Contrary to popular belief, the most difficult aspect of an agent’s job, isn’t selling property. On the contrary, the most difficult task for an agent, is getting listings to sell in the first place. Once an agent has been given exclusive authority to sell a listing, his greatest challenge is already behind him. As a home owner selling your own home – you have the unique luxury of not needing to get the listing. You already own the listing – two thirds of the work is already done for you. All you need to do now is sell it, and selling a house is not difficult. It’s no more difficult than selling your car, or boat, or any other large asset. Provided you price it correctly, present it to a responsive market, and ensure your paperwork is in order, there’s really nothing to it.
Here’s the process, in a nut shell.
1: Get your house in order
Before you can even think about selling, you need to get your house as move-in ready as possible. Buyers are a lazy, unimaginative bunch. Any mess, clutter, or maintenance issues will quickly turn them off. Even simple jobs like oiling the deck or re-painting a few dull walls can make a huge difference to buyer attitudes. Don’t underestimate the power of presentation!
This is the same whether you decide to use an agent or sell yourself. Clean your rooms, touch up any paint marks on walls, throw away any clutter and junk, put personal items into storage, tidy the yard, tend to any maintenance issues, mulch the gardens, prune the trees, clean out the garden shed, etc, etc. Once you’ve got your house looking spic and span, you’re ready for the next step. Research!
2: Knowledge is power
One of the valuable things a good real estate agent offers is local knowledge. They know how much the house down the road sold for, and the one next door to it, and the one across the street. In fact agents know how much just about any house in the suburb sold for, when, and why… This knowledge means they can very quickly look at your house, and identify with a fairly high degree of accuracy, how much the property is worth based on sales history. This is called a Comparative Market Analysis. Databases like RPData and Price Finder hold vast amounts of information on sales of just about every home in every suburb. When you list with us, we produce a professional CMA for you, telling you exactly how much you can expect to sell for, and why. We even give you an extensive list of similar properties that have sold recently in your area to support our estimates. This information grants you the confidence to price your house as you see fit and can form a powerful reference when negotiating with buyers.
3: Marketing Is Key
80% of what the agent does these days is marketing… which is ironic given 90% of the money they make is in the sale. The days of people walking into a real estate office and asking to see their stock are gone. Long, long gone! These days almost all property searches are performed online. The way online marketing works with major portals, is that photography is basically the only thing shown to buyers in the search process. Photography is therefore absolutely critical. It makes a massive difference between people clicking on your listing, or scrolling past it. We strongly (and I mean, STRONGLY!) recommend you use a professional photographer to capture your listing in the best possible light. $260 is all it costs in metro areas for a 16 image photoshoot and the images always look fantastic and add many tens or thousands in value to your campaign. Remember, buyers are LAZY and UNIMAGINATIVE, don’t expect them to be able to see past the blurry, pixilated, flat, distorted looking images you took with your iphone. They won’t, they’ll just scroll past to the next listing… the one with the nice professional images. Spend the extra $260 and get professional images taken. While you’re getting a photoshoot done, you might as well upgrade your signage to a professionally designed sign board. We’ll lay it out for you with your photos, get it printed, delivered, and installed at your house within 24hrs of approval (metro areas), for just $270. Get attention from people driving and walking past your house!
4: Presentation matters
When presenting your property to buyers, make sure your house: looks good, feels good and smells good! Keep it tidy, keep it uncluttered, keep it clean. Don’t cook an Asian stew 10 minutes before people turn up for an inspection. Remove personal affects like photos from walls and shelves, these restrict buyers ability to imagine themselves living in the home (remember, buyers have terrible imaginations!) Make sure pets, children, greasy teenagers, etc, are whisked away to Grandma’s house during inspections.
When buyers arrive, be sure to greet everyone at the front door, introduce yourself and make sure you take down their name and phone number in your note book, and give them a flyer about the house. We design and email you a PDF flier about your property as part of our package, just get them printed at your local Office Works or on your colour printer if you have one. Handing over printed material to take-away gives the buyer a way to contact you, as well as a tangible memento of the inspection. It will float around in their car for a few days, before they bring it into their house where it will float around some more, constantly reminding them of the house every time they look at it, and hopefully trigger them to take further action. You can also give them a follow-up call a few days after the inspection to get feedback. This is important, as it lets you identify any potential issues buyers may have with the listing, and also see how your pricing is holding up. Don’t get emotional or take it personally, when buyers give you negative feedback. All feedback is good feedback and it wouldn’t be as valuable if it wasn’t honest.
5: Negotiating
You can negotiate face-to-face with buyers to get a general ballpark offer nailed down. When you have a buyer interested in the property, you should compel them to submit an offer in writing.
It’s at around this point that you should speak to your conveyancer, they can shoot the contract over to the buyer to sign, and ensure the whole process is legal.
It is important to note that the buyer generally has a few ‘outs’ they can use during the contract period. They can have the finance rejected, they can fail the building and pest inspections, they can pull out on the cooling off period (although a penalty will often apply), or they can cancel the contract for a myriad of other reasons that may have been outlined in the contract clauses (due diligence, low valuation, subject to sale of their own property, etc, etc). As the seller, however, you don’t have the same luxury. Basically as soon as that contract is accepted, you’re obliged to sell so make sure you’re happy with the price you’ve agreed on.