Digging into the archives, I found this blog post from only one year ago…
After an absence of 5 days, I enjoyed reading this post from Counter Intelligence that described a situation that I’m sure is familiar to many real estate bloggers: “I’ve got to post a new article today or I’m going to lose readers.
You have to be in the top three of your “price tier”. Being at the high end of your “price tier” is better than being at the bottom of your “price tier”.
Photos must all be good photos and must be ordered in “hook order”.
Stop looking at what is for sale and stop looking at the comps once your property is listed for sale. If you have a lot of showings and no offers, then it is something AT the property that is causing it not to sell and you are a “bounce point”. If you don’t have enough showings it is something in the mls that is causing it not to sell, unless you HAD a lot of showings at first and dwindled down to not enough.
That’s pretty much it, pretty simple to me, but let me explain some of the lingo up there.
A “price tier” is the increment of value pre-supposed by the public websites. Go to Redfin or Windermere or John L. Scott or CBBain sites, and look at property in your area similar to yours. The site forces you to put a range of value that the site itself predetermines. The lower the price, the more important this is. Let’s look at the $250,000 to $300,000 crowd. If you are $259,000 or $276,000 or $309,000, you are “off”. The site forces people to look at $250,000 to $275,000 and $275,000 to $300,000.
If you are priced at $259,000 you are missing the people stretching up. Let’s face it, almost every single buyer in this price range “stretches up!” as in “I want to spend $250,000, but will go as high as $275,000, but NOT a PENNY MORE! By pricing your property at $254,000, you miss the boat on the $225,000 to $250,000 crowd and don’t compare well enough for the $250,000 to $275,000 crowd. $254,000 is just past the point where someone stretching up will see you at all and your property is not comparing well to those in the group at higher prices. $309,000 is just a KILLER price…the first number being the ALL IMPORTANT one. The difference between $240,000 and $249,000 is nothing, but the difference between $299,000 and $301,000 is a KILLER!! (An aside to agents here. If you are at a listing appointment and the seller insists on pricing at $301,000 instead of $299,999 or $300,000 straight up, LEAVE, RUN! It means “I don’t really want to sell this place, I’m just appeasing my ___ and pretending to be selling it.”
I could write a chapter of a book on “price tiers” alone, so let’s move on to photo “hook order”. Photo #1 is all important as many sites (like Realtor.com last I looked) require the user to click another button to get past photo #1. If photo #1 doesn’t grab them, you are dead in the water, and they are scrolling down past you.
Unfortunately mls rules hinder the seller when it comes to photo #1. There are a few rules written with agents in mind that I do not agree with, and this is one of them. Why should the mls REQUIRE that this all important key photo be…??? Seller should have more freedom in that regard. According to mls rules, photo number one must be an “exterior” shot, preferably the front door area, so agents can more easily find the property. Lame rule in my opinion if the curb appeal is NOT the seller’s claim to fame. All mls services should change that rule yesterday, giving the seller the opportunity to put his best foot forward, regardless of what constitutes each seller’s best foot. In condo complexes it is a KILLER rule. Who the heck needs to see another shot of the outside of a big condo building. Ever wonder why you see 25 shots of the same photo on a new construction project? Looks pretty dumb from the user’s perspective…but….it’s a rule. If the interior is a slab granite knockout and the exterior is 1977…this rule KILLS a seller and the mls is wrong, wrong, and wrong again for making the seller put the 1977 exterior as photo #1 vs. the knockout new kitchen. Let’s all fight for that change…or Robbie, can you reconfigure the photo order on an mls feed???
Hook Order – think attention span. Once you get past photo #1 issues, the second photo must be your absolute best of the rest. Forget about the “virtual tour” concept where you have the buyer “walking in from the front door”. If your claim to fame is your fireplace and kitchen, get those into the #2 and #3 spots. Make a list of your selling points in order or priority. If #1 is new kitchen, #2 is fireplace, #3 is double sinks in master bath…show the photos in the order of the priority of your selling features. If your #1 claim to fame is a jacuzzi in a cheap condo, don’t be afraid to put that jacuzzi as photo #2. Every picture in sequence, is a hook, as buyers often say “no I don’t want to see that one” after seeing photo #1 and #2. Having your best selling features at photo #11 and photo #12??…think about it…common sense rules.
