The Secret to Correctly Pricing Real Estate The White Paper you hold in In your hands (or view on your screen) is the culmination of direct industry experience, bolstered by reviews and revision by coaches and mentors who have over 91 years of direct real estate experience/coaching. This specific White Paper is aimed directly at the selling aspect of real estate. Until now, we’ve kept these secrets andwe’ve lessons forthese ourselves and personal However, feel compelled to share this with as Until now, kept secrets and lessonsclients. for ourselves andwe personal clients. However, we feel many people possible. compelled to as share this with as many people as possible. If this information will help you price your home with more confidence, position it to get top dollar, and prevent your home from becoming another statistic in the “unsold masses”, we’ve done our job.
Real Estate Market Statistics
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Did you know? • 34.5% of all homes listed in the past 12 months were expired / terminated / withdrawn- ultimately not selling based on the pricing, positioning and marketing of the home. • The average real estate agent sells 5 homes a year—hardly enough to become proficient – much less an “Expert”! • The average real estate agent only takes the licensing education of 160-200 hours and then the occasional mandatory course—so with 200-240 hours of “book learning “, you are trusting one of your largest investments to … a relative “newbie”. • There is a strong disconnect in the education and training for Agents in terms of the dollar value of the product ($500,000 average home price) and the professional advice Agents are expected to provide. • The average Agent invests less than 9% of their earnings in all aspects of their business—including the marketing of your home for sale! How do you know which Agent you should really trust with the listing, marketing and sale of your home?
Rely on a Neighborhood Expert and Trusted Advisor The bottom line is a Neighborhood Expert knows how to strategically analyze trends in the real estate market and get your home sold! You may ask: So why don’t homes sell when they are placed on the market? Well before we get into that, let’s recognize this fact — home selling is a process, not an event. For example a wedding is an “event” — a “marriage” is a process. Having a an agent pop by with a CMA / Free Home Evaluation and list your home for sale in one meeting is an event! Where was the planning, price analysis, preparation, positioning, and marketing analysis? There’s a big difference in an Expert’s approach. So how does this process differ and work?
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Expert Analysis of why nearly 35% of all homes listed do not sell. There are several reasons which we’ll review.
First, most Agents fail to ask the hard questions—so without gaining a really deep understanding of your reasons and motivation to sell it’s pretty difficult to come up with the correct marketing strategy to maximize your net returns unless they get into the details. A Neighborhood Expert asks the right questions so you understand the market and how you can work together to position and market the home to sell for the highest possible price. Once your goals are known, an analysis with a thorough Maximum Home Value Audit takes place to best position your home’s appeal to potential buyers. This leads us to the next step. Your home must somehow stand out from all of the homes for sale in the immediate area and from similarly priced homes in the general area. This differentiation will ultimately attract more viewings and higher offers because of the perceived higher value of your home. This requires a specific four part process known as the P4 Real Estate Marketing Formula.
P4 Real Estate Formula Prepare First, your home should have expert staging—staged homes attract higher offers in a shorter period of time!
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Plus we look for added Lifestyle Choices offered by your home and we look for ways to budget for the most cost effective improvements to your home and property in the most critical areas to increase appeal. We’ll identify and highlight the differences and benefits your home offers to buyers.
Position Second, a professional home pre-inspection including thermal imaging is recommended. Why? Buyers will have more confidence in your home’s condition and its value. Ultimately this will give us more leverage during the negotiation as 81% of collapsed offers are due to a failed property inspection or lack of financing for the buyer. By eliminating these potential challenges ahead of time, our strength and ability to negotiate from a position of strength increases dramatically.
Protect Third, is the addition of a home warranty plan. This added protection will stack upon the value already created in your home. Plus, you’ll be protected from any unexpected issues that may arise while preparing and marketing your home for sale and during the closing period.
Promote Fourth, once the preparation, positioning and protection is completed, the next task in the overall strategy is to have the home marketed with the broadest exposure possible. Why? Simple — exposing your home to the largest number of buyers gives you the most exposure to the market and the best possible price for your home. To be truly effective in terms of marketing via websites, social media, promotions, email and text marketing, video marketing, social bookmarking and local search marketing, a budget well in excess of the aformentioned 9% is required - Experts realize this!! With proprietary and proven market research to direct the highest buyer traffic possible, you will achieve the best results. Plus to increase these benefits, the Photograpy can make or break the number of showings as the buyer’s first look is initially online, and the second look is the actual in home visit. And, in a property description every word counts! Experts focus on the benefits and emotional hot buttons which drive buyers to take action.
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And since over 87% of all homes sold are via a cooperative Agent, the #1 mistake many Agents make is not targeting the group with the largest segment of buyers — the other Agents who are already working with buyers and who control in a large part the homes their buyers will see.
Unless we communicate effectively with these buyer agents, only a sliver of the buyers in the market will actually view your home or even be aware your home is for sale. A targeted marketing plan notifies other potential buyer’s agents of your property — thus increasing the showings from inside and outside of our Agent community. Speaking of buyers, one of the major roles as your listing and marketing agent is to act quickly to our own buyer leads. The role of buyer acquisition is to convert buyer leads as quickly as possible and turn them into legitimate, qualified buyers of your home. And like a call to 911 to a fire department the #1 factor is the first response—a quick response. In fact studies have shown buyers expect a response to inquiries in no less than 5 minutes from someone via a call, text or email. If not, a slow response reduces the likelihood of buyer acquisition by 323%!! During business hours our response time is measured in seconds while the industry average is measured in hours!! Buyers are dealt with quickly!!
