12 REAL ESTATE MYTHS FOR HOME SELLERS

3 August 2016
3 August 2016, Comments Comments Off on 12 REAL ESTATE MYTHS FOR HOME SELLERS

It does not matter if the home is unfurnished.

Rarely will an unfurnished home achieve as high a sale price as a furnished home, you can furnish the property with the basics or use a specialist company to supply furniture for the sale campaign in the latter case you get furniture that would suit your target market.

You must use a professional stylist to prepare your property for sale.

A good agent can provide or have in house support for styling the home for presentation, if you use a furniture supply company they normally provide styling for free as part of their service.

You can get away with using virtual furniture in your marketing material

While virtual furniture may attract buyers in the marketing, most homes are sold by the feel buyers get within them. An empty property lacks the feeling as many buyers struggle with how the space would look with furniture and what will fit in the spaces.

A good agent can sell your property using only their data base.

This has to be one of the worst myths perpetrated by agents, buyers enter and leave the market quite quickly and no agent has a data base of all buyers in the current market. This is the reason why marketing is a must.

You should always use a local agent.

This may have been true 20 years ago when only the local agent had access to sales data and buyers but with the internet giving all buyers access within minutes of advertising and all sales data going back years available to the agents using a local agent is no longer a relevant method of choice.

You should use an agent with local listings.

They may draw one or two buyers in from other properties but if you are slightly over priced they will use your property and your marketing to sell the other stock on their books. Use an agent who does not have properties competing with yours.

You must put large advertisements in the papers to reach all buyers.

Large advertisements in the newspapers boast the agent and agency profile without bringing in extra buyers. All advertising spend newspaper, internet and other must be based on potential return for your advertising dollar not the agent’s need for profile.

The agent and agency with a high newspaper profile is best.

The Agent’s personal profile is totally unrelated to selling your property, what you want is an agent who puts your properties profile above their own profile. A high newspaper profile usually means they are good at getting their clients to overspend in marketing.

You should use a busy agent with stacks of listings.

The theory is if they are busy they are successful, while this is good for the agent it is not good for your property as they introduce more competitive to your property. Also an agent with stacks of listings rarely has the time to spend with all your potential buyers or follow up every enquiry and quite often the follow up, open inspections will be done by their assistants and not the person you thought would be selling your property.

Our agency has a large sales team working together to sell your property.

With agents trying to protect their share of sales commissions the reality and the execution of a team of salespeople rarely match. This also applies to franchise groups.

The agent charging a premium selling fee will get a higher sales figure.

No it just means they just charge more for doing the same job, commission on selling a property is unrelated to the effort put in the sale. A professional agent wants a fair pay but the effort excerpted is about professional pride. If the agent is focused on their fees they may push you for a lower sale price to get their commission sooner.

The best time to sell a home is in spring.

Spring with drier days for opens and fresh gardens is a favourite time of year to sell but more homes come onto the market in Spring and more competition can reduce the selling price.

Summer with the end of the school year was a typical selling time, now over half of buyers’ decisions are not based on school schedules and employees move between states all year around.

Winter and Autumn bring a greener look for most gardens and opens can be affected by heavy rainy days, but competition is normally lower at this time of year.

So the best time of year is?  The best time of the year is in when you, the property and your agent are ready to sell the home.

Comments are closed.