I get a lot of questions from people who are trapped in houses that they bought only to re-sell for a profit. Now the market has stalled and they can’t afford to hang on to their property. What do they do? They list with a real estate agent (as if he or she had some magic potent that would suddenly produce buyers) and sit around hoping for the best. That’s about the same thing that their agent is doing too.
Selling is a learnable art just like any other aspect of the real estate business. It involves being able to write ads that attract interested and financially qualified buyers, getting them into a property that will appeal to them, “closing” the deal by getting them to sign a purchase agreement, shepherding them through the loan application process with a can-do mortgage broker who can find the right loan for them, resolving all the title and escrow issues quickly and satisfactorily, and getting paid.
If you dissect the foregoing paragraph, there’s a lot to learn to be able to sell in a buyers’ market, and most so called real estate professionals don’t have the knowledge, skill, or motivation to learn and be able to follow through on all these areas of expertise. If you want to sell, get used to the idea that you are going to have to do most of the work yourself.
I was a fairly successful real estate Broker for 23 years, and a top salesman primarily because I took it onto myself to learn as much as I could about all the various steps in preparing a property for sale, showing it, getting it under contract, and making sure the sale closed. Today, we don’t list houses for sale with any particular real estate firm because this would place me at the mercy of a single company that might not work the listing. This could cost me months of continued holding costs. Instead, we pay $500 to have a Broker place my house in the Multiple Listing Service. We also make sure the house is listed on craigslist.com and other sites that will attract buyers.
We pay a little extra to have the broker who puts the listing into the MLS also place ads in the newspaper and to screen out offers that I wouldn’t want to consider. Because I don’t waste a lot of money paying listing fees, I can offer the selling office a 5% commission. This is a lot more than most offices get selling their own listings. It motivates the top salesmen to work on my house.
We make certain that what is offered for sale has been prepped so that it is scrupulously clean with mini-blinds, often new vinyl windows, air-fresheners, new appliances, bright hardware, and bunches of silk flowers everywhere. More often than not, we put on new roofs and paint the house inside and out. We clean up the yard and plant grass and shrubbery; and keep it watered. We place extra sale flyers inside the house as well as in the little holster at curbside that shows the floor-plan, dimensions, minimum down payment, take home salary, and FICO score required to qualify for the maximum loan, We also include a little map so that buyers who are looking at several houses can find their ways back to this one later on.
If you will do all these things too, you’ll be able to sell quickly even in this slow market we are in.
