It’s a seller’s worst nightmare: their home being undersold.
And nothing breaks our hearts here at Red Fox more than seeing a crap local result.
Here are our top 5 tips to avoid leaving money on the table, and getting maximum dollars for your home.
1. Get your property into selling condition
Would you try selling your car without getting it detailed?
It’s pretty simple. The better your property looks, the better you’ll do.
Well-presented homes that are move-in ready, with nothing to immediately spend (think drive away, no more to pay), attract more buyers, and achieve higher sale prices, than those that aren’t.
We prove this principle every week. And wrote a blog about it: The easiest $100k you could ever make.
If you’re selling agent doesn’t provide access to professional styling advice, or worse, tells you that it’s fine to sell your home as-is, find another agent.
2. Don’t overprice
This happens when:
- you base your sale price on factors that have nothing to do with the actual market. Like how much money you need to trade-up to your next home. And buy a new car.
- you think you need to allow room for ‘negotiation’.
- an agent overpromises on price to ‘buy’ your listing. Telling you what you want to hear, not what you need to hear.
- you think you’ve got time and can wait for the ‘right’ buyer who’ll pay you your dream price.
- you focus on how long you’ve been on the market instead of how long the buyer has been in the market.
Time is not your friend when you’re selling.
In a seller’s market, if a home doesn’t sell quickly, buyers will automatically assume it’s overpriced. Because if it was priced correctly, it would have sold, right?
And when you do finally adjust the price, you’ll likely have to discount more heavily and sell for less than what you could have initially, if you’d priced it competitively.
It’s crap. We still see it all the time. And it’s easily avoided.
How do you spot an agent with overpriced listings? Their days on market. Check them out on AgentFinder on reiwa.com.
3. Choose the right agent
No matter how great your property is, if you choose the wrong agent, you’ll likely end up undersold.
How do you know what to look for? We’ve written a blog on that too. Find it here.
4. Quality, bespoke marketing campaign
You’ve seen them. Badly written online ads, photos taken on an iPhone, no floorplans, no walk-through video.
Or, marketing-by-numbers that looks the same as everyone else’s. Same-old, same-old. Vanilla. Bland. Bor-ing *yawns*
Real estate agencies need to be great marketers as much as negotiators. Our first job is to attract as many people as possible to your home.
More people = more competition = more money for you
Yet most agency marketing campaigns look like carbon copies of everyone else’s.
This is the sausage-making approach to selling. Get ’em in, get ’em up, get ’em out.
If that’s the approach of the agency you’re considering, change agencies.
5. Selling off-market or too quickly
Even in the current market, there is such a thing as selling too quickly.
Selling before your first home open, immediately after your first home open, or ‘off-market’, seems tempting. But the truth is:
It puts you at risk of leaving 10’s of $1000’s of dollars on the table. Or more.
The question is, is your agent trying to win a medal before the race has even started? Sure, they might know a couple of potential runners, but those runners aren’t exclusive – they’ll happily enter any agent’s race. Until such time as you fire the gun, you’ve got no idea who might be in the field. And you want as many competitors as possible.
Not too fast, not too slow, but getting the pace and final sprint just right. It needs to be you in the winners circle at the end – not the agent.
So if you want to make sure you’re not undersold it’s simple: find an agent that will give you great advice; tell you what you need to hear; has your back; is savvy with their marketing; and can demonstrate a track record of superior negotiation results, not just a high number of transactions.
Ooh, that sounds like us!
If you’re thinking of selling, and curious about how we do things here at Red Fox, call Nat now on 0405 812 273. We’d love to chat!
