Chapter 12
IN THIS CHAPTER
Figuring out the advertising techniques that work to sell your house
Using open houses to make a sale
Knowing the house showing do’s and don’ts
Curb appeal and staging are important aspects of showing your house off to its best advantage (see Chapter 9). But, by themselves, curb appeal and staging won’t sell your house. Even adding the sophisticated pricing techniques from Chapters 10 and 11 to the package still won’t do the trick. Regardless of how realistic your asking price may be, you lack one essential ingredient to make a sale.
Face it. Without a buyer, you’re nothing more than the owner of a well-priced, bewitchingly staged property with loads of curb appeal. You need a buyer to convert you into a seller, and the best way to do so is to market your house. This chapter can help.
In a red-hot seller’s market, just sticking a For Sale sign in your front yard produces all the buyers you need. When you have five buyers for every good property on the market, advertising isn’t so critical.
Unfortunately for sellers, the market isn’t always hot. In fact, it sometimes gets downright chilly. When your neighborhood is a forest of For Sale signs and buyers are few and exceedingly far between, merely getting a buyer’s attention is a major victory. The key to selling your house for top dollar — even in a dismal market — is simple: Implement a broad-based advertising campaign to generate spirited buyer competition for your property.
Whether you list your property with a real estate broker who handles all your advertising or you’re selling on your own, the same rules apply. Certain types of advertising are extremely effective. Others, while popular, are big wastes of time and money. The following sections describe types of advertising that get our seal of approval.
A humble, low-tech For Sale sign stuck in your front yard or nailed to your house is, without a doubt, one of the most effective ways to tell folks looking for a home in your area that your property is on the market.
Real estate brokers know sign calls (people calling to get more information about a house after they see the For Sale sign) are far more likely to result in a sale than ad calls (people calling about property they read about in an ad). Why? When ad callers find out the location of the advertised property, the style of the house, the age of the house, or some other basic fact they’d already know if they’d actually seen the property from the street, they more often than not reject it. Sign callers, on the other hand, obviously like the neighborhood and at least the property’s exterior, or they wouldn’t have called; they have a higher probability of being serious buyers.
This information is all you need on a sign. To attract folks driving by your house, use a two-sided sign placed perpendicular to the road so people can read it from either direction. If you have a corner lot, use two signs so both streets fronting your house have signs.
Be sure your sign makes a good first impression. Recycling is fine, but don’t let your agent reuse someone else’s old, beaten-up For Sale sign on your wonderful property; get a spiffy new one. A worn, dented, faded sign makes your property look equally tired. Don’t put up the sign before you’re 100 percent ready to sell, because after the sign goes up, you will start receiving calls.
The classified section of your local newspaper is a cost-effective way to reach prospective buyers. Because most house hunters look at property on weekends, run an ad in your paper’s Sunday real estate section or its weekend edition. If you’re handling your own advertising because you’re selling your house without a broker, get some tips from the pros. Study real estate brokers’ ads for ideas on phrasing your ad. People who work in the classified-ad department usually can help you draft an ad and suggest standard abbreviations — such as “br” for bedroom, “ba” for bathroom, and “fp” for fireplace — so you can save money without confusing readers.
A multiple listing service (MLS) is composed of and operated by local real estate brokers and agents who pool their listings so information about property listed by any MLS member is immediately available to all participating members. Brokers and agents enter new listings into their computerized MLS database as soon as the listing contract is signed. Price changes and sales also are same-day entries. In most places, nonmembers (that is, the public) can’t put property into an MLS.
The listing statement, also called a property statement, is a data sheet and is given to people who tour your property on Sunday open houses or people who are shown through your house by appointment. Listing statements are effective point-of-purchase ads containing more information than you can put into a newspaper ad or an MLS listing (see Figure 12-1). This sheet offers you a chance to wax poetic about the special features of your property.
In addition to the computerized MLS, brokers have websites they use to advertise their listings. As previously noted in the “Classified ads” section earlier in this chapter, most newspapers put classified ads on the Internet so computer users can access them without having to dirty their fingers with newsprint. We devote Chapter 13 to describing ways you can use a computer during your sale.
Word-of-mouth advice sounds so darn primitive coming right after “Computers” in the preceding section, but networking is an extremely effective form of targeted advertising. Tell people you know — friends, business associates, folks who go to your church, club members, and especially your neighbors, that your house is for sale. Make a point of inviting your friends and neighbors to your first open house. Who knows? One of them may have a pal who’d love to buy your house. Stranger things happen every day.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, personally touring property must be worth at least a couple of encyclopedias. That’s why, in a touchy-feely business like residential real estate sales, open houses are an invaluable sales tool.
You can hold two distinctly different types of open houses to sell your property. Even though each type of open house targets a different market segment, they share a common objective — to sell your property. This section focuses on your two options.
If you hire a broker to sell your house, one of the first things your listing agent does after you’ve signed the listing contract is tell the local brokerage community about your property. One extremely effective way to get the word out is scheduling a brokers’ open — a special open house exclusively for local real estate agents.