A small note about the number of total photos. Max allowed is 15. Always use max if possible. That DOES NOT mean I want to see the open toilet and the toilet paper. It means take your best features from varied angles. Don’t be afraid to be redundant with regard to your very best selling points, but mix them up. Put it at photo #2 and #3 and bring it back to emphasize the strong selling features at photo #11 and #12, but from a different perspective as in #2 is kitchen from kitchen and #11 is kitchen from dining area.
This is getting way too long and I have things to do, so let’s just brush over the last point. If I could crack open every agent’s brain and slide in a little microchip, it would say STOP LOOKING AT THE COMPS AFTER THE PROPERTY IS LISTED FOR SALE! You look at the comps to determine your opening price out the gate, that’s all, DONE, finito!! No showings…wrong price. Plenty of showings but everything is selling but yours…condition problems. DO NOT even MENTION the sold comps once you are out the gate…irrelevant data.
And if I had nickel for everytime I heard an agent say, “I don’t know what’s wrong? We’re the ‘best game in town’ given what is for sale.” Face it…they are going to the next town, because you are an overpriced dog, regardless of the fact you have no competition in YOUR complex. What else can they buy for THEIR MONEY is the order of the day! Of utmost importance with one level condos. Buyers come in waves. “Surfing the net” is not just a catch phrase.
In the low price range the buyers are currently renting and have nothing to sell. If they don’t like what they are seeing in their price range, because the cream has been skimmed off the top, they wait for the next wave of new inventory. Your wave has crashed and your board is floating out to sea.
Buyers pay attention to these rules, and go grab all of the stale ones who aren’t following the rules, by offering them eighty cents on the dollar. Go for the $309,000s, on market for over 60 days, with only two photos, photo #1 being the sign with the name of the condo complex on it 🙂 and search for the “pick of the litter”.
Wikimapia, which is basically wikipedia plus location, just added the ability to embed maps into your page. I like the neighborhood boxes and the map interface, but as far as labeling and tying together the world, it’s not quite as good as 43 Places, which lets users map their neighborhoods with more precision than a rectangle.
The amount of open, user generated spatial information on the web is skyrocketing right now.
[photopress:bow.jpg,thumb,alignright]Let’s hit this nail right on the head.
Truth is I’m not taking any bows for kudos and props on my blogging efforts to date, because I haven’t yet said what really needs to be said.
Zillow is “good enough” because agents aren’t.
Redfin is “good enough” because agents aren’t.
Inspectors and Disclosure Forms aren’t “good enough” because agents aren’t demanding better service from these areas for their clients. Don’t get me started on the lead based paint debacle…CYA is the order of the day.
Lead generators are needed because agents aren’t “good enough” to attract clients based on their own merits.
Agents aren’t “good enough” because all of the education is about how to cover your butt, thanks to the lawyers, and all of the education classes are about how to “get more leads” and not about how to “deserve” them or what to do with them after you’ve got them.
“Lower the price, lower the price, lower the price”…is NOT how you sell a house.
“Sign this huge pile of disclosures” so that if you get ripped off you can’t sue me, is not how you represent a buyer client.
If your clients think they are paying you too much, they are probably right.
Consumer: The answer isn’t to find someone who will charge you less, the answer is to find someone who will cover YOUR butt instead of their own.
Now I’ll take that freakin’ bow. Thank you Sellsius and Dustin and Bloodhound Blog and Uberator and Kate and…I don’t know, maybe Dave Letterman.
[photopress:inspectors.jpg,thumb,alignright]I am just beside myself on the topic of home inspectors and asbestos. I don’t care how many inspectors want to tell me why inspectors aren’t “obligated” to call asbestos in the inspection, I will still keep saying: “You have GOT to be KIDDING me!!
