My new home screen:
Category: Selling Your Home (page 3 of 5)
I’ve been watching this house for months. There is after-market stuff in there, but the kitchen and baths are original insouciant MCM – Rob and Laura Petrie in a 1963 state of optimism. It would be wonderful if someone adopted this as a project home, an historic renovation as it were, to put Rob and Laura where they belong by now – in Sun City.
Sun City’s youngest were born in 1969 – spawned at Woodstock? – which has amazing demographic implications. Like this: There is a market for MCM historic renovations here – houses like this built in the early ’60s. The sign rider? “Barbie and Ken slept here!”
Yes, that’s a real MLS photo. We’ll let the guilty parties writhe in anonymous ignominy. But: What do you see? I see a sloppy seller with a lazy lister – plus one ugly red flag – catastrophic for the listing and potentially for the house itself. Do you see it? Buyer’s agents will.
If you follow me on Facebook, you will see me briefly post-mortem Closed listings, as in the image above. Everything matters – on Day Zero – but those two little boxes tell the final tale on everything: As a house is marketed, so does it sell, which is from Proverbs, sort of.
But I can do so much more. Working from the full listing, I can show people what helped, what hurt and why those strategies and tactics produced the ultimate result.
So let’s play a game. You send me the MLS number or street address of your Closed, Expired or Cancelled residential listing in Sun City, and I will post-mortem the entire marketing strategy in detail here.
All secrets kept, yours and the agents’. We’re talking about ideas, not individual people or specific homes.
But I know a lot about why houses do and do not sell quickly, for top-dollar, so when you play Post-Mortem My Listing with me, everybody wins.
Yesterday, FannieMae and FreddieMac did what I had sworn they wouldn’t: They relented to accounting for the buyer’s-agent’s commission as a seller-paid concession:
This is almost no change from the bad-old-days that have been subject to so much litigation. Instead of splitting commissions by way of the listing agent’s commission instructions, the split will now be declared to be among the seller’s concessions to the buyer.
That’s good, even if comically pointless, and, very probably, of temporary duration. The jackals feeding on the National Association of Realtors seem unlikely to be sated by old wine in new bottles.
But: My advice to sellers remains the same. The buyer is getting advice at the seller’s expense, but the seller is getting the buyer – without whom nothing would be happening. You’re not paying for the advice – even though it is a liability shield for you. You’re paying for the introduction, for the contract, for the opportunity to successfully close the sale.
The seller’s motivation is the same for both agents, the lister and the buyer’s agent: You’re paying the people who are getting you paid. It’s just that simple.
Meanwhile, my plan to broadcast our buyer’s agent’s commission seems to be holding up. Because sellers can be pound-foolish, and because the ‘co-broke’ will be undisclosed in the MLS, Bloodhound being known for paying the whole pizza will work to my sellers’ advantage. Buyer’s agents are not supposed to care how much they are getting paid – in much the same way that paramecia are not supposed to move toward the food and away from the poison…
We’ll have to wait for FHA and VA to catch up to the brand-new same-old way of doing business, but this is the upshot: Status quo ante with less disclosure and more paperwork.
There are two ways to list a house for sale. Typically, a seller will elect to ‘start high’ – price the home above the value justified by the recent sales. Often a lot higher, usually at a creepily deceptive price like $349,900. It won’t sell early, it may not even show early in the listing. What will happen is that it will languish on the market through successive price reductions. Eventually the seller will relent for a price far lower than the listing started with, possibly lower than the home’s fair-market-value on the day of listing, often with seller-paid cash concessions to the buyer.
In other words, the listing strategy from the outset was to sell low and slow to the least qualified buyer out there.
Yes, that’s funny, but that is literally how most Sun City homes are marketed on the MLS.
We work very differently. The elements of a real estate listing that matter most are: 1. Price, 2. Photos, 3. Copy, 4. Directions. Our goal is to make everything perfect – irresistible! – on Day Zero. That way, we can be under contract and on our way to close-of-escrow in just a few days – instead of languishing for months and months.
The value proposition is in the headline: Better money sooner. We will get the best net return that can be had for your home – with the fewest hassles and in the shortest time.
We should talk. No cost. No obligation. No BS. Just better money sooner.
As you should expect, the property is better than its main photo. And yet: We are all Tinderellas now. Rejected on a quibble is still rejected.
Other than the tree, everything you might object to in this photo is personal property and will have been removed prior to Close of Escrow.
