11May2008
Posted by Jerry Kidd under: How to...; Sales Tips.
Welcome to late spring! In about 4 weeks it will officially be summer and by now all of your listings should have offers on them or should be in escrow…right?
Hardly. This market is not recovered to the point where you can make general statements like that. In years past, it was commonly accepted knowledge that a home placed on the market in spring would have the best chance of selling, due to the larger number of home buyers present in the spring market. This year that is not always true.
However, there are some things that you can do to enhance the possibility of selling that listing that seems to be languishing on the market. If you have been diligent in your marketing efforts, and if the home is presentable and in good repair, then there is a good possibility that you don’t have the right price on the home. In many of our markets, we have seen multiple offers on well presented, well priced homes. So we know that buyers are out there and they are looking for bargains.
Obtaining a price reduction from today’s sellers is a necessity once the home has been on the market for 30 days with no offers and no sale. Beyond 30 days, the available pool of buyers has seen the home, either virtually or in person, and they have declined to make an offer. In order to attract fresh buyers (and even bring back previous lookers) you will need to adjust the price downwards.Obtaining price reductions has always been both an art and a science. The art is in your presentation and the science is in your ability to pull together the facts and make a compelling argument.
We have all heard that 80% (or more) of home buyers begin their search on the Internet. We have heard it from many sources, but perhaps the most strident voice is Realtor.com. They seem to have most of the listings on line and they do a very good job of tracking visits to each of the listings that they have on the site. But, did you know that you can get Realtor.com to give you a comprehensive report of the traffic to your listings? And that you can either email or print the report?
Here is how to obtain this "secret tool": First, go to Realtor.com, then…
-Click on Resource Center on the left side of the home page (Under “For Realtors”)
-Choose your MLS
-Put in your Agent MLS Identifier # (Generally your NRDS number)
-Put in your Agent MLS Identifier # again as your password (Unless you have changed your password previously)
-Click on Reporting and then click on Listing Traffic
-Click on MLS # (You have to have listings in the MLS for this to work)
-Then click on either printable version or email version
Here is what you will get: (I have removed all identifying information, but other than that, this is an actual report)
As you can see, there was a steady buildup of traffic over the first couple of weeks, but after that, traffic has steadily declined…and there have been no offers. Do you think that if this was your listing that you could take this report to the seller and convince them that if over 2500 people had viewed the listing and he still hadn’t gotten an offer, that a price reduction was in order? I’ll bet that you could!
Give it a try on your listings, go get a price reduction and get a closed sale before the end of summer!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
4May2008
Posted by Jerry Kidd under: How to...; Product Reviews; Sales Tips.
I know a lot of agents and brokers that do not like the emergence of online players such as Zillow and Trulia. I was involved in many "water cooler" talks when these sites first came out. In fact, many of those conversations revolved around the inaccuracy of the information contained on those sites. Many of us predicted the early demise of them because of the inaccurate data.
Then a funny thing happened, the public embraced those sites and started using them.
As professionals, we found it necessary to visit those sites before meeting with our clients just so that we could be prepared to answer questions. It also became necessary to help our clients understand what they had learned on those sites, and why the data was often inaccurate. Over time, the data has improved and customer acceptance has gone up based on web site traffic to both sites.
Pretty soon it became apparent that we would have to learn to work with them because they weren’t going to go away!
As it turns out, both Zillow and Trulia were anxious to work with us and began to offer tools to do just that.
On Zillow, you can register for a free account and then you can do some pretty cool things like submitting a listing with up to 50 pictures. If you wanted to spend some money on targeted ads, Zillow has a way for you to create targeted ads that will be made available to people looking in a certain zip code. They offer you a listing presentation piece that you can use to explain why you use Zillow to help market your listings. It’s available at: http://www.zillow.com/static/pdf/Why-Agents-Use-Zillow.pdf.
If you don’t have any current listings, you can use Zillow to "fish" for buyers and sellers by several different methods, not the least of which is to periodically log into the site and answer questions posed by other visitors to the site.
You can do many of the same things on Trulia as well. You can upload your listings manually or use a service such as Postlets. You can sign up to answer questions that are posed by visitors to the site and by doing so can be recognized as a local expert. You can also buy targeted ads as well.
Trulia also has a marketing piece that you can use, but you will probably not want to do so unless you are with one of the brokerages listed at the bottom of the piece. It’s available at: http://images.trulia.com/resources/Trulia_User_Profile.pdf
What they do have that I think is very interesting is that they offer 4 different widgets to add to your blog or web site…one for stats, a map, a search box and the "Home Roll" which lists the latest listings for an area. Tools like these on your blog or web site go a long way to making your site stickier.
My recommendation is that you take a few minutes and go visit these sites and sign up for both of them. Upload your listings. Answer some questions. Become part of the community and who knows, one of these "interlopers" may bring you your next transaction!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
27April2008
Posted by Jerry Kidd under: How to...; Product Reviews; Sales Tips.
We used to live in the information age, but we don’t anymore.
That’s a pretty bold statement, but here is what I mean. The Internet, more specifically the World Wide Web, has flooded us with information. So much so that we are constantly bombarded from the time we get up until we go to sleep. We are assaulted by email, text messages, phone calls, newspapers, magazines, television news, radio news, RSS feeds and on and on. (And we used to complain that we didn’t have time to read the paper every morning!)
In addition to all of the above ways that we are hit with too much information, there is a quiet revolution taking place. And that is that we are moving into the age of referral or recommendation. People are increasingly turning to each other to make purchase decisions as a way to make sense of it all. They are using sites like www.Yelp.com and other social networking sites to help them make decisions about what products or services to use.
In speaking with an agent a few weeks ago he told me that he was selected as the agent for a buyer because she found his name in a www.Yelp.com posting by one of his previous satisfied clients! And he had no idea what Yelp was nor how he was mentioned there before she brought it to his attention. In his case, it was a positive commentary, and it brought him a transaction. But, what if it wasn’t good? Would he have even known about it?
How many other places are people talking about YOU? And what are they saying? How can you find out?
Here is a painless, two step process:
Step 1: do a Google search on your name. Enclose the name in quotes and see what gets returned. Try a few variations of your name like this: “Jerry Kidd” or “Gerald D. Kidd” just to make sure you get it all.
Step 2: then setup a Google Alert (http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en&gl) for your name and the various permutations that you discovered in step 1. It’s free and it’s fast. You can search on videos, News, Blogs, Web Sites and Google Groups. You can choose to aggregate the searches into one or more emails per day if you wish.
As soon as you set up the alert, Google will send you a confirming email which you must respond to in order to start the process. From that point on, every time that Google indexes a new page that contains the search that you wanted, you will receive an email containing a link to the relevant page!
Take it a step further, and set up searches on your competitors to see what people are saying about them. Set up searches on your hobbies or news items that you want to follow. To make life easier on yourself, set up a free Google account and you will be able to manage all of your alerts on one page. And for comprehensive information on how to sign up and use Google Alerts, go to the Google Alerts FAQ at:
So, make life easier on yourself and still stay on top of the things that are important to you and setup some Google Alerts. After all, it’s your name that people are talking about!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