I’ve seen more asbestos in homes in the Seattle area than in my entire career to date around the Country.
“Well Ardell, I know we both “think” that’s asbestos were looking at there, but we really can’t say it’s asbestos unless we send it out to a lab and have it tested. So we just have this disclaimer in our contract saying we are not responsible for calling asbestos in the inspection…and that is sufficient for US” US being the home inspectors!!
Yesterday I literally took a razor tool from the inspector and cut open some paneling held together by duct tape in a basement and forced an inspector to look behind it before he wrote “inaccessible area” on the report! I said if you don’t lend me something to do this with, I’m going to use my bare hands!
How come I can get 10 average Joe’s to stand around the asbestos wrapped pipes, who will all say “Yep, dats asbestis alright”, but I can’t get one inspector to note asbestos in a home inspection report?
Oh, and here’s the agent’s lovely comment (I represent the seller and she represents the buyer) “Not my problem. The buyer chose their inspector and if the inspector doesn’t tell him what he needs to know…that’s not my problem, is it?”
In PA inspectors included “testing for radon” by setting canisters in the house and sending them to the lab. They couldn’t see radon or taste it or smell it, but they didn’t put a disclaimer in their contract saying “Duh, Don’t Know”.
Here’s a clue, Risk Reduction equals every buyer KNOWING WHAT the heck they are buying!!, not 25 disclaimer and disclosure forms covering everyone’s butts in the industry! And they have the nerve to tell me that they don’t want me at the inspection because I make them look bad…Oh WELL!!
And if you stick that pointy metal thing and chunk away at the mortar between the bricks of my seller’s house one more time in some silly act of macho bravado, I’m going to take it out of your and and stick it where you don’t want it stuck.
Some days I want to be a waitress…
To Stephane, this entire post should be in bold AND all caps! I am heeding your advice. But if you tell me to stop using !!exclamation points!!, we’ll have to agree to disagree 🙂
[photopress:top_10_women_bloggers.jpg,thumb,alignright]Rudolph over at the Sellsius blog put together of his choice for the top woman real estate bloggers. It is a great list and all of the featured bloggers are worth reading. No surprise that Seattle had both both Ardell and Marlow featured on the list! They are two of the finest bloggers, male or female, Seattle or otherwise.
Other bloggers featured were:
Some others I would have put on my short list of contenders are:
[photopress:2faced000.jpg,thumb,alignright] Much has been written about the accuracy, or lack thereof, of the Zillow Zestimate of a home’s value. What one must remember is that a property can sell at the low point or the high point of its Zestimated range.
I don’t pay much attention to the articles written on bubbles bursting and what kind of market we are in, because I always know what kind of market I am in. I feel it in my bones, the same way an old person can tell that it’s going to rain before the weatherman predicts it. I know just how far I can push a price in either direction, depending on market conditions and who I represent in the transaction.
Every agent wears two hats and is two-faced, because a home’s “value” has to be higher when I represent a seller and lower when I represent a buyer, and it is my “job” to “make it so”. The Zillow range of value represents my best hope for my buyer client at the low end of the range, and my highest hope for my seller client at the high end of that range. I have yet to meet an agent in the Country who can jump back and forth over that line as well as I do. I guess that makes me two-faced, but being very good at being two-faced has always been my forte.
When I represent a seller I try to get the seller to give me the key to his house for a couple of days and go away and give me “carte blanche”. Mainly because I look very odd when I am “doing my seller thing”, somewhat like “MONK” at a crime scene. I keep going out to the street and walking up to the house, at various paces from all directions, emulating a buyer getting out of the car from every possible available parking spot. The neighbors must think I’m looney.
I trim trees and bushes based on the angle of the “walk up” and what I can see and what I can’t see. “Good, that bush blocks that window frame that needs painting…bad, that tree is blocking the main feature, the rounded brick archway…then I trim the tree to “accentuate the positive” until I can see the brick archway from the position of the buyer driving by or getting out of the car, and leave the bush overgrown to “de-emphasize the negative”.