Agents generally work with at least four or five serious buyers at any given time. After these buyers have, for one reason or another, seen and rejected all the houses of interest to them that currently are on the market, they go into a holding pattern waiting for a listing of just the right property. One primary mission of agents working with buyers is to scout out new property.
A brokers’ open is amazingly targeted marketing. No guarantees, of course, but don’t be surprised if the first brokers’ open leads to a sale. After all, having 50 agents tour your house is the equivalent of showing it to 200 or 250 motivated buyers.
Although your house obviously won’t appeal to every one of the agents’ buyers, you can bet it’ll press hot buttons for a few of them. Well-priced, attractive property almost always generates immediate showing requests. With the advent of cellphones, agents don’t even have to wait until they get back to the office to call their clients about the fantastic property (yours, we hope) that they just saw on a brokers’ tour.
We start this section by noting that folks usually think of public open houses as Sunday open houses. That idea is prevalent because most houses are held open on Sundays. However, no law says you can’t hold a Saturday open house every now and then to scoop up people who can’t come to a Sunday open house. For that matter, you might also hold an open house on a Monday or Thursday evening after people get home from work. There are no rules here. Don’t be afraid to get creative. Having planted that thought in your mind, we refer to all public open houses from now on as Sunday open houses for simplicity’s sake.
Compared to brokers’ opens (see the preceding section), you have lower odds of making a sale directly by holding a Sunday open house. But if you’re trying to sell your house without an agent, you won’t have access to brokers’ opens.
After you open your house to the world at large, not everyone who walks through the front door is a legitimate buyer. You get Lookie Lou types who are trying to pick up some decorating hints and curious neighbors who always wanted to know how your house looks on the inside. You also get real buyers who were attracted by your open house sign but need a home in a different size or price range. Unfortunately, other than an address, open house signs don’t contain a wealth of specific information to help qualify prospective buyers.
The incidental traffic isn’t necessarily bad for you. Unless your visitors are terribly antisocial, people who come to your Sunday open houses probably have friends or neighbors who want to buy in the neighborhood. Word of mouth is powerful advertising (see the section “Word of mouth” earlier in this chapter).
No one will buy your property sight unseen. Luscious listing statements, appealing ads, and inviting photographs of your house’s interior and exterior fan the flames of buyer curiosity. To satisfy the inquisitiveness that you arouse, you must let prospective buyers wander through your house.
If you list your house with a real estate agent, showings are an inconvenience rather than a problem because a good agent handles the actual buyer and broker showings for you. Your job is simple. Make sure the property is staged to show well — no dirty dishes in the dishwasher, toilet lids closed, lights on — and make yourself scarce while the property is being shown.
If you don’t know exactly how to generate property curb appeal and subtly stage your house, turn to Chapter 9 for the details. In this section, we cover a few final things you must do to maximize the showing process:
Make showing your property easy for agents: The easier your house is to show, the more often agents will show it, and, most likely, the more you’ll get for your house and the faster it’ll sell. If you force agents to get a house key from you before each showing, you’ll have fewer showings because some agents are too busy to get the key, and others are too lazy. Instead of personally doling out your key each time there’s a showing, you have two options:
From an agent’s perspective, nothing is more embarrassing or frustrating than trying to explain to an antsy buyer the reason she can’t unlock the front door. Before you give the listing agent keys to your house, make sure that the keys actually unlock the door and that the lock works smoothly. (This is your chance to make a good first impression on the buyer.) Lastly, if the house has an alarm, make sure it’s disarmed or that the showing agent knows how to turn off the alarm.
Make yourself scarce during showings: If you have a listing agent, leave the property while your agent shows it. Some buyers are too polite to say so, but having you hover over them as they tour your house is very inhibiting. Serious buyers want to look into all your closets and cabinets, look under all your sinks, and explore every nook and cranny of the house — but they won’t if you’re hanging around.
By the same token, as long as you’re around, buyers won’t make derogatory comments. Sometimes, the most important information you get from a showing is the reason why someone doesn’t like the property. Correcting a problem or overcoming an objection starts by finding out about the problem or objection. Your agent should follow up every showing by calling the buyer’s agent to find out whether the buyer intends to make an offer and, if not, why not.
You can’t vanish during showings or open houses if you’re selling without an agent. Try, however, to be as unobtrusive as possible when buyers tour your property. For example, don’t walk them through the house pointing out the obvious: “This is the kitchen. Here’s the bathroom. This bedroom is where the kids sleep.” Instead, point out special things they may not notice, such as the high ceiling in your dining room or the fact that a hardwood floor is under the wall-to-wall carpet in the family room. Make your points selectively and remember the quality of your guidance is more important than the quantity.
You may think you’ve been put out of your misery after you accept an offer to purchase your property. “Goody,” you say, “no more showings — I can have my life back.”
Not quite. Inspections by the buyer’s property inspectors aside, one extremely important showing remains: the inspection an appraiser makes as a condition of your buyer’s loan approval.
This final showing to the appraiser is critically important. If the buyer’s loan isn’t approved because the appraiser thinks your property isn’t worth the amount the buyer is willing to pay for it, your deal falls through, and you’re back in the fishbowl again.