Category: Marketing (page 143 of 191)

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):

 
Market today should dictate price of home

How much effort should you put into listing your home for sale?

After the past 15 months, that’s almost a silly question. There are more than 40,000 homes for sale in Maricopa County, with an average time on market of almost four months.

How much effort should you expend to sell your home? Whatever it takes.

We tend to be very careful about the listings we’ll take, because we want our homes sold in four days or four weeks, not four months.

But that leads us to the most important thing you can do to make sure your home sells while others languish: Price it to the market.

Home values in the West Valley are down 12 to 15 percent from the peak. If you’re pricing to the peak market and not this one, your house will not sell.

I want to talk about some innovative marketing ideas, but no amount of marketing can overcome a too-high price. If you are unwilling to price your home to the market, you might as well spare yourself the agony of listing it.

Now let’s go through the home and repair everything. You don’t need to remodel — unless you really do — but everything should work as advertised.

Have your Realtor walk through your home. Anything that you feel the impulse to call attention to, or to divert attention from, should be repaired or replaced. Your most sales-worthy competition is in turnkey condition. So should you be.

Your Realtor should either be a home stager or have a relationship with one. Either way, an expert needs to go through your home with a critical eye, giving you room-by-room instructions on what to get rid of, what to pack away, what to move, what to emphasize.

Your stager might add furniture or decor items, or it may be sufficient to redeploy the things you already own. The point is to enable buyers to move themselves in psychologically, without your own lives getting in the way.

Next week, we’ll talk about some passive marketing tools that can swing the balance your way.

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by Cathleen Collins

Realtor, Staging Consultant

Author website

As real estate professionals, our clients’/customers’ satisfaction with our service and the outcome of their transactions is unquestionably key to business success. In fact, I’d bet this has been true in every career you have ever had. It sure has been for me… beginning with my first jobs as babysitter, then as counter help at The Red Barn, and then throughout my various corporate positions in management, finance and information technology. Whether my customer has been internal, external, faceless or my very best friend, I’ve always done very well by doing very well for him and her.

And so it’s always been maddening for me to see someone or some organization fail to recognize that the “customer is always right,” or if the customer isn’t right to help the customer become right… at least to try to help. We all know the adage that a happy customer will tell someone else about his satisfactory experience, but an unhappy customer will tell the unhappy story ten times more often. Well, I want to tell you about great customer service that I was just the happy recipient of.

But first some background… It begins with Greg and me wanting to attract more clients than we were getting from reputation alone. Around the end of the amazing sellers’ market of 2004/2005, around the first anniversary of BloodhoundRealty.com, we hoped to jump-start our business by giving someone who didn’t know us personally (or through referral) a reason to believe that we put our clients’ interests above our own. We wanted to offer something more tangible than a motto or a sincere-looking pose. We were doing well when we took listings, but we were turning down more listings than we were accepting, because home owners, who didn’t yet know us, didn’t yet believe us that the buyers were no longer willing to pay top dollar. So we figured we would try to attract buyers by offering to let them keep their money in their pockets — money they would be paying the seller to pay to us. We thought that once we got this word out, we would Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I was at a party about 13 months ago, a going away party for one of my clients whose house we had just sold. I had sold the hostess her house, and somehow or another we started talking about 80/20 loans — nothing down financing. She had just refinanced to retire the second mortgage, so she had 20% equity in her home at next-to-nothing in out-of-pocket costs.

All around the room, people started nodding and saying 80/20, 80/20. They had all done the same thing, a room full of young homeowners with their homeownership made possible by the no-PMI piggy-back loan.

This is Peter Coy in Business Week’s Hot Property:

Is Your Mortgage Choking You?

For an article in BW, I’m looking to interview people who have subprime ARM mortgages and are feeling squeezed by resets.

A few weeks ago, Coy admitted that margins of error in statistical reporting render much of it meaningless. I have never worked with a sub-prime borrower, but I would expect that, among the stories of people being “choked,” there must also be stories of people who bought homes they would not otherwise have been able to purchase, homes they have subsequently refinanced with conforming loans.

“Proof by anecdote” is bogus in the first place, since anecdotes abound (and they’re much easier than real estate to improve). But surely there are countervailing anecdotes for almost any phenomenon. This might seem to argue for presenting “both sides” of the story. To me, it suggests a better approach. An anecdote in a news article is almost always a fallacious Appeal to Emotion dressed up as testimony. With two or three sad tales, the reporter implies that a situation that might be quite rare is in fact ubiquitous — and that the “solution” propounded requires no rational defense. Facts are facts, and surely thoughtful people can digest them without all that saccharine. Why not leave the anecdotes out altogether…?

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by Russell Shaw

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

Most of the national real estate sales trainers training today are selling worthless crap. Want proof? Buy their stuff and see if you can apply any of it and actually make your business better.

Most of the real estate magazine articles that are chock full of “what agents ought to be doing” are written by well intentioned people who either were never successful at selling real estate for a living or never did.

One of the most high profile agents in the world endlessly promotes that he will share (if you sign up for his fabulous training program) how he became so successful. He is quite successful and it would seem logical that he could share quite a bit that would help. One of the main things he “shares” is a cluttered looking clone website that you can buy from him. I’m not quite sure how that website helped him so much as he was fantastically successful before the internet existed.

One trainer (rhymes with fairy) knowingly lies from the stage.

Most agents who enter the business (13 out of 14 by actual count) will be gone in a year or two. Can that be changed by “learning about success”? I really doubt it, as most of them didn’t have much commitment to ever really apply themselves. But that doesn’t include everyone – there are a LOT of people in the real estate business who want to do better and aren’t sure what to do next.

I’m planning on doing something about that. Over the years I have figured out what is involved – exactly – to go from “0 – 60” and I also know what is not involved. We are going to make that information broadly available. Free. Free, in the sense that we won’t be charging any money for any of it. Period. We won’t be endlessly attempting to get new people to listen to the audio or watch the videos because it makes us more money. Our only goal will be to see Read more