For the most part, my Sacramento short sales are closing faster but they aren't closing any easier. I was looking at my website this morning. My listings rotate on my homepage. Agents who don't have any listings often link to their broker's listings on their homepages so it won't look like they don't have any. But all the rotating listings on my homepage are homes I have listed or co-listed. These are homes that are either for sale or are active contingent short sales. Not all of them are a short sale, either. Some are regular transactions.
My pending sales don't show up in that spot. If visitors to my website want to know how many of my listings are pending, they will need to click on "Elizabeth's Sold Listings" to see my pending sales. Those don't include the pending sales for my buyers. Just the pending sales in which I represent the seller.
As I was looking at my rotating listings, I decided to play this little game. Could I correctly identify each of my listings? Hey, you may laugh, but I have a couple in that bunch which, due to a series of unfortunate circumstances, have been active contingent for more than a year. Now, I shoot and upload my own photographs. Which means I had personally visited the home, stood in the front yard as well and shot a series of photos. Then, I went back to my home office, opened those photographs in Preview, compared each of them to each other, clicked back and forth, narrowed it to the 2 best photos and selected the winning photo.
Next, I opened the photograph of the front of the home in Photoshop and tweaked it. One of my favorite enhancing tools in Photoshop is lightening shadows. I might even manually select a feature on the front of the home, generally the front door or maybe part of the roof, and lighten that a bit as well. I want my photos to pop because I distribute my listings everywhere online and realize I am competing for eyeballs. After all that work, one would think I would remember each home. But I wasn't so sure.
So I am sitting in front of my computer this morning and trying to name the street in the 3 seconds it takes for each photograph to rotate. To be honest, I missed one in the first go around. Hey, it looked familiar at least. Give me a break, why doncha. And by the time it came around the second time, the name of the street appeared in my head. Thank goodness, for that. Because if I can't recognize my listings, then I might have too many of them, but I am pleased to report that is not the case. Memory intact. Whew.
Photo: Sacramento Short Sale in Land Park by Elizabeth Weintraub
Comments(0)