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From Listing Appointment to Sale: Preparation is Key

May 2, 2016 by khproperties Leave a Comment

Preparation

A real estate agent makes a listing appointment with you and comes to discuss the sale of your home. You like what they have to say, think the terms are agreeable, and you sign the listing paperwork. Soon your house will be on the market and hopefully under contract. You’re eager to get started and have potential buyers come to your home to view it, but your agent says it won’t be on the market for a couple of days or maybe even a week. Wait…what? You just signed the paperwork, you’re ready to sell, and the agent is asking you to wait? That makes no sense to you at all and you’re ready to tear up the listing agreement and send your new agent packing. The listing appointment may be over, but the preparations are just beginning.

Why the Wait After the Listing Appointment?

As agents, our job is to get your home sold. It’s the basis of everything we do for a living. If your home doesn’t sell, we don’t make a commission. If we don’t make a commission, we don’t pay our bills. Unlike a hourly or salaried job, we live off of those commissions, so we need them to survive. So why would we want to delay selling your home? It doesn’t make sense…or does it?

After the listing appointment, preparation kicks into high gear and we begin to align all the pieces to get your home sold. We’ll need to get you to fill out some paperwork about your home – from an MLS profile sheet that tells us all the details of your home to a Seller’s Disclosure. We may ask you to write down all the features and upgrades you’ve done to the home so that we can use those in our marketing. You’ll want to dig through your old files and see if you have a previous survey (this could potentially save you some money during the sale) and if you have any paperwork about the house, now is a good time to look through it – do you have the original builder blueprints, a builder feature sheet, warranty paperwork, invoices for repairs or services you’ve had performed on the home – anything you think might help us paint a picture of your home’s history. The more documentation we have, the better we can inform potential buyers so that they can choose your home over all the others on the market.

Of course we’ll want to get some photos. Photos sell homes. We preach it all the time. The better your photographs, the more eye catching your listing, the better chance we have of a buyer putting your home on their list of potential homes to buy and making an offer. It will take a few days to get on the photographers schedule and once they’ve taken the photos it usually takes a day or so to process them all and make them look their best. Once the photographer delivers them to your agent, we’ll need to look through them and select the ones that best represent your home and pick which ones we’ll use for different purposes (MLS, flyers, advertising, websites, etc.).

Once we have gathered all the information, it’s time to get to work entering all that data. The MLS will be our first stop as that information is populated to various websites through listing syndication.

During our listing appointment, we may have given you some tasks to complete in order to get your home ready. From staging advice to a punch list of repairs you might need to make so that your house shines, we want to make sure that any buyer that pulls up to the curb and walks through that door thinks your home is “the one.” You can get sliding room divider from here! We want to ensure the details are taken care of so there is nothing to distract them from dreaming about their life in their new home. The more preparation we do up front on the home, the less worries we’ll have later during the contract side of the process.

When we’re ready to go and all our ducks are in a row, it’s time to put a sign in the front yard, go live in the MLS, and start accepting showings. We’ve done our homework and prepared the home for sale and now is when the fun really begins.

And let’s not forget kicking the marketing machine into high gear. Your agent and their staff will begin working on flyers, ads, websites…whatever marketing you may have discussed at your listing appointment. All of that can take time to put together and sometimes, to get the most impact, you’ll want to have all those pieces coordinated and ready to go before your home in actually on the market, so that we’re not scrambling to put them together and losing those precious first few weeks on the market. The best time to generate interest in your home is in those first few weeks, not months later, so we want to be sure we can unfold our marketing plan in a step by step process that we have tested and improved over the years.

We know the wait between the listing appointment and the moment your listing goes live on the market can be a bit frustrating and seem too long, but all those details that happen in the interim are what separates your home from all the others on the market. We don’t want to be just another house, we want to be a home. A little preparation goes a long way and when it comes to selling homes, we want nothing more than to get you to the closing table and hand over those keys to a new buyer. It’s our job and it’s what we love to do. Your sale is our success, so let’s get all of those details sorted before we list your home, so that we can get your home sold in the shortest amount of time for the highest dollar. Your goals are ours and we’re going to make sure we do everything we can to reach them.

image courtesy of moriakimitsuru

Filed Under: Sell Your Home Tagged With: listing, sell your home

Have You Seen Your House Listing Lately?

January 4, 2016 by khproperties 2 Comments

House Listing

We spend a lot of time combing through listings in the San Antonio MLS as real estate agents. These listings are the lifeblood of our industry and without them, real estate wouldn’t be quite the same. One of the defining pieces of the MLS is the data about all the homes for sale. That data is used on countless sites in the marketing of the property to the buyer.

Flipping through homes, we often see listings with only a few photos, one line descriptions, or a lack of details in the various sections that help give additional information about the home. The details are one of the most important parts of any marketing plan. Every ounce of marketing is related to this source, especially internet marketing, which has become crucial in selling homes. When your listing is syndicated to sites like Realtor.com, Trulia, Zillow, or a million other sites out there, including our home search, it is the original listing data that is displayed to the public. Most of the big sites pull in photos and what we call the “remarks” section (a brief description of the house). The remarks section is your agent’s chance to describe your house, tell the world the interesting facts about it, and draw buyers to come view it.

