Are you really trying to sell that house?

That’s the question I tend to ask when I come across a listing with no photos and/or no public remarks/description.

Now, right from the outset let me say that I see a large amount of listings each and every day.  I do this as a part of my real estate business.  Besides completing CMA’s for prospective customers/clients, search out homes for my buyers, prepare potential properties for my expired listing marketing campaign, I also complete 5-7 BPO’s for lenders each day.  For all of those I have to research acceptable comps and therefore I need to view the listings in the general vicinity of the subject properties.  With that said, I have lost count of the number of listings I have seen that have been on the market for over 90 days and have no photos of the property at all.  Also, in some cases there has been no description, at any level, of the home.  How are you trying to market the property?  I can see that there may not be any photos after 6-8 days after getting the listing.  You intend to go back and take photos during better weather or give the home owners a opportunity to properly stage the home.  But after 90 days, you should at least have a photo of the exterior of the property.  What is the listing agent thinking?  That buyers will be interested in seeing the property just out of curiosity?  I doubt it.  Buyers feel if there are no photos showing any aspect of the home that it probably isn’t worth even viewing.  Leave out interior photos and they will presume that the interior is in such bad shape that the listing agent didn’t want to scare off the buyers.  So, they move onto other listings. 

As for the lack of property descriptions, I just don’t understand this.  The listing agent has been in the home.  They had to be in there to make their presentation as to the market price and their marketing plan, so why not just pit down some basic information about the home…a verbal narrative of what the buyer can expect to see when they view it, highlights of the key areas of the house.  I don’t know which is worse, have a blank and empty public remarks/description section or stating “Property description to follow” still showing after over 90 days on the market. 

As a professional marketer and businessman, it sets my teeth on edge whenever I see such listings.  The listing agent took the time to make their presentation to the home owner, establish an agreed to marketing price, and then had the home owner to sign a listing agreement.  For what?  To have the home owner’s home wallow on the market with no activity and a very slim chance to sell?  These agents are my colleagues, my competitors, and I wish they’d find another line of work.  They are tainting the market for the rest of us.  We have to follow behind them and apologize for their lack of skills, knowledge, and professionalism. 

Now I start wondering if the property listing has no photos and/or description then how does the listing agent expect to market and sell the home?  I’m left with one conclusion.  Price.  If you price something low enough you will definitely get lots of interest regardless of the property condition.  But the days of overpaying on homes is over.  Under pricing a home just to generate interest is not doing your home owner any favors.  Buyers still remember what happened during the last real estate “boom” when people over-paid on homes, made offers over the asking price.  They remember the end results of people who have a home that is now valued at less then what they owe.  So, why would buyers want to pay over the asking price, even if it is considerably less then where it should be?  The listing agents aren’t home marketers because they aren’t properly representing the home owners or giving a true picture of the home being sold.  In the last year the actual sold price vs. asking price has been less then 95%:

1.  Camden County      -           avg. actual sold price was 89% of the avg. asking price

2.  Burlington County                -           avg. actual sold price was 90% of the avg. asking price.

3.  Gloucester County   -           avg. actual sold price was 90% of the avg. asking price.

4.  Cumberland County -           avg. actual sold price was 91% of the avg. asking price.

So, you’ll note that the average price that a property sold for was less then the average asking price.  The actual sold prices are NOT 100%+ of the asking price.  Then why market via price only?  The listing agent isn’t doing their client any favors.

Real professionals look out for their client’s best interest and make a point of knowing the market area and what it takes to insure that the property is sold at the optimal price.   As important as price is, proper presentation and promotion is just as important.

Tags: home listings, homes for sale, listing agents, listing photos, MLS listings, no photos

Why hasn’t my home sold?

I’m sure that there are many home owners out there that are asking that question. And there are many possible answers to this question. The home owner can start to answer this question for themselves by doing their own analysis of the way their agent is marketing their home.

1. Does your home’s MLS listing have any photos included? At least there should be a photo of the front of your home. If your agent didn’t even bother to take a photo of the front of your home, how much are they really going to bother marketing your home.

2. Have you heard from your agent or been able to reach them by phone or e-mail in the last 2 weeks? If they don’t have time to speak to your for a few minutes every couple of weeks, then how dedicated are they to marketing your home? Their answer to you, once you finally do get in touch with them, is that they have so many other homes they are marketing. You need to tell them that they may need to cut down on the number of homes they are marketing to a number that they can manage and service. The worst thing any agent can do is to completely ignore their client once they get their signature on a listing agreement. That is completely bad business practice.

3. When you were discussing the price that your house should be marketed at, did your agent give you a specific dollar amount or a dollar range? If they gave you a specific amount then look for another agent…no one can predict the future with any amount of certainty. If they provided a dollar range, did you agree to price it at the upper range or the lower range? Whose idea was it to do this? If it was yours, you need to rethink your pricing strategy. In a declining market, one always wants to establish a price toward the lower range. If, as a home owner, you don’t know what a declining market means or how it is determined then you need to look for another agent because this is one of the very BASIC things that your agent should have told you. If the agent recommended the upper range without a set timetable for price review then you need to look for another agent because they really don’t know what they are doing. You may have a great pride in your home, to the point that you feel very strongly that your home is the BEST home in the neighborhood…with absolutely no equal…then you had better be able to quantify that. Because the market does not care about your opinion. The market (i.e. buyers) only care about things that they can see and touch.

The key to selling any home is marketing the home, promoting and exposing it to as many people as possible. And for people to take notice the keys here is price and location.

Every home is unique, but the one common thing among all of the sold homes is that they were aggresively marketed, priced to sell, and the real estate maintained contact with the home owner.

Terry Iwaniw
REALTOR Associate
R & I Realty, LLC
Off: 856-795-3111 x263
Cell: 609-417-1086
http://www.snewjerseyhomes.com/
http://snjrealestate.ning.com
Connect On Facebook – http://profile.to/terryiwaniw

Tags: home buying, home listings, home marketing, home selling, MLS listings

Are they in business or not?

Everyone is saying that the market is slow. It may be true or it may not be. But that is still no excuse for shoddy customer service from real estate agents. What is this with agents not returning phone calls? I’ve left a few voicemail messages for agents in the past coiuple of weeks about the homes they are marketing and I have yet to recieve a phone call back? Can it be that all of these agents have already sold those homes and are not interested in any more buyer inquiries? I doubt it, I’m not that unlucky to be able to pick almost 10 agents who have solid buyer offers and are no longer interested in other potential sales. It just blows my mind.

And then when I call the broker or office manager I get either the basic “You’ll need to speak to the listing agent about that.” and when I tell them about my messages that I have left that they’ll “look into it”. Or I end up leaving a voicemail with the broker/manager and still no call back. This gets very frustrating when dealoing with our own buyers because we don’t want to give them a bad impression about our industry. But I gotten to the point that when my buyers ask again about what info I was able to get about a particular property I just tell them “They’re not really interested in selling the property because I haven’t gotten a call back from the agent”. I then encourage my buyers to move on to another property.

The questions that our buyers tend to ask are ones that cannot be answered by the appointment desk. Our buyers are interested in knowing specifics about the property. They have questions, either before they take the time to view it or after they view it and need to make a decision on making an offer or not. This makes one wonder if the current owners are aware that a potential sale has disappeared because their agent has been unresponsive to inquiries. Or maybe the current owners don’t care.

Tags: 2 - Listings, customer service, home listings, homes for sale, MLS listings, responses