Thinking of selling? How to sell your home for more…

Hi all,

There are many things you can do to maximise the sale price of your home, namely, presentation, good photography,having floor plan, staging, using an agent that knows how to negotiate and show you a sales strategy tailored for your home and not some generic plan. The price of your home is what the buyers are willing to pay but you can do a lot to influence that price.

1. Open Listing Versus Exclusive – Open listing creates competition amongst agents, you tend not to pay anything in terms of marketing at all. Competition amongst agents will get you rock bottom prices. If you have all the time in the world to wait, you may get what you want but no agent will bother getting you more money from the buyer in case the other agent sells it first. Your property is not a priority to them and it’s everyone’s listing but no ones responsibility. What you want is actually competition amonst buyers NOT agents. An exclusive with a good agent, will create competition amongst buyers which will provide the opportunity to drive prices up and they will have a proven sales process to step you through to ensure you maximize the value of your home.

2. FREE marketing, no upfront costs – alot of sellers think that they are saving money and marketing is a cost to them. Marketing is an investment, it’s like opening a shop and not letting people know you exist or why they should buy from you rather than the competitor? Your property will sell with free marketing but what you don’t know is that you missed out on tens of thousands of dollars because the agent is not interested in getting more money for you and that the free marketing may not be giving you the exposure you need to get the maximum price, for example approx 50% of buyers don’t scroll past page 2 of realestate.com. Now guess which page your “free” marketing is going to be? and you don’t want the “researchers” who scroll through every page because they just want a bargain. Home owners trying to save a few thousand dollars and not use the best advertising and marketing strategy end up losing out when they’ve undersold their property by tens of thousands.

3. Auction vs Private Treaty – People who don’t understand auction will fear it and will not like it, or if they have had a bad experience with an agent or seen it happen with people they know then it may also be off putting. However, same goes for private treaty as well. Both strategies cost about the same for marketing, you just pay bit extra for an auctioneer. An auction if done correctly will give you opportunity to get maximum price because there will be competition amongst buyers and buyers who perceive the property to be worth more to them will pay more because there is no price. You can sell prior to auction if you are offered a insanely good price, or sell on the day of auction if it meets your reserve price, if not then you’ll have another opportunity to sell after auction as well. Without putting a price on your property, it has the potential to break records because buyers value it more than what you or agent or even valuer thinks it worth. And in a rising market, valuations are 3 months behind where the market is at. If sold via private treaty, unless the person has cash, they generally will need a bank valuation and they will have trouble getting the finance at the high price anyway if you are trying to get a higher than market price for your home via private treaty. Auction are cash buyers or has finance in place to pay for you home and you don’t get stuffed around waiting 21 days to get finance approval and then contracts fall over and then your home is back on the market for who knows for how long until the next buyer. It’s not used just for expensive properties or unique properties. It can work for any if the campaign is managed well.

4. Pricing if selling via private treaty – All sellers want the highest price and often make the mistake of pricing it on what they want rather than what it’s worth in the market compared to other properties. Or an agent has “bought” their listing by giving them the idea that they can get a high price and was quoted highest out of all the agents…when this happens the seller will very quickly be having conversations of reducing the price to match the market and if not it might be for sale for a long time that property has become stale and “old” news, rather than a property that buyers are excited about. When it’s priced well, and the sale process is managed well, you’ll end up getting more than asking price due to competition between buyers anyway because it represents good value to them. You can list your property for whatever price you want, the question is how long are you willing to wait to get that price? because it may just be waiting for the market to catch up.

These are my observations as an agent. If anyone has any questions feel free to let me know.

• This topic was modified 9 years, 2 months ago by  ANNA.