All across the US there is a recurring question being asked by home owners who want to sell a home and are frustrated because they are not finding a buyer. These hopeful home sellers are asking
“Why Is My Home Not Selling?”
When I first meet with a home owner who has recently failed in an attempt to sell their home, this becomes the base theme for our discussion. They are frustrated for many reasons, and most of them had not realized just how competitive the housing market was going to be. For those with past experiences selling a home, they thought they would just hire a real estate agent to sell the home, give the property a good cleaning, have an open house, and then be on their way. What they found was something all together different.
The majority of homes that are not selling need to address 2 issues. It takes targeted exposure to get a home sold today, and the two elements of targeted exposure are
- An Aggressive Internet Marketing Campaign
- Strategic Pricing
I will start with the second point first, and the video at the end of this blog addresses both.
Pricing A Home To Sell
Nobody will argue that we are in a declining market, as both the number of prospective home buyers is dropping and home values are dropping as well. This is a very different market for home sellers who may have sold their past home 5 to 10 years ago, and those methods that worked in past are just not working today. In fact, roughly 6 out of every 10 homes listed for sale in Tallahassee over the past year failed to sell, and that trend appears to be getting worse.
If you want to sell your home, you have to be priced correctly. Every home has a value that will get it sold in a relatively short period of time (less than a month in most price ranges) and the graph above is a real world example of why your price has to be right.
I went to the Tallahassee MLS and grabbed a sale that had taken more than three (3) years to sell (from date listed to date sold) and plotted the seller’s asking price against the market value of homes in its neighborhood. The red line in the graph shows the the trailing six month home values (in price per square foot) while the purple diamonds show the sellers asking value.
This seller chased the market all the way down until she finally had to sell (three years later). Had the home seller priced it correctly on day 1, the home would have sold right away and the seller would have netted $70,000 more than was received when it finally did sell. This is a classic case of a seller “chasing the market.”
An Aggressive Internet Marketing Campaign For Home Sellers
A common misconception that I see in the real estate industry is the belief that marketing a home on the internet is merely a one-time thing that occurs when the property is put in the mls and then syndicated to 20 or more websites. While this is an important first step in the real estate marketing process, it is not what will get the home sold.
Internet marketing in real estate is not a passive activity, done and completed at the beginning of the home selling period. On the contrary, real estate marketing on the internet is a continuous, active, process that requires daily attention for every single home that a real estate company is working to sell. If this activity is not happening, then the home seller is not getting the aggressive internet marketing that is needed to get a home sold at its highest price.
Video: Why Is My Home Not Selling?
As promised at the beginning of the post, here is a video (from my real estate frequently asked questions library) that answers the question … “why is my home not selling?”
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