Top 8 Seller Strategies

1. The Visual Inspection

The first strategy for preparing a home for sale is somewhat simple - The Visual Tour.

Take a notepad and pen and walk around your home just like a buyer would. Try to forget your home. Not literally, but figuratively. Try to forget that your home is yours and is covered in all your personal touches, pictures, tools, and countertop spices or appliances. Imagine this is the first time you've been at your property.

Start outside. Approach your property from a distance. What is appealing? What isn't appealing? Is the mailbox broken? Does the yard need to be trimmed? Are there toys or tools in the yard? Is there clutter on the porch? Make a list of things that need to be done to make the outside of your home inviting. Some agents even recommend painting the front door of the home an inviting colour like black, red, or yellow to give it a welcoming feel.

Then go back inside the way a buyer would walk inside your home. Remember to try to remain objective with fresh eyes. First impressions are important! Are there keys and change scattered at an entry table? Consider getting a cute key hanger or a nice dish/jar for change. If coats are piled on a rack at the door, consider putting away all the ones that are not used daily.

As you continue through the home, keep watching out for clutter on floors and countertops. Make a list of all the places clutter can be moved. Think of where you can put the pile of letters or bills - possibly in a drawer - and make sure you have those places identified in your list (so you don't lose anything!).

Pay special attention to the clutter in this order of importance:

• Kitchen

• Living Room

• Bathrooms

• Rooms that you know will be highlights

• Bedrooms (buyers are far more forgiving of cluttered bedrooms than kitchens)

In each room, list and pick up every countertop or bookshelf item and decide if it is appealing, or not. Then plan with your family to split up the clutter list with the storage places identified and move items as needed.

Removing clutter is a great start! If you struggle with "fresh eyes" or you'd like a real estate professional to check your work, call to schedule a time with us to tour your home with you.

2.  Pre-Inspection

When you toured your home with fresh eyes, you may have noticed some things in your house that could use a little cleaning, paint, or other work. But you may not have noticed everything! That's why it's a good idea to get a home inspection before listing your home to identify all the things you cannot see from a walking tour. We call this a Pre-Inspection.

Benefits of getting Pre-Inspection:

• Identify any hidden major issues before a buyer is scared off.

• Fix issues or schedule repairs before listing.

• Avoid costly "surprises" to your net return from the sale price.

• Give you and your buyers confidence by offering an inspection report with repairs completed before negotiating their contract price.

• Some buyers may decide to skip the inspection period if you've already done one, shared the report, and completed the repairs. One less contract contingency and a major hurdle in many purchase contracts!

When the report comes in, try once more to be objective with fresh eyes as a buyer might, and decide what is easy to fix yourself and when you need to hire a professional.

Once you get the report, we are happy to review it with you to help you identify items for repair. We also have a long and great list of trades and contractors we can share with you too! You'd be surprised how many "big" items can be very affordable to fix proactively so you don't lose anything on the contract.

3.  Depersonalize

By this point, you've done your Visual Inspection and Pre-Inspection. Now it's time to Depersonalize your home. What does this mean?

de·per·son·al·ize - divest of human characteristics or individuality

You must remove the "you" from your house. Our next strategy is going to talk about photography and to make the photos show as well as possible, as much of "you" as possible should be removed.

Items to hide/remove:

• Unsightly or unnecessary furniture to make rooms look more spacious.

• Toys and piles of children's books.

• Personal photos. We'd like to think buyers are not biased toward anyone, but it happens. Also, they want to see themselves in this home, not see another family.

• Remove all items that are personal and not decorative, especially in kitchens and bathrooms. You can put them away in a cabinet, drawer, or travel bag.

• Depersonalizing fully before photography is most important. Buyers will be drawn to your house from the photos online, and if they want the home, they will go back and back to the online photos in excitement. For day-to-day showings and living, you can put back out toys and children's books, but keep general clutter in kitchens and bathrooms as clear as possible.

Also, be sure to lock up and secure any medications or valuables before anyone tours your home!

4. Photography

One of the most critical factors that will make or break your home in this market - Photography.

First impressions mean everything. According to the National Association of Realtors, 94% of buyers first saw a home online by searching or because their agent sent them the listing.

