SELLERS: Top 10 Marketing Mistakes in a Buyer’s Market
#1 MARKETING Mistake: Bad Photos of your home online
Pictures speak volumes and are noticed before the written word. Since it's the first thing a potential buyer will see, why leave a bad first impression? The job of a photo is to entice the buyer to want to see more of the home in person.
#2 MARKETING Mistake: Omitting Descriptive Comments
Just listing the FACTS does not make the buyer pick up the phone and call. Good marketing tells a buyer why this particular home is better than the dozens of others on the market. What makes this home unique? How can a negative be addressed to accentuate the positive?
#3 MARKETING Mistake: Restricting Access for Showings
If an agent can't easily show your home, she is going to show another agent's listing instead. Don't give an agent a reason to pass up your home. Any of these can hamper showings:
· No lockbox on the property
· Restricted hours to show
· 24-hour notice
#4 MARKETING Mistake: Offering Less Commission than Other Listings: less than 3%
It's not that agents are greedy creatures who show only high-fee listings, lower commissions indicate that the seller is not motivated to sell. If the seller isn't motivated, it could mean the seller isn't willing to negotiate on price. In slow moving markets, buyers expect to negotiate.
#5 MARKETING Mistake: Not Including Buyer Incentives
An incentive could be
· $$ credit toward the buyer's closing costs
· Home protection plan
· Pre-paid homeowner association fees for a year
· Buy-down mortgage interest rate
#6 MARKETING Mistake: Refusing to pack away your clutter because you don’t want to change your lifestyle
If you have collected a lot of ‘treasures’ and like having them visible to you, now is not the time to expect others to want to do the same. Your home will be seen as cluttered, disorganized, and smaller and its virtues will not be seen.
· Pack away everything that speaks to your family and other personal items—no one wants to see pictures of your family on the wall.
· Pack it all in the garage, rent storage space, have a garage sale, donate it—but get it out of sight.
Learn to live simply without all the electrical gadgets on your counters, beauty products all over your bathroom, clothes you don’t wear anyway, towels, bed sheets and blankets that are really rags, rusted equipment, sporting goods and garden equipment.