Just like there’s no magic pill we can take to achieve our ideal weight, there’s no magic pill for achieving the best possible result when it comes to selling your home either.

It can be very tempting when you’re selling to want to believe the agent offering you a magic pill – they’re the ones that are are so desperate to win your business that they’ll tell you what you want to hear, versus the agent that’s genuinely got your best interests at heart and has the courage to tell you what you need to hear.

But whilst the cost of failure in dieting will is no more than a couple of months of wasted time and a few hundred dollars, choosing the wrong real estate agent and going to market with the wrong strategy for selling your home, could cost you tens of thousands.

There are 5 clues to spotting if an agent is trying to sell you a magic pill:

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  1. Presentation. Magic pill agents will tell you that there’s very little you need to do to get the home ready for sale apart from some cleaning & de-cluttering. Why? They’re either too scared to tell you the truth for fear of losing your listing or they don’t have the expertise and process in place to help their clients get their homes ready for sale. We’re selling homes in the era of Tinder and Instagram – if buyers don’t like what they see they’ll swipe over your home and move on to the next one.
  2. The price they promise you. The fact that an agent is promising a price at all should ring alarm bells. The philosophy of magic pill agents is to start your property at high price, usually your hope price, and then once the property is online and not selling condition you downwards – this is what I call the discount game of death by a thousand price cuts.  It’s a sure fire way of ending up selling for much less than what you probably would have if the property was priced appropriately in the first place. The magic pill agent doesn’t care though as they’ve got what they wanted – the selling fee.
  3. The investment in quality marketing and promotion. Where your home ranks and is positioned on the major real estate portals is critically important, but there are other places that we need to appeal to buyers too – it’s about casting as wide a net as possible. Which would you prefer? Saving a few hundred dollars on marketing or underselling by tens of thousands?
  4. Selling fee. Magic pill agents are typically those offering lowest selling fee. If an agent isn’t able to negotiate a fair fee for their professional service, how are they going to negotiate the best result for you?! Pay peanuts…
  5. How an agent works with buyers. The best agents know that they need to follow up with and nurture buyers to get a great result – they know that it’s not where you start with the buyer that counts but where you end up. They don’t sell you out at a home open by suggesting you’ll take a lower price, and they’ll write all offers for a property because they’re trying to create competition and leverage to get the best possible selling outcome for you.

So when you’re speaking to an agent about selling your home, ask yourself, are they selling me a magic pill and telling me what I want to hear in order to get my listing, or are they genuinely telling me what I need to hear so that we set ourselves up to get the best possible selling outcome?

Which one is it and which one will you choose?

Photo by Anna Shvets from Pexels

Natalie Hoye is the Founder and Licensee of Red Fox Property Group – a boutique agency doing things differently in the suburbs surrounding Beaufort Street. We call it ‘real estate alchemy’: a genuine blend of science and intuition, marketing and magic, head and heart. The Red Fox Way. And we’d love to chat with you about your local real estate needs. Call us now on 0405 812 273.