The first impression most buyers will have will be the photos online. Homes with professional quality photography have been proven to receive up to 20-30% higher offers than homes without it. Would a 20-30% higher offer be worth it to have a professional come take photos of your home? Heck yeah!

Lighting

Photographers and skilled Realtors® use wider angle lenses that can make rooms look larger, and really showcase the best features. They know how to stand back from a room to get as much in as possible, and they can even remove forgotten items or toys from photos with Photoshop! 

Additionally, drone photography if appropriate can take the "money-shot" or main image of your home from different angles that a person cannot get to, especially if your home is on a steep hill, on a lake, or another unique location.

Tips if you are taking photos of your own home:

• Take photos in the daytime to allow as much light in as possible.     
• Have every light on in the house. Lights and lamps make a room look more alive. Homes without lighting can appear to be distress sales.
• Be sure everything is picked up and decluttered in each room. 
• Stand just outside each room or just in a doorway to get as much of the room in the photo as possible.
• Back up as far into a corner is a good way to get an angled shot of the room. 

If windows bring in too much light, close or draw back the curtains. 

5 - Pricing Your Home

There's a myth about home pricing that it's the real estate agent that sets the price or that they know exactly what a home will sell for. We don't! In fact, it's the seller that prices the home, and it's the buyers who set the value when they make an offer.

If you've had listing appointments with real estate agents and reached the pricing part of it, they will give you the recent comparable sales around you. They'll suggest a price or range that your home *should* sell at given current market conditions. Ultimately, you price the home, and buyers will determine the value. The real estate agent should know ranges and should have seen properties in the area to know how your home compares to be able to guide you in setting the right price. 

Price Expectation is Crucial to Success

If you went to a car dealership and a car you've always wanted was $1,000, would you rush out to buy it? Yes, likely you and 50 other people too. Because of supply and demand, we know that the car would end up selling for much more than $1,000 when everyone offers what they're willing to pay. Why? Because you know it was worth much more than $1,000. 

If you went to a car dealership and a car you've always wanted was $100,000, would you be as likely to buy it? Would it sell for more than the asking price? Maybe depending on the car and demand, but it's not as likely. Not as many people can afford to splurge on a 6-figure vehicle. These are extreme examples, but it emphasizes the importance of pricing your home correctly.

If you overprice your home, fewer people will be able to afford it, and others are looking at similarly priced homes with better features, more square footage, or in better locations. Your home may sit on the market for a long time, leading to a stigma about your home having problems, and ultimately sell for under its true value. 

If you underprice your home, people may crawl out of the woodwork to make offers, and you'll likely get over asking and end up reaching the true value of your home. 

Or you could price it right, and not have to wonder where you'll end up. A real estate professional like myself can help make sure you have clear expectations. I'm not going to fluff your ego with high expectations that may hurt you in the long run or undershoot your home price for a fast sale. 

Our Pricing Strategy 

We apply the most accurate method available to price your property. It's the same process that banks and appraisers use. We access the same database, the assessor's records, and the MLS® to look at all the active, pending, and sold properties. We review at least 5 actives, 5 pending, and 5 sold properties that are the closest and most comparable to your home. Then we'll guide you in setting the best price.

Let's make sure you're priced right when your home hits the market! Call us to make sure you’re in the pricing "sweet-spot"!

6 - The Marketing Plan

When your home is poised to hit the market, we'll go LIVE with it! It's an exciting time and if we followed all the steps correctly, you'll get more showings in the first 2 weeks than after the first 2 weeks. This is one reason why inspections, decluttering, depersonalizing, pricing, and marketing are so critical to your success. 

We figured out how to get your property to show the best in all of the places buyers are searching. We're going to share some of our marketing secrets here. 

How We Break Down Marketing

Brokerage Sites - We have made agreements with all the brokerages in the area to get your listing featured on their sites, so their agents can sell it too! When listing with our team, you'll be featured everywhere. Buyers looking at these sites will see your property.

Listing Portals - We have agreements to feature your home on all the most popular listing portals like Realtor.ca, and Zillow. The cool thing about this agreement is that we are  the main contact through all of these portals so we will receive all buyer requests so we can follow up with them and get them to view your home. 

Search Engines - We work with tech professionals to get the highest exposure on Google, Bing, YouTube, and Facebook. We utilize both organic and paid results. 

Social Media - We market homes on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, LinkedIn, to just name a few of the places we share, promote, and pay to showcase your property.

Craigslist and Kijiji - We use classified services to promote your home to international buyers who do not know about sites like Zillow, Realtor.ca or other major portals. 

It's the most aggressive approach to getting your property everywhere online. We’ll share all of our marketing efforts with you so you'll be able to see exactly where your property is online - you'll never have to wonder what we're doing to sell your home for you. 

There's much more to our marketing plan, but that's a good overview. If you want to set up a time to dive deeper into our full marketing plan, let us know! If you would like a copy of our marketing plan just ask and we can send it to you

View our 100+Point Market Plan to get your Home SOLD for top dollar

7 Offers & Seller Concessions

 In the months right after COVID, buyers went nuts for properties for a number of reasons. There was pent-up demand with so many buyers and so few homes available. Buyers were making offers as soon as homes hit the market and offered higher (and in many cases much higher) than the asking price. One big reason for this was because money was so cheap! Mortgage interest rates dropped to a historic low of 0.99% at their lowest in 2020. 

Below is a graph of interest rates to payments based on a $500,000 home purchase at .99% vs the same home purchased at 5%. (calculations based on min. down payment and include insurance premiums)

When interest rates go down, the monthly payment goes down. Since many more people could afford much more in a home, this drove buyers to offer higher because money was cheap. That drove more buyers onto the market, and largely fueled a shortage of homes. 

As interest rates go up, fewer people can afford homes. Supply and demand tell us that when there's less demand, a seller may not expect to receive an offer right away or for those wild over-asking prices we saw in 2020 and 2021. 

What does that mean for your home? 

It means that we need to be more strategic about your home sale. By following my plan outlined in the Top 8 Seller Strategies, we can position your home better, stage your home (if needed), prepare professional quality photography, price your home effectively, and then market your home better, in more places, and with more gusto to get you the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time!

When offers do come in, there are some things we may discuss as possible offers and/or concessions strategies to reach your goals. 

Find out what the buyer wants. 

One strategy car dealers are famous for is making the price of the car happen all around the monthly payment. If we can find out what the buyer really wants to pay per month, as in the interest rate examples above, there are some good strategies to reach their goal without changing your goal price. 

Typical Seller Concessions

• Accept a Lower Price

• Pay Buyer Closing Costs (generally up to 3% of their loan)

• Pay for Buyer Inspection Repair Requests

Summary

There are other strategies and concessions that will vary based on your unique property. We would cover all your options when we are reviewing your future offer(s).

There's a good chance that if you follow our strategies from 1-7 that your home will sell fast and at or over the asking price. With our experience and connections to service professionals, lenders, mortgage brokers, and programs, we can set you up for success and reduce any seller strategies that might be costly to your bottom line and goals. 

Let us know if you have any questions about these strategies, and let's get your home sold!

8 - Communication

According to the National Association of Realtors (US, but our stats are usually fairly comparable), the #1 complaint about real estate agents is their lack of communication during the listing process, all the way through closing. When you're buying or selling possibly the largest financial investment of your life, clear communication can make or break our relationship and even your contract. 

We recognized this was a problem and implemented a tool that gives you regular email updates on all the things we do for your listing each day. You'll also get 24/7 access to log in and see everything related to your listing process and transaction. We can promise you complete transparency into all the things we do for you. 

The number one thing we do for you is communicate in these areas:

1 - Communicate aggressively with buyers to hear their feedback about your home. Did they like it? Was it too small? Overpriced? Did they not like the colour? We will also help you make strategic decisions on what you should do about the feedback. We use ShowingTime and the ShowingTime app which gives you access to all your showings and feedback in one easy spot. It even syncs with your personal calendar!

2 - Timely and clear communication with you about all marketing, feedback, offers, timelines, and strategies throughout the process. You and the entire team will work best together by being transparent about what's going on in the market so you always have the same amount of information as we do.

Now you have all our biggest strategies, but there's so much more about our unique listing and sale process that we'd love a chance to sit down with you to discuss your goals. Together we will formulate a plan and strategy that works for you. Call us at 902 446-3113!

Thinking of Selling Your Home? Contact Us for a Free Marketing Consult