Sales are slow.
But they haven’t stopped! Homes are being sold EVERY day, all across North America, in EVERY market.
What about you? Are you getting your listings sold?
Or, are you feeling frustrated and unsure what to do? ☹️
If so, you’re not alone.
Here’s some practical advice to help you get your listings priced right and sold. There’s nothing like racking up a couple of sales to cheer you up!
At the very least, you’ll be providing your seller clients with some critical information that they need right now.
“The more information you provide to your clients, the greater their ability to make informed and intelligent decisions.” – Ted Greenhough
Here’s how I suggest you consider the current situation for every one of your listings:
- Determine who is the ideal target buyer for your listing, and which other homes and neighborhoods that target buyer might consider.
- Determine the likely price range of that target buyer. For example, if your listing is $450K, might the target buyer be looking up to $500K? Yes, probably.
- Save a search with a price range approximately 5% less and 10% more compared to your listing, including numerous communities your target buyer might consider. Resist the urge to add too many other limiting criteria. For example, might your target buyer be interested in a newer or older home, at a similar price? Yes, they might.
- Try to come up with a BIG list of 50-100 active competitors. If it’s much bigger than this range, you can tighten up the criteria to eliminate weak competitors. The point is to ensure your sellers understand they have a LOT of strong competitors in the same price range, not just the 2-3 similar homes in the same neighborhood.
- Using the same list, switch the status from “active” to “sold” for the past 30 days only. There’s no point showing them sales that occurred BP (Before Pandemic).
- Make sure there are no outliers (properties that sold for an unexplainably high price) on your sold list. If there are, adjust the criteria as necessary to eliminate them.
- Send a link to your seller so that they can review every listing, along with the following explanation:
“Dear Seller – Attached are all the sales in the last 30 days with the following criteria (list the criteria, including neighborhoods, price range, etc.) I will also send all the current active listings, with the same search criteria, under a separate email.”
You can follow that up by having a conversation, something like this:
“There have only been three sales in the last month, and we’ve got 63 active competitors. There’s nothing much we can do about this, under the circumstances, except being a bit more competitive on the list price. With only three sales in the last month, there will probably only be around three in the next month, so we may need to consider positioning ourselves a bit more aggressively.”
Provide the information. Have the conversation. Use your skills to get the price where you know it needs to be.
Now, here’s something you probably didn’t expect. This is the exact same methodology I teach in the Big Picture CMA module, using the Criteria Manipulation Approach (CMA). Pandemic, or no pandemic!
But it does seem particularly relevant, right now.
