TWELVE TACTICS FOR REAL ESTATE AGENTS IN TOUGH TIMES
TACTICS (7-9)
Tactic # 7: Price Ahead of the Market
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Pricing effectively can amount to 80% of your successful marketing of listings.
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Until you get it right, you won’t have showings or offers, and little else you do can change that.
Don’t Chase the Market, Let the Market Chase You:
- Whether the market is going up or down, price your listings ahead of the market.
- Ahead of it on the way up and ahead of it on the way down.
The Challenge:
- Sellers and buyers can be out of sync with the realities of the market.
- Sellers tend to trail market reality by six to eight months.
- Buyers tend to project forward six to eight months.
Seven Maxims for Pricing in a Shifted Market:
- Be a student of your market – know your numbers.
- In hard-shifting markets, focus your comps on actives. Pending and solds may already be out of date.
- Preview properties – understand what’s behind the numbers.
- Keep your presentations as current as possible. Let your ongoing research speak for you.
- Prequalify for motivation. Sellers who most need to sell, sell most often.
- Secure price reductions in advance -avoiding falling behind the market.
- Always price ahead of the market!
Tactic # 8: Stand Out From the Competition
- Proper staging is one of the best ways to entice buyers to take a look and make a property stand out.
- Preparing a house to put it on the market directly impacts whether or not a home will sell, how quickly it will sell and for how much.
- A review of over 2,800 properties in eight cities found that ‘Staged homes, on average, sold in half the time that non-staged homes did. The sellers with staged homes ended up with 6.3% mort than their asking price, on average’.
- Remind sellers that: 1. buyers are looking for value, 2. you won’t get a second chance to make a first impression and 3. you’re in competition with all of the homes in the vicinity.
Tactic # 9: Creating Buyer Urgency – It is Called a Buyers’ Market
- The biggest challenge you have in a buyers’ market is getting buyers to buy. They are fearful, reluctant and are sure it’s going to go lower.
- All of this has happened before and it has been even worse.
- Every market has it good buys..and even great buys.
Be The Local Economist of Choice:
- Once you are clear in your own thinking, you can begin to have a positive impact on others(buyers and your local community).
- Overcome the media enhanced real estate malaise.
- Be the one with the facts.
- Focus your lead generation on finding and attracting motivated buyers.
The Best Buy List:
- A list you have compiled of the current best buys in the market.
- Based on your consistent tracting of new listings, price reductions, and pre-foreclosure or foreclosed properties.
- You can’t creat urgency if there isn’t a good reason for it.
- Buyers can see through false optimism and manipulative selling.
- You must find real, honest, and compelling ways to help the feel the truth.
- If they wait, they are going to miss their best opportunity.
Overcoming Doubt and Fear:
- You are being the highest level of fiduciary when you don’t let them cave-in to their doubts and fear.
- They will thank you for having helped them make a smart decision.
- When the market turns back toward a seller’s market, all the best buys and even the good buys will be gone.
- Building buyer urgency is a matter of: knowledge of the market, skill at communicating the realities and assertivesness in challenging their thinking.