Not every agent is a gifted writer or fantastic photographer and many employ people to do these things for them for that reason alone. Even if your agent isn’t the greatest writer or photographer, they should still be striving to give your listing the most detail and the best look it can possibly have. But, often we see homes with four photos (the MLS allows up to 25) or homes with descriptions like “3BR/2BA in nice community.” That’s it. No details, no reasons to investigate further. With that kind of lack of detail it might as well read “house for sale” and nothing else.

Detailed listing information will make your home stand out.

What can you do to make sure you’re getting the most out of your listing? Well, we’d be crazy if we didn’t say hire one of our agents, but in all seriousness, no matter who you select as your agent, make sure your listing contains as much info as possible. Buyers want to know the details before they get in their car and make an appointment to see your home…don’t let them click through to the next house. Ask your agent to show you what they’ve entered into the MLS, google your property address (you’d be amazed how many people do this to find additional info on homes), look at your agent’s website – look where the buyers are looking. Think like a buyer and take a look at your listing. Would you want to investigate further and potentially go see the house? If the answer is no, then there is still work to be done.

image courtesy of Beegee49 (and no, it’s not a photo from the San Antonio MLS)

Filed Under: Sell Your Home Tagged With: sell your home, listing

Holiday Decorating or Listing Disaster?

November 1, 2012 by khproperties Leave a Comment

Christmas Decorations

Looking for some blog post inspiration, I was combing through my usual sources this morning and a post on Facebook from my friend Ines Hegedus-Garcia at miamism.com caught my eye. Her article, “When are Holiday Decorations too much?,” reminded me that sometimes, less is more.

In our quest to be the coolest house on the block, we can easily get caught up in holiday fever and go nuts with the decorations. While no one loves an overly-decorated house quite like I do, it’s true – if your house is for sale, you need to think about the home as a commodity and not your personal design space. Simple and neutral are words that speak to home buyers and as is the case with any over-decoration in your home, buyers will be distracted, no matter how hard they try not to be or how much their agent tries to focus their attention to the general home versus the assorted items around the home. If your home is on the market this holiday season, keep it simple and keep it clean!

PS If you’re ever thinking about moving to Miami, I’d highly recommend following the www.miamism.com as a great place to start. Tell Ines we sent you!

image courtesy of lalawren

Filed Under: Sell Your Home Tagged With: sell your home, tips, advice, listing, holiday, decorating

Should I Stay or Should I Go Now?

September 20, 2012 by khproperties Leave a Comment

The Clash

So, you’ve decided to sell your house? Congratulations! After meeting with an agent to sign the paperwork, surely you’ve gone over the many things you can do to improve the way your home shows. From sweeping the front walk to making the bed or even putting cookies in the oven, there are hundreds of little tricks sellers use to put their home’s best side in the spotlight.

But what you may not have prepared for is the uncomfortable feeling of knowing that strangers are walking through and scrutinizing your home. Your home has, until now, been your private domain, a retreat, and a refuge all your own. But once that for sale sign goes up, you’re in a different world and you may be tempted to try and hold on to the security of knowing all of the happenings in your home by hanging around during showings. But there are several important reasons to relax, take a step back, and let buyers (and their agent) walk through uninterrupted.

Free speech

  • Buyers will not feel free to discuss their concerns with the homeowners around. This feedback is important for buyer’s agents to have so that they may help overcome many issues. Good agents can provide buyers with options that could change a buyer’s perspective on a property. Do you have an extra bedroom the buyers don’t want to furnish? Why not convert it into a private library or workout room? Buyers hate the cabinets in the kitchen? Here are some suggestions for quick fixes or low cost changes that could easily bring them back around to considering your home more seriously.
  • Buyers may not want to let you, the seller, know that they’re in love with the house. They want you to think this is a serious business deal and they could take it or leave it, because they think it will help them in negotiations. The key here is to get them to negotiations to begin with. Let them be happy and excited and you’ll get your offer soon enough.

Overtalking

  • Information Overload: Your home is your castle, and you want to make sure potential buyers don’t miss a single glorious detail. We get it. But in your enthusiasm, you may start to overwhelm the buyer. Or not pick up on clues from them. Or focus on things they could care less about so they get bored and anxious to move on. Don’t risk it.
  • Expectations: In your enthusiasm to show off your home, you may start to make promises to the buyer – “Sure that framed picture can stay” or “Oh, yeah, I’ll paint the garage for you.” But these promises may be based on the prospect of a full priced offer, and with a lower than anticipated offer in front of you the next day, you may not be so eager to make those kinds of concessions. And then you can end up with an ugly “he said/she said” scenario that leaves no one happy.

