Wow...life sure has become so much easier when I figured out that it's so much easier to get price reductions on the front end, as opposed to trying it a few months into a listing contract.
In the beginning, you're definitely the expert and the sellers cling to every word you say. If a couple of months go by and you don't have many showings, they forget all about the discussion of "price" that you had with them at the beginning of the contract. They simply translate "no showings" = "agent doesn't know squat".
To help avoid this is to simply get the price reductions up front. We simply start with our list price and (depending on what the trends are in your specific area) we say that if we don't have an offer within ___ weeks, we will drop to __________. If we go another ____ weeks and still have no offer, we then drop to __________ and so on.
When we insert the price reductions, we also make sure that the reduction will be significant enough to get us down into the next pricing tier. For example, if your starting price is $100,000 it doesn't make any sense to reduce to $97,000 because you're not entertaining any new buyers. You're still going to be found by all of the people that are looking up to $100,000.
We need to catch the next group of buyers, the ones that are only looking up to $95,000. I don't know why it is, but people are never looking up to "96,000" or "97,500". They use flat numbers and they seem to search in increments of $5,000 or $10,000 in lower price ranges...$25,000 or $50,000 or even $100,000 in higher price ranges.
People, including your sellers, are searching homes online all the time, and this is something they can understand. It's almost like you can see the light bulb turn on in their head when you explain that this is how you're going to do it. It's makes sense to them. They get it!
If you haven't tried this strategy before, you might give it a whirl. It sure does beat those dreaded "it's time to start thinking about a price reduction" phone calls. Click here to see if it's something you might be able to tweak and use for your business!
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