I walk into the front door 25 or more times and change things, until I remove any negative influence in my sight pettern (which is eye level side to side, without looking up or down). I always tell agents, “if you are standing in one place when you are staging a home you are “decorating” and not “staging”. Walk through and walk fast. Remove negative influence or distract the eye away from the negative with a bright vase or photo in the opposite place from the negative. If you can’t eradicate the negative, draw the eye toward the positive. That is staging, and that is why the agent has to do it themselves and not hire landscapers and decorators.
Staging is about the real estate, and a real estate professional must be in charge of what will and will not be done, to enhance the sale price.
Conversely, putting on my other hat, I take out my other face when evaluating homes with buyers. We both step into the house, and usually I walk one way and they walk the other, and I see things quite differently than they do.
They say they “love” it and I say “Oh, my God WHY?”. I get them to focus and point to what they like. Sometimes by forcing them to tell me what they like, it turns out to be a painting or a piece of furniture. I say great, let’s find that painting to put in your new house, but for now let’s go back and try this again and look at the “real estate” of this place. Sometimes, if it is vacant, I actually have to move the staging so they can see what I see.
To achieve the lowest possible price for my buyer, I either have to find a seller who has “left money on the table” or I have to find a property that is overpriced. If a house could have sold for $510,000 or $515,000, but the seller priced it at $519,000 and staged it incorrectly, I can usually get it for $500,000. That’s a standard best case scenario. If a property comes on at less than fair market value, which happens on occasion, I can usually swoop in and modify terms, to grab it while the vultures are still hovering.
Often people comment on the Zillow Zestimate wondering “Where exactly is the value of this house? Is it closer to the high end of the range or the low end of the range?” The answer is it is the agent’s job to pull “the value” in the direction of their client. When I represent the seller, I have to DO something before I hit that “live on the mls” button that makes it go higher. When I am representing a buyer I have to DO something to force it back in the other direction.
I pretend that all my clients are Captain Kirk, who command me to “make it so #2” 🙂
[photopress:3ofhearts.jpg,thumb,alignright]I’m still scratching my head as to why agents around the country hate Zillow so much that they want to call it “Z”. Theory is that if they even whisper the name Zillow, they are spreading “the word” and helping it to become even more popular.
Zillow is a system of mathematical calculations, a tool that is easy and fun to use. So isn’t hating Zillow like hating your calculator?
I like Zillow because before they came along, all of the lead generators were about buyers. Buyers went there to look at houses and hit the big flashing “Find an Agent” button and were taken off to never-never-land where the lead generator collected a toll. Buying buyer leads has always been a joke. I can hardly go anywhere without hearing someone talking about buying a house. Every coffee shop, restaurant, the lady in line in front of you at the bank, at least 20% of the people at a barbecue…really. If you need to buy a buyer lead you need to look in the mirror and figure out why you need to trick people into hitting a big flashing button and pay for one. Time to hone up your skills and get a personality.
The innovation of Zillow is that every lead generator has asked that question: “How do we attract SELLER leads?” Even House Values knows that they cannot get enough seller leads, and they can sell them as fast as they can get them. There are more agents willing to buy seller leads from House Values in prime areas, then there are seller leads to go around. There’s a waiting list…I know…I’ve been on it for over a year. Every time they email or call me I ask…you have a seller lead spot available for 98033 or 98034. Answer is always no, but they are trying to sell me something else. Because attracting sellers rather than buyers is something the lead generator industry has been very lax at doing well.
And then comes Zillow. I don’t know what they are selling, but they clearly have the seller’s attention. Did Zillow get an Inman award for that? If not…Zillow now has the ARDELL award for innovation in lead generating sites. Don’t be waiting for the trophy, I haven’t gotten out shopping for Greg and Sharon yet, and you’re behind them.
Kudos to Zillow. Don’t know where you’re running with that ball, but kudos for putting a seller oriented site in play.
