about what we’re doing, we should emerge from this downturn in a position where we can write our own ticket in the neighborhoods where we are strong.

The bottom line: If you really are an expert at selling homes, sell that idea. When I’m showing, I see a lot of houses where the listing agent is obviously not in charge of the marketing process, but I cannot think of any reason why this should be so. Bad sellers deserve bad listers, I suppose, but why are there any bad listers? And why would anyone want to be a part of a marketing effort that is either doomed to failure — or can only succeed by massively discounting the property?

You have a choice when you go out on a listing appointment. You can take listings that you know cannot sell on the terms set in the listing contract, which means that you stand at great risk of taking not only a financial loss but incurring an enduring loss to your reputation. Or you can list only for sellers who know — and know why — they are lucky to have you on their side.

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