Listing and Selling your Home
Preparing, listing, marketing, showing and selling a home are not trivial tasks. Success requires significant skills, experience, know how and game plans.
You can hire a competent Agent and Broker and have a very positive experience, or unfortunately you can easily find any number of agents with no clue or plan and end up completely frustrated.
Buying and selling homes is primarily about the internet these days. You’re looking at the internet right now and so is every home buyer out there. Every serious active buyer is on an Agent site, like this one, and or crawling the big national MLS listing aggregrators, like Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, Trulia, etc.
To get started, you will want to get answers on the following questions:
What’s the market value of my home and how long will it take to sell?
This can only be accurately answered after preparing and analyzing a Comparative Market Analysis, or CMA. You may find web sites offering automated CMAs produced by a computer, like a Zillow “zestimate,” using your home address. These are meaningless.
To produce an accurate CMA, a Realtor must do some real work: research and analyze all the recently listed, pending and sold comparables, compare these to your home particulars, and from that build a fact-based scenario, factoring in current market conditions.
To request a real CMA, one that will be as thorough and accurate as possible, I simply need the address of your home to get started. After the initial research, we then factor in the specific features of your home. You can request a CMA here.
How do I prepare my home to make a great first impression?
This is best answered in person, after walking your home with you. But in general, your home needs to be as uncluttered, open and neutral as possible so it will appeal to a wide audience of buyers. We will also send a couple of Realtors through to gather potential buyer first impressions and provide actionable non-fluff feedback for you.
Unfortunately, you only get one or two chances to impress a buyer; the initial showing and any followup showing a buyer schedules. After the first showing, the buyer is off to the next home and is can be easily distracted from your property.
Given this, you really want to maximize this FIRST showing so your potential buyer is asking about making an offer, not asking about looking at ten other homes.
What is our Marketing Plan to sell your house?
Again, the internet exposure is KEY here. All serious buyers are searching relentlessly all over the internet for homes. They have custom searches set up and automated alerts. Their agents are doing them same for them.
According to a National Association of Realtors study, nearly 100% of home buyers are using the Internet to search for homes. If you want to get your home in front of today’s home buyers, you need a comprehensive internet strategy.
All my listings are displayed on the home page of my web site, not buried under the listings section. This gets your listing in front on 100-300 unique visitors per DAY, just from my site alone.
You will not find this with any other Agent, as they likely do not have the expertise or web presence.
Your home will be listed in the FMLS, the Multiple Listing Service as well as cross promoted on all our partner websites. From the FMLS, the listing is picked up by all the large aggregrators (Trulia, etc). I also get your listing in front of a large Facebook audience.
Here’s another one almost no other Broker can offer. Virtual Properties has over 2900 agents and all our listings are shared with all the agents. Many of these agents have a buyer or multiple buyers at any given time. Many homes have been quickly sold via this method alone.
Communication
Communication is key! We will set up a showing procedure that works for you and stick to it, no surprises. We follow up on all showings of your home, seeking feedback. We also stay in constant contact with you, reviewing and adjusting the marketing plan if warranted.