I like Redfin, because…
a lot of my past clients who came to me from blogging,
tried them first 🙂
Between Galen scaring us with stories of AOL mischief, and both the WSJ and USA Today treating us to stories of crime-infested houses (you can’t just “repaint” over memories), I’m thinking there is something fishy in the air and I probably shouldn’t be writing any blog posts today.
However, I can’t help but wonder: What factors do you use in choosing your client when they are dead?
The red-brick mansion that just went up for sale in Greenwich, Conn., has about everything a buyer could want. Set on 2.1 lush acres on tree-lined Dairy Road, it has four bedrooms, four bathrooms, two fireplaces and a pool. Its $5.2 million asking price is, by Greenwich standards, appealing.
The home has another distinctive feature. The basement is where real-estate developer Andrew Kissel — who had been renting the home for $15,000 per month — was found bound, gagged and stabbed to death in April. “To say the broker will need all the luck he can get finding a buyer is an understatement,” says Greenwich broker Chris Fountain, who isn’t connected with the property’s sale.
Almost 10 years after the body of 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was found in the basement of her Boulder, Colo., home, the Tudor-style house at 749 15th St. is on the market again.
“It’s stigmatized. It’s always been stigmatized,” says Joel Ripmaster, president of Colorado Landmark Realtors. Ripmaster has represented the last four owners of the property, all who purchased or sold the house at below-market value since JonBenét’s slaying in 1996.
Note: I went ahead and published this article today because it was brought to my attention that RCG does not do well in “real estate murder”-related search queries 😉
A seller receives 23 offers on his property. All of the buyer agents want to present their offers in person and introduce the buyers to the seller.
There are 23 buyer agents and their buyer clients seated on folding chairs in a big room. Picture 50 or more people sitting on folding chairs with Offers to Purchase in their hands.
In a little conference room sits a seller and the seller’s agent preparing to review these 23 offers. The seller is not happy. All he wants is one, good and acceptable offer. He is overwhelmed by the prospect of having to review 23 offers and send 22 people home “empty handed”.
One by one the buyers and their agents “present their offer to the seller”. After about 8 of these “presentations”, the seller is totally confused and beside himself, as all of the offers seem about the same to him.
Along comes buyer number 9 and his agent. The savvy buyer’s agent can sense that the seller is completely fried and wants this over with. So he makes the seller an offer he can’t refuse, and the seller says to his agent “I’m going to take this one, get everyone else out of here.”
So the totally embarrassed seller’s agent goes out to the big room of many people in folding chairs and announces that the seller is DONE! He thanks them all for coming, but the seller is going to take offer #9 and they should all leave now.
AND THEN, AND THEN….ALONG COMES HANNAH!!! She jumps up from her chair, runs past the seller’s agent, kicks open the door to the little conference room, points at the buyer and buyer’s agent in the room and says “Whatever these guys have offered…we’ll go $100,000 over THAT!!
The seller’s eyes get as big as saucers. He realizes that it may be in his best interest to let everyone compete with one another and so he tells his agent to proceed as originally planned and “the game” proceeds until all 23 agents and their buyers have given their “Final and Best” offer.
I just love the picture in my mind of Hannah jumping from her chair, TACKLING THE LISTING AGENT, kicking down the door and refusing to be eradicated! I wonder why no one has ever made a movie of her valiant move! Her client must have been stunned, the whole room must have gasped in awe! I totally LOVE this story.
End result: Hannah’s client did NOT get the house. In fact Buyer #9 did, in the end, get the house for $400,000 more than his first acceptable offer. Buyer #9 got the house AND he sued Hannah’s company for making him have to pay $400,000 more for the house, as Hannah and Buyer #9’s agent worked for the same company. The suit was settled out of court and we now have “the Hannah clause” in all Buyer Agency contracts stating that the buyer is aware that the company may have other buyers under contract competing for the same house.
So Hannah’s efforts have become legendary…but only in the archives of lawyers and new stock clauses.
Hannah deserves much better…she at least deserves this article on a blog. So here’s to you Hannah! You are my idol!