I was going through some old footage and found these – and I’m not sure they’ve been seen before:
For those who don’t know, our daughter Kayla worked worked with us for five years before moving to Manhattan in 2018, where she’s a realtor. Here is her Instagram account (she is a great agent!): https://www.instagram.com/kaylaklinge/
She’s been doing real estate videos for ten years!
Are you thinking about selling your home and are trying to identify the strategies used by listing agents to get you top dollar with minimal inconvenience?
Are you finding that agents aren’t real specific about how they do their business, and just want you to trust that because they sold houses in the past that they can do it again?
Here is my specific strategy to achieve top-dollar sales with minimal inconvenience: 1) Do a minor tune-up of the home prior to hitting the open market, 2) Price attractively, 3) Make the home easy to see via the open-house extravaganza, 4) Allow all buyers to bid it up, 5) Treat buyers and agents with respect and deliver full transparency that encourages participation.
Here are the results of our last 25 listings:
None of these were priced artificially low to generate a bidding war. When a property is ‘attractively priced’, it means the presentation is worthy and it causes buyers to want to see it in person.
I have not come across any agent who sells homes like I do, and rarely do I ever meet an agent who has any strategy about handling multiple offers.
It happened again yesterday – the listing agent said on the phone that he had 3-5 offers, so I asked how he planned to handle it. Literally, he said, “I don’t know”, to which I replied, “How about doing a highest-and-best round?” He said, “Well we will probably counter the best 2-3 offers”.
Why he would eliminate any buyer is beyond me – I always counter every buyer because who knows how much higher they might go when asked.
In further discussion, he made it sound like none of the offers received were full price, and later I sent him a text that we were sending in a full price offer. Two hours later, he sends a text back that said, “It sounds like the seller wants to move forward with the first offer he got”.
This is the standard procedure in the realtor business – just grab one.
If your listing languishes on the market, it gets worse. Even the chief economist says so:
You want to sell early – during the first week on the market – when urgency is highest, and not languish for weeks or months just to take less later. In case everything goes right and multiple offers are received, you want an expert who creates a proper bidding war. In 2023, when buyers are more tempted to cancel and move on, you want your escrow handled in a way that it closes successfully, and on time.
Your eventual sales price can vary 5% to 20%, depending on your listing agent.
This is the easier part – charting the next six months.
Either the Fed will pause and delight us all, or their threat of higher rates will make buyers antsy and ready to pounce. The best-looking inventory usually happens in springtime, so all the necessary the ingredients for a selling-season surge should come together nicely.
We played in the charity whiffleball tournament to benefit Camp Kesem, a week-long camp for kids who have parents who suffering from cancer. We raised enough money to send another TEN kids to camp! We got smoked 13-2 in our game though.
Here is the story on Camp Kesem – Natalie was a camp counselor 4x, and loved it:
This blog started on September 24, 2005. It was a Saturday morning, and literally I thought I better get into this blogging thing before every other realtor started doing it. This was my first blog post that talked about 20% to 25% appreciation per year:
I am very grateful for you being here. At the height of the notoriety in 2009-2010 when all we talked about was foreclosures and short-sales, the monthly unique users was around 11,000. To still have 6,421 over the last 30 days is fantastic, given that the market turned 180 degrees in the opposite direction since 2009, and I figure that once readers buy or sell a house, they are likely to quit reading and go on with their life:
The new-visitor count has to be loaded with bots.
Where are you from?
Ashburn must be where the bots live?
What devices are you using?
Do bots have a mobile device?
Beats me, but if they don’t, then the audience of real people is into the thousands – yay!
How about age and gender?
I love seeing the younger people – about one-third of you are age 34 and under:
About 60% of readers go straight to the home page, and the others are either searching for a specific real estate topic and find a bubbleinfo article, or readers are sharing links to articles with their friends and family, which I really appreciate – thank you:
The Other Bob (TOB) suggested a blog post where he and others could ask questions.
Let’s do it!
Leave your questions in the comment section, and I’ll do my best to answer promptly. The comment section is moderated, so you will see your comment once I have a chance to review and approve.
We are busy launching my best listing of all-time today, so it promises to be the biggest day in the nearly seventeen years of Bubbleinfo.com history!
For those who would like to review the history of this blog, the 10,094 posts are poorly organized here. You’ll see that I went back to the first three years and marked nearly every blog post as private (868 posts). Hopefully, the whole history will be re-visited, organized, and turned into an action thriller some day: