In the world of real estate sales, it would be nice if every property was to sell within the first 7 days and for more than the owners’ expectations and we’re often in a position where this does happen…but it doesn’t happen every time.

I can promise you that it would make my life a lot easier if it did! 😊

There’s a misconception that an agent knows precisely how much a home will sell for…and this can be a long way from the truth.

Just recently, I listed a home for sale and after the first two weeks, everything seemed to be well on track.

We hadn’t sold it, but the signs were there that a good offer wasn’t far away…and then disaster struck – another home was listed for sale in the same street by a different agency that was very comparable…only $50,000 cheaper!

Needless to say, this completely derailed our campaign and made it very hard to recover.

So, if one of our listings has been on the market with no result, we will normally catch up with the owners and sit down to dissect the campaign and look for ways to improve.

Many agents will focus on only one thing at these meetings – price!

But we believe there’s more to increasing activity in selling a home than simply reducing the price.

Sure – if you constantly reduce your price, will you eventually end up selling a home? You bet…but at what cost?

I’ve never yet met a seller that is prepared to ‘Give their home away’.

There’s one particular real estate group that has a company policy of asking the owners to reduce their price by 10% (5% is the fallback) every 7-14 days if the property has not sold and in my opinion, this is highly unethical.

Many agencies run their own agenda of selling a property as a number to meet KPI’s or sales’ targets rather than focus on what’s best for their clients.

So how do we work if a result hasn’t been achieved.

As I mentioned last week, I’ll share with you an action plan of one of my recent properties that didn’t yield a result after the first 60 days on the market.

Here it is below…

• We changed the main photo and the heading of the advertisement

• Change the furniture layout of the living/ dining room as it had been mentioned by a few buyers that this space seemed small when in fact, it was actual a reasonable size. We took out one large piece of furniture, brought into an extra 2-seater couch and gave the room a little more structure.

• We re-filmed a video tour of the property to focus a little more on the area as the buyers we were attracting seemed to be (generally speaking) a different age group too what we expected…hence some of the features of the home and the facilities within the area were possibly missing the mark just a little based on what predominant age group was showing interest in the home.

• We added a floor plan to the advertisement. There’s ‘Pro’s and Con’s of this and as you might be aware, I’m often reluctant to give too much away as I often seek to attract buyers into the home before giving them tools to eliminate their search but the we concluded that our property was a lot larger than it looks from the street and as such, felt it worth providing this as a tool to bring some buyers in that might have thought it to be too small for their needs.

• We changed the ‘Car accommodation’ icon from ‘1’ to ‘2’. We knew that this may have been a move that was a little controversial but worth a go. The home has a single carport and a single garage that has been converted into an extra bedroom by the removal of the garage door and replaced with glass sliders. It would be easy to remove the glass doors and re-install the garage door to turn it back into a garage. Whilst this may reduce the number of bedrooms by one, there’s an upstairs rumpus room that could be easily be termed a bedroom since it offers a built-in robe…so in effect, the number of bedrooms would remain the same, but the number of living spaces is reduced by one. Some would argue that there’s work to do to effectively utilise ‘2 car accommodation’ but we might be turning buyers away that have 2 cars and as such, we could be turning away our willing buyer.

• We upgraded the listing on the major real estate portals to re-appear in a more prominent position.

• We added a price back into the advertisement (it hadn’t had a price for a period of time as an experiment because we were receiving a lower number of enquiries and inspections when it was listed with a price. This experiment was to determine if the price was too high and was the contributing factor towards a lower than expected level of enquiry). This new price was a little lower than the original listed price but not a huge amount lower.

As you can see, there’s so much more to carefully analysing a sales campaign in order to maximise the final selling price.

What do many agents do?

Simply ask the owners to drop the price with little thought into anything else.

Hopefully, this might provide an insight for you into how we believe an agent should look into a sales campaign and if your property and not yet sold, perhaps you can take a few ideas out of this blog that just might work.

Until next week, Happy Listing & Happy Selling!