Listing adventurously the Bloodhound way . . .

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

“If you list, you last,” runs the Realtor’s mantra. This is true to a degree: It assumes you will last long enough to get a listing and for that listing to sell. It’s no accident that most agents start out working with buyers. It’s harder work — from the traditional point of view — but buyers will be more forgiving of a lack of experience, and working with buyers can require a smaller up-front, out-of-pocket investment.

In any case, I didn’t list very much in my early years as a Realtor. I crashed and burned on an early listing, and I didn’t race back to the wreckage until I had learned a lot more about what I wanted to do. Even on that listing, we were doing a lot of radically-innovative things, but I had made the classic new agent’s mistake: I was drawing huge traffic to a home that was over-priced.

After that bad first experience, I listed when I couldn’t avoid it: For pre-existing clients. Listing, lock-box, sign, flyer — but also price, preparation and presentation. We weren’t gun-shy, but we wanted to perfect the idea of our kind of listing before we rolled it out in any major way.

As it happens, we hit our stride as listers just as the Phoenix real estate market oscillated to an absurd frenzy. We did a lot more work last Summer than we actually needed to do: Web sites, open houses, neighborhood canvassing, etc. — when all we actually needed to do was go down to the Safeway and whisper that we had a house for sale.

But we got really good results really quickly, and we learned a lot about the things we do now — when selling any house, even a perfect house at a perfect price, is a major undertaking.

This is from our seller’s web page:

Take a look at this web site.

This is the site we built for a house we recently listed in the F.Q. Story historic district of Phoenix. It happens that the home was owned by one our favorite clients, but that’s beside the point: This is the work product we deliver for all of our full-service listings. We love working with buyers, but it is in listing that our real estate practice can become a praxis, a perfectible process, steadily more effective. We’re already doing far more than our competitors, and we are barely begun exploring what more can be done.

How did we do? The house sold in four days, where competing listings are languishing for months.

This was the first real test of our budding listing praxis, a half-million dollar historic home selling after the market had turned. The web site was the most elaborate one we had done to that date (a record we have since eclipsed several times). We were still using our first generation of signs, soon replaced by the big-photo-of-Odysseus signs, which were in turn replaced by our current custom signage. The flyer was Poetry Writ Large; we got listings on the strength of that flyer alone. Cathy’s crew of teenagers promoted the Open House all through the Historic Districts of Downtown Phoenix — with the result one two-hour Open House drew over 200 people. We listed on Thursday and by Sunday the home was under contract — in a neighborhood where comparable homes are languishing for six months and more on market.

Since then, with each new listing, we’ve added ideas. I’ve written at length about our web sites, our custom signs, our ideas about promotional copy and about using the business card form factor for our promotional pieces. Cathy got her Property Staging Consultant certification earlier this year, and she has made vendor relationships for dealing with chores running from the painfully onerous to the painstakingly dainty. Going through our benefits page, there are half-a-dozen other services we provide to our sellers that the Realtors we compete against do not do.

What’s the point of all this? Mostly, our competition for listings consists of a listing, a lock-box, a sign and a flyer — a minimal effort. The better fifth of listings also bring with them a reasonable selling price, preparation of the home and a marketing presentation. How does any of that stack up to the unique benefits we bring?

And: For now, at least, we’re perfectly happy to negotiate the sales commission, because we want to take away any objection any other listing agent might bring to the table. We’ll do a lot more, and we’ll do it for the same money or less. I think this is a very compelling argument.

I’ve talked about all of this a lot, but I don’t know that I’ve done enough to paint the big picture. On the one hand, this is more of the Realtor 2.0 idea. The listers who last are going to deliver either top-quality service or bottom-dollar pricing. There is no middle. And then there are the unseen parties at the listing appointment. Who might they be?

There may be only one set of decision-makers at a listing appointment, but there are three sets of clients: The sellers, the potential buyers, and potential future sellers in the neighborhood. Everything that we do when we list a home is primarily motivated to sell that home to the buyers. But we have to sell the sellers on letting us do that job, and, in doing it, we are going to sway a certain number of future sellers to our way of thinking.

How are we doing? Too soon to tell. We have learned that we can’t take a listing if the seller won’t stay out of our way, so we turn down more listings than we take. Cathleen has taken over all formal responsibility for our listings, with me serving as her trusty back-end minion. So far, she’s at 31 Average Days on Market, where the market as a whole is averaging 88 DOM. Still: It’s not enough houses to make a sound judgment, even though we get more right and less wrong with each new listing — and we never stop thinking about new things to try.

Here’s a better test: Ask again a year from now…

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