I’ve been corresponding over the last week with a customer who purchased her ProSell MLS plan three weeks ago. She wanted to know if her listing had been picked up on the other sites where we feed our listings. A couple of days later I confirmed that the listings had been fed and were beginning to appear (how quickly they appear on the other sites is controlled by those sites), not only on the sites we feed to, but on several others in her local area, thanks to the additional online exposure provided by her MLS agent. As a matter of fact, when I searched for her property address, I came up with over two pages of search results. So, all in all, our seller was satisfied that she was getting the widespread online exposure we promise.
But in the meantime, there was interesting lesson to be gained from this seller’s expectation that her online listing do the lion’s share of marketing her home.
In the three weeks since creating her listing, she had gotten some traffic. In today’s real estate market, any traffic in three short weeks is quite remarkable. Yet when she wrote, she commented that “time is of the essence for sellers” which seemed to indicate that she had an expectation of a lot more traffic and even possibly getting an offer in that three-week time frame.
We have always been keenly aware that time is of the essence in the home selling process. We address the issue of timing exhaustively in Book Two of our home-selling system, Marketing Made Easy!
And that brings me to the Thighmaster…or Bowflex…or diet plan. We all buy products that make promises, and ours is no exception, in that we promise you that if you use our system you’ll save a lot of money on the sale of your home (or we’ll give you your money back). But just as the Thighmaster sits in many a basement and doesn’t achieve the results it promises, so our complete system, if unused, won’t achieve the results we want for our sellers.
You’ll get the best results from using all the components of our home-selling system. Get all you can from your four selling system books. From home prep to pricing, from marketing and sales to a hassle-free closing, we’ve written them to cover every issue that might arise in the home-selling process. (If we’ve missed something, please feel free to let us know what it is!) Contact our staging or storage partners to help clean up and declutter. Use our classified ad partner to get a great price on a classified ad. Plan a traffic-stopping Open House with our Open House sign kit.
I reminded our seller to gather the statistics discussed in Marketing Made Easy! For example, in her market, the average days on market is 133, and there are currently over 600 properties in foreclosure and over 150 other properties listed for sale. I suggested a thorough review of her Home Valuation Report for recent sales data in her neighborhood. She decided, first, to drop her price, and secondly, to lower her expectation that, in such a competitive market, the sale of her home will result from an online listing alone (or even many online listings).
We know that we’re not going to get the slimmer thighs, rock-hard abs, or lose the weight without doing the “work” of using the products that promise those results. Similarly, we provide you with a complete set of tools for saving money on real estate commissions, but in order to get the results you want, you’ll need to open the tool box and put the whole set to work for you!
