What does a listing agent do?
Help with pricing the home, take pictures of the property, enter the listing into the MLS, install a sign, hold an open house, and wait for an offer to come. . . Let’s hope that’s not all they do!
The internet is where the vast majority of home buyers find the properties they end up buying. Yes, being listed on the NWMLS is an effective way to reach a lot of prospective buyers online, but it’s only a start. Providing maximum exposure for a real estate listing requires going above and beyond the normal, traditional ways of selling a home. Here are a few of the things we do to ensure that every single buyer out there is exposed to our clients’ listings:
- Professional photographs of the property. How many listings have you seen online with terrible photographs? Well, not our listings! We aren’t photographers, so we leave the photography to the pros. (If you want a laugh or a cringe, see this website dedicated to bad real estate photos: http://terriblerealestateagentphotos.com/)
- Full-color, professionally designed, professionally printed marketing materials, including custom “storybook” bi-fold flyers in a higher quality card stock, for buyers who tour the property in person.
- Assistance with staging. We partner with some of the area’s best staging professionals to make our clients’ listings as desirable in person as they are online. NAR statistics show staged homes sell faster and for, on average, 3% more than un-staged properties.
- Matterport 3D virtual tour. In the era of COVID-19 and social distancing, more buyers than ever before are touring properties virtually and in some cases, even buying properties without touring them in person. Including an immersive, highly accurate 3D rendering of your property will help it attract more buyers and sell faster, for more money.
- SEO (search engine optimization). Including repetition of key search phrases in marketing content online captures high placement on Google and other search engines for our clients’ listings.
- Syndicate the listing to over 50 of the leading real estate websites including Zillow, Trulia, Estately, Redfin, etc.
- Personal follow-up with every agent who shows the property. Many agents rely on an automated system that sends out a template questionnaire for agent feedback. Most agents ignore these emails. That’s why we follow up with buyers’ agents with an actual phone call. You’d be surprised how many listing agents don’t do this!
- Regular communication with our sellers. The biggest complaint that sellers have about their real estate agents is that their agents don’t communicate with them often enough. It doesn’t matter how hard you’re working if you don’t tell your clients what you’ve been doing to sell their home!
- And finally (and perhaps most important), representation with a top-rated, top-producing broker who holds professional certifications in Negotiation (CNE), Internet Marketing (IMSD), Mortgage Financing (CFS), and senior representation (SRES).
Honesty is the best policy. . .
No one wants to see their house sit on the market for months without an offer. If the owner is still occupying the house, keeping the home clean and presentable and making arrangements for showings quickly becomes tedious. And if the home is vacant, the costs of paying the mortgage, not to mention the costs of electricity, heating, landscape maintenance, cleaning, and staging can start to add up quickly! Oftentimes a house doesn’t sell because it’s not being marketed effectively by the listing agent. But sometimes it’s just overpriced. In this hot market, if your home hasn’t been shown at least 15 times in the first week it’s for sale, or if you haven’t gotten at least one offer in the first 10 days, it’s probably overpriced. And if the house doesn’t sell in the first couple weeks, the best opportunity to get the highest and best price may be lost forever (or at least for 6 months until the property can be put back on the multiple as a “new” listing). If a seller doesn’t have the luxury of waiting 6 months and trying again, they may be forced to reduce the price of the property until they find an interested party. In the end, they may end up selling their home for significantly less than they would have if they had priced the listing appropriately and competitively in the first place. Therefore, when it comes to pricing a home, we always tell our clients the honest (and sometimes difficult) truth.
Hit the market with a BANG!
Because real estate listings reach their maximum exposure within 4-5 days of being listed, timing the marketing of a new listing to maximize its exposure is crucial. All marketing should be timed to “blitz” the internet in the first few days that the property is listed. If the property is priced correctly and the marketing is timed effectively, the chances of creating the kind of “feeding frenzy” that every seller (and agent) hopes for are maximized. We help add to this by blasting an email with your listing to the top 5000 agents in King County, and posts on our social media.
What’s the best price for my home?
Many agents encourage their clients to intentionally underprice the property by a significant amount, to ensure that there is a high level of interest. This strategy is valid, but risky. If the property is priced too low, then even multiple offers may not yield a price as high as sellers might have gotten if they priced the property competitively, but appropriately. The listing price should never be less than the minimum amount the seller is prepared to accept. For that reason, we often offer clients several different pricing strategies with several potential outcomes; fair market value pricing for a full-priced offer, or below-market pricing for a quick sale which could result in multiple offers and a bidding war. But we will not waste the time and money of our clients by encouraging them to price their home in excess of what we feel the market will bear. See the “valuation” tab if you’re interested in seeing what your home is worth today!
Dedicated to your needs ONLY.
We don’t list bank-owned properties. We’re not “short sale listing specialists” who take on 50 listings at a time. We only take quality listings. This allows us the time and budget to exhaustively and effectively market the listings we take.