2010 February — Lise Howe.com

Don’t Sell Your Listing to the Highest Bidding Realtor!

Some Agents Just Keep Bidding UP

Some agents get the listing by inflating the value of your house.

Or they may simply go along with “your” unrealistic price without objection. This is what’s known in the trade as “buying the listing.” The agent figures that you’ll eventually give up and give in and place a real price on your property. If you let this happen, it’s really your own fault.

Don’t be fooled! You need for your agent to be straight with you from the beginning. This means you should receive from every agent you interview a “supportable” opinion of value based on recently sold properties in your neighborhood; exactly what you would demand if you were a buyer. An honest agent will give you a “range” in which your house should sell.

If you price your house too aggressively high it will take longer to sell and you will probably will receive less in the end. If you take too long to reduce your price, your house can get stigmatized with prospective buyers wondering what’s wrong because your house has been on the market for so long.

In the end, ready, willing and able buyers determine value … not sellers and not real estate agents. And sometimes it isn’t even the buyer who determines the price, but rather the mortgage company’s appraiser, who can come in and find a value for the property that is significantly different than the contract price.

Rather than pick an agent based on which one promises you the highest price, why not look at the agent’s marketing plan. You want an agent who understands and “gets” your house. I talk to my sellers about how I plan to tell the story of their home and to communicate that story to prospective buyers. I believe that each property has special qualities that make it appealing to buyers. In the case of a condo that I sold recently along Connecticut Avenue, the story was the old world elegance of the building and the condo itself. The website that I hosted for the property, www.2737devonshireplacenw.com, brought out that feeling in buyers and it sold within three days with a full price offer.

Does the agent plan to make a video tour of your home? We all are so conditioned to twenty second sound bites and visual stimulation! It only makes sense to put together a video tour of your home in order to hook buyers into the emotions of your home.

Don’t sell your home to the highest bidding realtor – Your home and you deserve better than that!

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Why Hire A Realtor to Sell Your Home?

Back in the hot days of the real estate market, when sellers were secretly sure that if they wanted to move, all they had to do was put a For Sale sign in their yard, and the buyers would come flocking to them, waving vast sums of money. Times have changed, and sellers see more value in Realtors, but is this really the case? Where are homebuyers getting their information? Is a Realtor really necessary?

A recent survey by the National Association Realtors showed some surprising results in the attitude of recent homebuyers.

An eight-page questionnaire was sent out to over 100,000 consumers who had purchased a home between July 2008 and Jun 2009. They were asked to rank the usefulness of certain information sources typically used by Realtors® to market homes. When asked which information sources they found to be useful consumers ranked as follows:

Real estate agents 81%

The Internet 77%

Yard signs 42%

Open houses came out low in the ranks with 10% of buyers finding them to be very useful and 25% said that they were somewhat useful.

But where are buyers actually finding the homes that they eventually buy?

36% found their homes on the Internet
36% discovered the home from a real estate agent
12% from yard signs

Only 4% of buyers said they found their homes via newspapers, home books, magazines and television.

Many realtors still find open houses to be a good way to meet the public as well as an effective way to expose homes to buyers. But according to this latest survey – consumers, apparently, do not agree.

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