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.” 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
