Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category
Buyers Just Want Price
You think?
From Bloomberg:
"Buyers just want price,” says Mike Morgan, a Stuart, Florida-based lawyer, real-estate broker and consultant who researches property markets for hedge funds and financial institutions. "Buyers have become educated and they can easily cut through the fluffy incentives.”
"On one $429,000 home a client wanted me to sell, the seller wanted to give the broker a $30,000 bonus on top of the commission. I told him it wouldn’t help. I told him to just drop the price.”
Then there was this advice about marketing strategy:
Morgan suggests you sell exclusively through Internet-based property sites and local Multiple Listing Services. He has found that newspaper ads, signs and open houses don’t work as well as the Internet.
"If you don’t get any calls on your listing price after a week, drop your price $10,000 or about 2 percent of your original asking price,” Morgan says.
"The market will tell you what the price of your home is. You better be priced 10 percent under your competition — and then be prepared to think about accepting offers under that.”
This isn’t news, or at least it shouldn’t be. It is an inconvenient truth many agents won’t speak. In the spirit of the current election season, I have this message for those agents who tell you that you need to siphon off what’s left of your equity to pay them more: "It’s the price, stupid."
Short Sale Overview Short-circuited by Realtor Trade Group
The other day I wrote a post about a short sale as a viable solution. The subject has been bandied about as an alternate solution for a homeowner who may be faced with losing the home to foreclosure. It has become the agent listing tool de jour. However, it is complicated and there are tax and legal issues that go beyond the scope of what most agents are qualified to address with most potential short sale candidates.
I view myself as a problem solver, negotiator, and marketing expert, then as a real estate sales person. My logic is simple. I believe that when buying or selling real estate, you need access to as much factual information as possible in order to make an intelligent decision, or rather, the best decision possible for that particular situation. Given that mindset, I set out to provide an unbiased, intelligent overview of the issues surrounding short sales.
I did some homework and found an excellent piece written by the legal eagles at the California Association of Realtors (CAR). I prefaced the post with this:
Is A Virtual Tour Right For Your Property?
I get asked all the time, "Bob, what advertising works best?"
Fsbo sellers want to know what works that doesn’t cost anything, sellers want to know how their listings will be advertised regardless of effectiveness, agents want to know what they should stop wasting their money on, and brokers want to offload the entire issue on agents.
My answer is always the same, regardless of whether we’re talking about the San Diego real estate market or Middle America.
