How to avoid a bidding war? Avoid beautifully staged homes! Part 1.
Welcome back to the 'Rain Patricia Kennedy !! "...And who is the focus of their ire if something goes sideways? Why, that nice buyer agent who was supposed to be protecting their interests!"
Right on target - and - re-blog!
There is a way of marketing homes in this area that becomes more popular as the inventory of homes for sale dwindles. We all know it. We all do it!
First, you convince the buyers to hire the best stager you know so the place looks, smells and feels wonderful.
Second, you convince them that when it comes to price, less is more - that homes priced below market will sell quickly at over the current market value.
Third, you get your sellers to take a quick little vacation - get them out of town or at least out of the house.
Fourth, you enter it into your local multiple listing service on a Wednesday night, preferably with the sellers out of town for several days.
Fifth, you set a deadline for six or seven days from the listing date for agents to submit offers.
Finally, you sit back and wait for all of the buyers to start to throw offers with huge escalator clauses at you.
If you are lucky, you will have 10 or more offers by the deadline. The buyers will all be excited and imagining their wonderful lives in your beautifully staged listing. The agents will be a little nervous, knowing that after showing the house, preparing a market analysis for their buyers and dealing with 40+ pages of purchase forms, only one of them will have happy buyers, and only that one agent will get paid.
Even winning might, in the end, be losing. To get the house, your clients probably had to forego all of the consumer protections in the boiler-plate contracts, waiving the home inspection, appraisal, and financing contingencies. And then there was the gigantic earnest money check to prove they were indeed serious about "winning" the war. And because the contingencies were all waived, the really have no way of getting out of the contract without forfeiting the deposit. And who is the focus of their ire if something goes sideways? Why, that nice buyer agent who was supposed to be protecting their interests!
Lately, I've been working with a lot of first-time buyers who are looking in a price range with little inventory that cannot be described as "hovel". But if they are flexible about the location, I can usually find them something that works. But lately, even my off-the-beaten-path neighborhoods are becoming a challenge.
How am I dealing with this challenge? OK, that's a subject for tomorrow's post!
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