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Plus, Neighborhood Experts utilize a “coming soon” program for their buyers and prepare their buyers to expect a home’s listing when it closely meets their needs, thus preparing them for a potential match for their wants and needs.
What Happens When an Offer is Made? Once an offer has been attracted, the next step is negotiation. Since the positioning of your home and the upfront diligence has been completed 80% of the negotiation has already occurred in your home’s preparation! Negotiation becomes a balance of an art and a science in terms of getting the best price and terms based on the criteria we identified in our questions about your needs.
And the best part of it is this – the buyer’s agent probably needs the sale worse than you do. They are helping us sell the home!! And finally, implementation is critical. As experts we utilize proven systems and a team to achieve consistent results. It’s the team applying proven business systems and checklists to carry out a task or a project to its successful conclusion that counts - especially since it’s in the sale of your home! To get a better idea of the entire process, consider a solo sales person versus a well-coordinated sales team. The main areas of a real estate business are as follows: marketing, systems, finance, sales, customer relationship management, legal and compliance, and real estate education-each with its own systems and operating protocols.
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Real Estate Business Structure
After breaking out all of the different activities you can see how the independent and solo agent can be overwhelmed. This leads to frustration and confusion for the solo agent
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Solo Agent
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The real estate business isn’t structured to allow solo Agents the necessary time to focus on running their business, let alone acquire additional education, create and run systems for all parts of the business, market and promote your home and stay on top of the transaction details. Let’s compare an ordinary business doing $50,000,000 in revenue on a yearly basis. This business would have specific people doing specific roles. The business starts off with an organizational chart—with a CEO - their direct reports which can include a marketing manager, a research and development department, a sales training area, a finance department, technical support for software and computers and a human resources department and an operations department.
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In other words the solo Agent has “a lot of balls in the air “. What does this produce? An associate busy running around like a chicken with its head cut off instead of focusing on real estate fundamentals, real estate trends, real estate education, real estate analysis, and most importantly – marketing your home for sale and client satisfaction. All told, the business model of a solo agent produces a person trying to do too much with too little time. Pricing your property to sell and to achieve maximum results has a lot to do with understanding the current trends in the market plus deploying and executing the processes described earlier on of differentiation, exposure, agent cooperation, negotiation, buyer acquisition, execution and having the expertise, education and team to pull it all off.
How Can We Help You? If you’re serious about using the latest market trend analysis strategies to properly position and price your property, you may be interested in requesting a custom (MHVA) Maximum Home Value Audit for your property (properties) from one of our experts. Since our experts serve specific communities in the Calgary metro area and occasionally other select areas in Alberta and due to the time invested in providing the services they cannot possibly serve everyone.
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Here are the criteria we need to know for you to request your own personal Maximum Home Value Audit: • You’re serious about using a Certified Neighborhood Expert and Trusted Advisor in deciding at what price to list and market your property for sale. • You are planning to list and market your property for sale in the next one to three months. • You are in the Calgary Metro Area—if you are outside of this area, there are with other area experts who also use this type of analysis who we can refer you to. • You are not currently working with another agent – if you are, please remain loyal until the existing contractual relationship terminates.
What to Expect Here’s what to expect if you meet the criteria above and we commit to completing a personalized MHVA for you:
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• We’ll email you to setup a time to gather some very specific data about your property. • We’ll take what data you give us and use our analysis to create your very own MHVA. • Then we’ll set a time to meet in person to go over the data and findings together—explaining how each part is critical to marketing and pricing your property to sell. This takes much more time than pulling the last three or four sales in your area.
Why Would We Do This? Now you might wonder why we would do all of this … for free? Well, we’ve learned in every business and personal relationship someone has to make the first move. And someone has to make the first investment of time and / or capital.
Since you’ve already made the first move by reading this White Paper, in return, we’re willing to invest our time and expertise in you. And from experience, we’ve learned a very simple fact—the better educated our client is, the better we can work together to reach your goals. So it makes sense for us to take a risk and fully invest our resources and staff in assisting you. If we’re right for each other – we’ll map out the process to get your home sold. If not, you’ll get an amazing education on how to properly price real estate based on market and technical analysis versus emotions, -all absolutely free. We cannot work with everyone—but if we feel like you’re a good fit for this service and meet the criteria, here’s what to do next:
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Revisit www.MyNeighborhoodExpert.com and submit your property details. Email: The designated Neighborhood Expert with a request for custom Maximum Home Value Audit and include your address and your daytime and evening phone numbers and the best time to call you.
Our experts work with a large base of existing clients, referral clients and business partners and only have the ability to accept five new custom MHVA requests per month—if you feel this would be helpful for you then you’ll want to make this request today to reserve your spot. Remember you must meet the previously mentioned criteria to be considered for the custom MHVA-Maximum Home Value Audit
Note: If all spots are taken for this month we’ll add you to our waiting list. After you study the MHVA and apply what you learn — you’ll be able to look back to our meeting day as one which brought clarity and confidence to you in the sale of your property! Thanks and we Look Forward to Serving You! P.S.
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P.P.S.
When you meet your Neighborhood Expert ask them for Part 2 of this report-the Market Trends Report for your neighborhood. Each Neighborhood Expert creates a detailed overview of area home sales, listing inventory and a technical analysis of market statistics - all delivered in a graphical format - specifically for you!
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