Seven Selling Mistakes:

#7 Trying to ‘Hard Sell’

It is not necessary to write books and books about your beautiful home. Yes, a  little descriptive booklet is good enough to let the prospective buyers know how much you love this home and what this home has to offer them. The buyers do not like ‘Hard Sell’. The moment they are pushed to ‘like’ the home, they back up. If there is no hard sell, the buyers would love to know more about the home and they can get more information when requested. But ‘Hard Sell’? It hardly works!

#6. Mistaking lookers for buyers

Most buyers stop by at an open house. This is just the first step towards buying a home for them. They know nothing about a home but are curious to know about different homes. So, this summer on Sundays, when they have nothing else to do, they pamper their dream by visiting the Open Houses when their intention of buying one is as much as 6 to 8 months away.

So, if the attendance at the open house is really great, and if all the visitors are not accompanied by any agent, chances are, your home has a curiosity factor. The buyers would like to ‘SEE’ the home. Buying is surely months away – unless you have lucked out.

#5. Not knowing the contacts and responsibilities

It is understood that Internet is ‘Kuber’, a king of all resources. It is a good resource that you can get answers to almost all questions – even real estate related. So, it will have all the information about buying and selling a home. True? To an extent, it is true. But it has been found out that even when there is a form available to sell the home; you may interpret the clause one way – to your advantage, whereas the real inference could be something different! It is very important to read and understand these contracts before they are signed. Like any other signed contract, these contracts are also legal and binding. You cannot say, the buyer promised me $20,000 any more verbally – it better be written in a contract – binding by both, the seller and the buyer.

#4 It’s SHOWTIME!

Many home sellers believe very strongly that their home will sell – no matter what the condition of the home is. Reasons: it is in the great neighborhood where lots of good families live; the home is close to highways and/or shopping. Or because, the next door neighbor’s home sold in just two days!!!

If you are not ready for the Showtime in the prime time to impress the prospective buyers  – usually, first four to six weeks once the home hits the market – it may take forever to sell your home in this market. People are exploiting lots of different ways to ‘stage’ or showcase their home so that the buyers fall in love with  the home at first sight. And once they like it on the first visit, that they’d like to own it – just because you showcased the home! Yes, it’s a SHOWTIME! 

#3. Limiting Marketing and Advertising

In this era of internet, it is assumed that the moment home is listed in ‘MLS’ (multiple listing service), people will know about it. It does not matter at what price it is listed and if at all any supportive advertisement is taken care of or not. There are some success stories that will tell you how they saved money by not listing with agent! At the same time, what you do not hear are the stories of the homes that are or could not be sold when there was a restriction set on marketing and advertising.

Internet is the great resource and having an exposure of a home on multiple web sites always helps but when it comes to spending money for advertising at the ‘right’ place, sellers shy away and that’s why, the recent NAR statistics tells us that homes sold by sale by owners, on an average, fetch about $10,000 less than the homes sold using real estate agents.

#2 Using Internet to your disadvantage

A new baby was born a while ago – named ZILLOW. (or, a new web site was launched a while ago, namely, http://www.zillow.com. This web site has a ‘z’estimate for about 60 million properties in US. It does do a great job of estimating the property value, but I have seen it off a lot. A listing that may not have sold for about $300,000, when ‘zillowed’, the zestimate was $392,000! If you are a motivated buyer, you’ll see a great bargain in this deal. Is it really a bargain? Ask some of the realtors® and you’ll get the answer. On the opposite hand, you may see a lower value for a beautiful home you love, but are limited to the price zillow has suggested, you may end up losing a home to another buyer who knows reality better than zillow. 

This web site is surely a good estimator of a property values all over the country, but do not forget, in many instances, it is off by tens of thousands of dollars. This leads to our most common mistake… price the home too high…

 #1: Pricing the home too high!

This is the most common mistakes most of the home sellers do – unknowingly. There is a buyer in every seller and while selling a home, a buyer behavior dominates, not sellers. What would buyer do when they buy a home? Bargain, of course. So, based on buyer’s instinct, seller puts a price little high, so that there is a margin for the bargain. Some times, this margin is as higher as 10%! Does it work? Well, when you ask for bargains, you get bargains. To begin with, you lose more than 50% of the well-qualified buyers because of high price. The rest of them are ‘bargain hunters’ and eventually, you may end up getting lower price than market value.

Should you have any questions related to real estate, please call me or email me at Praful@iPraful.com.

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