Judgement

  • Hot Topics: Like it or not, many home buyers cannot look past their own prejudices to focus on a home. Don’t give them anything more to judge or to question. Sometimes buyers and sellers meet, start talking, and become the best of friends. But how often do you really think that happens? You’re a super swell person, but do you get along with everyone you meet? Do some people just rub you the wrong way from the get-go? Do you cringe when hearing someone go on about their favorite political candidate? Don’t let potential personality conflicts get in the way of the ultimate goal of home selling. Just don’t go there to begin with.
  • Looks can be deceiving: What if it just so happens that you look like a potential buyer’s ex girlfriend? Or a mean former teacher? There are so many possible relations. Do you want to be associated with a buyer’s past history? Sometimes it is unavoidable, but is it worth the risk?
  • What to do, what to do?

    Instead of hovering around your home when you are scheduled to have a potential showing, try the following tips to get your home ready for showing, then try some of the following: take a walk, return some purchases, get the car washed, take the kids to the park, treat yourself to a nice meal, work-out, see a movie, buy a “just because” card for a loved one, hand write some letters, remember how to do cartwheels in the grass, or volunteer. Whatever you choose, just avoid being in the home during showings (and always leave some room in the schedule for the buyers to take a bit of extra time – nothing worse than feeling rushed).

    image courtesy of mtarvainen

Filed Under: Homeowner Tips Tagged With: sell your home, tips, advice, listing, showing

Selling Your Home? Exposure is essential.

February 27, 2012 by khproperties 1 Comment

Listing Exposure

Listing a home for sale isn’t as simple as putting a sign in the yard and entering some data into the San Antonio MLS (Multiple Listing Service). I should know, I help agents do it everyday. Marketing, particularly internet marketing, has become essential to listing a home and getting it sold, learn how to improve this area of your business by hiring one of the Top PPC Agencies. In order to thrive in today’s age of digital marketing, having a strong online presence is crucial, and you can do that with the help of a reliable SEO services similar to the ones at Damon Burton SEO.

Here at Kimberly Howell Properties we use multiple methods to get your property noticed by the buyers out there looking. The edge we provide is a knowledgeable staff who specialize in internet technologies and seeking out new opportunities to market and sell your home.

Where is my home listed?

When you list your home for sale with Kimberly Howell Properties, you can be assured that your home will have maximum exposure on the internet. From this site (and specifically, the listings pages and our home search) to the various syndication sites large and small, your home will be seen all over the internet. Syndication sites? Let’s talk about them…

Listing syndication sites are everywhere these days – you probably know a handful off the top of your head – Realtor.com, Zillow, and Trulia are well know these days. Realtor.com pulls info from the MLS and is typically the most accurate of the three (although not always the most detailed). Zillow and Trulia have a lot of listings, but don’t always have every listing and their data can sometimes be outdated. We work hard to keep our data up to date on these sites and many others. In addition to the big sites, we syndicate to many others – here’s some of the current sites you’ll find your homes on (they change often and we keep changing with them):

HGTV’s Front Door, Homes.com,Hotpads, Oodle, RealtyTrac, AOL Real Estate, Vast, CLRsearch, LakeHomesUSA, RiverHomesUSA, OceanHomesUSA, MyRealty, Enormo, LandWatch, Resortscape, Buyer Home Site, Condo Compare, Diggsy, eLookyLoo, Forclosure.com, FreedomSoft, Gooplex, GovListed.com, Harmon Homes, Home2Me, HomesbyLender, HomeTourConnect, Homew3inks, HouseHunt, HUDSeeker, IAS Properties, Juwai, LearnMoreNow.com, LiquidusMedia, ComcastOnDemand, Lot Network, NewHomeSource, OfferRunway, PropertyPursuit, PropertyShark, RealEstateMarketplace, RealEstateCentral, RealQuest Express, RealtyStore, Relocation.com, RentRange, The Real Estate Book, USALifestyle Real Estate, USHUD.com, Military.com, E-RealEstate, Homes and Land, and a host of over 280+ localized websites. Some sites are specific to certain types of properties such as foreclosures, lots and land, resort properties, location, etc., but if your home fits the qualifications, we’ll get it listed on every site we can!

IDX and your home.

In addition to the lengthy list above, your home will also appear on many other real estate sites – from large brokerages to agent websites – this is all thanks to the magic of IDX. IDX stands for Internet Data Exchange and it is a way for brokers to allow their listings to appear on other sites. We use IDX to help power our home search – which is why you’re able to see so many homes for sale on our site, not just our listings. We are given access to the MLS feed and allowed to post homes, no matter who they are listed by (unless they opt out), so you can see as many listings as possible.

Other Avenues

Of course, we don’t limit ourselves to just these ways of marketing your property – ask your agent what they plan to do with your home when they list it. Some of the things that I do to help our listings get found are tips and tricks that I don’t share with everyone on the blog (wouldn’t want to tell everyone all of my secrets, would I?) and some things are custom for the property (single property websites being a great example). No matter what the methods employed, your San Antonio home for sale will be given the most exposure possible thanks to our agents and our staff who work tirelessly to ensure you’re getting the most out of your work with us.

Have questions – just let us know.

image courtesy of Mike Poresky

Filed Under: Sell Your Home Tagged With: san antonio, idx, sell your home, internet marketing, home for sale, listing

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