Yesterday was an exciting day for us at Century 21 Manausa and Associates, as we experienced the benefit of our aggressive home selling program.
You see, the days of sticking a "For Sale" sign in the yard and hoping a buyer drives by are long gone. Long-time readers of the Tallahassee Real Estate Blog know that more than half of all home sellers over the past 6 years failed when they tried to sell their homes, so home selling systems need to be overhauled.
Anybody in the real estate brokerage business who takes the time to do the research will tell you that more than 90% of all home buyers are using the internet during their home search process.
With this knowledge in hand in 2007, we went about moving our home selling plan to the internet. There have been many obstacles and many learning curves to navigate along the way, but the results have exceeded our expectations.
How Modern Home Selling Plans Are Used To Sell A Home
Real estate professionals seem to fall into one of two camps when it comes to selling a home with a modern home selling plan.
Many real estate agents believe that exposure (= being on many websites) is the most important aspect to getting a home sold. The more websites used to promote a home, the more people who will see it, the better the chance of getting the home sold.
The other group will tell you it is all about price. If you properly price your home, it will sell right away.
What we have found through diligent measurement and testing over the past five years is that both camps are missing an ingredient.
For example, if you put a home on 500 websites that are trafficked by 1 Million people every day, but price the home too high, it will not sell.
And if you price the home perfectly, but do not tell anybody (meaning do not gain adequate exposure), then it will not sell.
And finally, if you get millions of people to see a home (but who are not buying a home in Tallahassee), have you really accomplished your exposure goal?
No, our home selling model acknowledges the importance of both pricing and exposure, and using the most appropriate exposure method for the specific home.
That's right, not all homes are marketed exactly the same. Our research has found that certain types of home buyers can be found in different places on the internet, so the "shotgun" approach to promotion is not very effective. Think about it ...
All of the listings in the Tallahassee MLS go out to the major websites like Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Century 21, Remax, Coldwell Banker, etc. They also appear on every real estate agent website with an IDX Feed. Even with this "massive exposure," less than half the homes that hit the market since 2007 actually sold. I think this enough evidence that exposure is not the primary solution.
An Example Of Progressive Home Selling
About two weeks ago, we met with a homeowner who had a wonderfully unique property to sell in the Tallahassee real estate market.
We knew this beautiful pool home on over 20 acres would be highly desirable for many different types of home buyers, and specifically for people who love to keep horses.
Due to the low liquidity levels in our current market for this type of home though, the statistics revealed that there were precious few buyers who we would attract with a conventional home selling plan.
We decided to use our "Coming Soon" program to get the word out about this excellent home on acreage, and we even implemented a contest to get our readers involved.
Our goals was to use our social networking platform to spread the word. A property like this might only have four or five buyer candidates a year, so we needed to leverage far more than traditional home selling methods. And we did!
The real estate graph above shows that 173 people participated in our contest, and more than 160 property flyers were downloaded from our site before it even hit the market!
Our readers felt this was a home worthy of a $653,000 sales price (the median contest entry value), and we have priced the home far below that amount in order to get a quick sale. You can see a video tour of the property any time you like, 24/7!
The Future Of home selling
The next biggest surprise in home selling in Tallahassee is "coming soon!"
I will not tell you what it is, you'll have to wait and see it when it happens.
But I will tell you that home selling in 2013 is going to change dramatically, and those that do not attempt to keep up with the benefits of these new changes will be left behind!
Homeowners, make sure you do a thorough analysis of the company you choose to run your home selling plan, it will be the difference between getting top dollar for your home or maybe not even getting sold.
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