ACCORDINGLY, it is the listing agent’s job to make sure every potentially-off-putting thing has been put away for the duration PRIOR to photography.
Call that stuff in front ‘flair’ – as in the movie “Office Space.” The steps to staging would be deflair, declutter, deep clean, stage – and I don’t hate vacant if my alternative is too-much-lived-in.
The buyers have to find themselves in the home, and they can’t do that if the seller won’t get out of their way.
You live or die on the listing itself, by agent emails or Zillow or whatever. If buyers reject the house on the smartphone, they will never see it in person and therefore will not make an offer on it. Everything counts, and victory for the lister – and hence the seller – is the ease of getting across the finish line with every penny expected. Or more. 😉
Here’s the news: To get out from under the many lawsuits plaguing it, the NAR has elected to do away with its entire reason for existence – the cooperating broker’s compensation.
You know of it as the buyer’s agent’s commission, and, unbeknownst to practically everyone, it is the “why” of the MLS idea as such.
Ideally, my office has enough buyers to match up with my sellers, so I don’t need to leave the walled garden of my own brokerage to clear my inventory.
But nothing is ever ideal, so when I need a buyer that I can’t find on my own, I turn to the MLS to appeal to other brokers to bring me that buyer, offering them a split of my sales commission as incentive.
Note well: It is the listing broker, not the seller, who is paying the buyer’s broker’s commission – even though he might rather have kept everything in-house.
Under the new rules announced Friday, an MLS listing will continue to elicit cooperation, but it can no longer promise compensation.
Buyer’s agents can show houses, but they may not know how – or even if – they will be compensated.
Accordingly, they will either appeal to their typically cash-strapped buyers for their pay, or, more likely, buyers will either go unrepresented or their agent will also be the seller’s agent – just like the bad old days.
Worse for the NAR, there is no longer any reason to prefer the MLS to Zillow. That’s where the buyers are seeing my listings, and not only can I promise compensation there, I am free from every other arbitrary MLS rule.
The NAR uses the golden handcuffs of the MLS to keep its membership ensnared. But with free-market forms and third-party lockboxes, and with no particular advantage to listing by MLS, there is no reason for agents to stay in the NAR – paying for its legal blunders.
Meanwhile, sellers: Be wise. The commission is a marketing fee. You pay it because you net more at Close of Escrow for having had professional marketing. Stiffing the half of the marketing team who is bringing the money to the table is penny wise, pound foolish.
Boom! Like that.
It was the copy you see above that sold it.
I have been studying Sun City for six months, planning an assault that begins April 2nd. I’m going to tear this town up.
That’s me for the past five years. NeeizzObody has numbers like these. I want to hit the ball like this 50 times a year, Thursday to Tuesday, every week.
Can I do it? Hide and watch.
That is my take on the NAR settlement: Losing buyer’s agent’s compensation from the MLS is a terrible thing for buyers, which in turn will hurt sellers.
But: Even so: Because the buyer’s agent’s commission is now a marketing differentiator, placing the ad you see above in a flyer frame in each of my listed homes will give my sellers a leg up on their competition.
It’s against the rules for buyer’s agents to shop by commission, but it is my perfect right to let them know that Bloodhound Realty, at least, has them covered.
I wrote about the NAR settlement in greater depth in an article I sent to the Independent. If they don’t care for it, I’ll post it here.
Meanwhile: A good listing agent is the best bargain in real estate, surfacing for the seller the highest attainable net return from the buyer least likely to fail to perform, all in the least amount of time – the highest/safest/soonest offer.
And the second-best bargain in residential real estate is an experienced buyer’s agent: Literally paid just for the introduction to their buyers, yet shepherding them through every step of the process, startling long before we sign a contract, and then making sure every hurdle in the escrow process is overleapt on time.
The bottom line is the bottom line: If you got less than you wanted – of anything! – you overpaid. If your results were better than you expected – tell your friends and family! 😉
The Sun City Business is a topic I want to return to: How Sun City’s citizens get taken. Of immediate moment is the advice in the headline.
Here is why you should carefully read the super-secret real estate agent’s print-out of the listing for your home: There are six Active listings in Sun City right now that are not denoted as being Age-Restricted, even though they are, of course.
Why does that matter? Anyone who is searching for homes by Age-Restricted status is not seeing those listings at all.
There are Gemini/Twin homes marketed as Single-Family Detached houses and an enormous number of Town/Patio homes listed as Apartment Style condos.
Agents will typically search within a subdivision or by using a map-based search, so they are likely to see everything. But people making their choices about which homes to see from Zillow or another portal can filter badly-listed homes right out of their visibility.
Everything counts, and any mistakes will be paid for by you, not your listing agent – in money but most especially in time. Take the time to read your home’s listing carefully.
I have a hotsheet for the first time in my career – a daily report on real estate activity in a specific place – in my case within that odd blue shape in the illustration. I call that space 99 Bells, everything age-restricted west of 99th Avenue to the river, south of Bell Road but north of Grand Avenue.
That’s where I live, where I ‘farm’ for listings and where I am most interested in what is going on. So now I get up in the wee hours every morning to see what happened yesterday.
It’s been an eye-opener, to say the truth. I am an avid student of listing mistakes, so there is plenty for me to work with every day. I’ve been studying Sun City listing agents for months, but the hotsheet focuses my attention where – and upon whom – it matters.
So here’s a simple mistake, literally repeated daily, one you can use to test potential agents:
“What’s the best day of the week to post a new listing – or to make a price reduction, should that be necessary?”
There is a right answer, and worse than not knowing it is showing that you don’t know it by making those MLS entries on the worst possible days.
If you follow along with me, I will show you how to get your own home sold faster and for more money. Half the battle, at least, is knowing what not to do…
I am Cassandra: I wrote a long thread on Twitter last fall on how to list a home so it will sell for top-dollar on the first weekend. The response? Crickets. The truth is that most real estate agents are very bad at selling homes, by my standards, and yet all of them are convinced they have nothing new to learn.
Here’s the way the world works: The only remaining marketing channel for a residential listing is the MLS – by way of sites like Zillow and Realtor.com. I do everything I can think of to supplement the listing, but, in a world where no one looks up from the cell phone, the cell phone is the only way you have to reach buyers.
Hence: More than ever, real estate is not just a marketing praxis but a publishing job: To be effective, the listing must make your home’s ultimate buyer crave the property. The analogy of the Christmas Wish Book is spot on: If I can get you to peruse my listing over and over again – you’re not looking at anyone else’s.
And that’s my job. Over time, we’ll talk more about how I work; as noted, I have no fear of my competitors learning anything from me. For now, take this away: The listing is the invitation to the showing, and the showing to the offer. The marketing strategy that works is the one that gets buyers off their phones and into your home – before anyone else can steal it away.
Urgency. Fear of Missing Out. Sold. And it all starts with the MLS listing…
This post marks a soft relaunch of this web site. I’m marketing for new business for the first time in 14 years, and we’ll celebrate with a new Sun City listing later this week.
Jump over to the About page to see what’s what. The Cliff’s Notes is simply this: I want to list your Sun City home, when you’re ready to sell, and I would love to have the opportunity to show you why I am the better choice: Better results in time and money, yielding better net returns in your pocket at Closing.
Call me: 602-740-7531. I can do better, and I can prove it.
Hard to believe, isn’t it? You can actually sell a home in Greater Phoenix and make money on the deal.
How can this be so? The long answer is long and boring, but the short answer yields a comprehensive truth in only two words: Market volatility.
We were a slow leak on the way down, until all of a sudden we were a fast leak. And then, just as suddenly, the market surged upward, gaining back a lot of lost price-pressure very quickly.
The result? If you bought a house in Phoenix or its suburbs within the past two or three years, it could be possible for you to sell that home and actually pocket some cash on the deal.
How much money could you scrape off the table?
It could be a lot, actually. We’re getting ready to list a property where we expect the sellers to more than double their 20% down-payment in less than 15 months, total, since they closed on the home.
Your mileage will vary, of course, but you only need to beat your original purchase price by 7% or so to put yourself in the black — and home values are up more than 30% over the past year.
Okay, so you might be able to sell at a profit. Why would you do it? And why now?
The why is your question to answer: To move up to a better home, to move down to a house you can own free-and-clear, to move on to another part of the country, to get your money out of housing and put it into a business — your reasons are your own.
But why now? Because supplies of homes are very low, demand is insanely high — and because neither of these circumstances can last forever.
It could be that we’re back on the appreciation track for the foreseeable future, in which case holding out for higher prices makes sense.
But it also could be that the recent upsurge in prices is the eye of the hurricane, and continued foreclosures combined with other bad economic news could push home values down yet again.
I don’t know which will happen — but I know that no one else knows either.
But if you have a reason to sell your Phoenix-area home, we can make it sell quickly and for top dollar right now. If you want to explore your possibilities — and calculate your potential profits — drop me a line.