Mark Wozniak: An important step in selling your home is selecting your Realtor®. And it really doesn’t matter where you may have found Realtors® that you’d like to do your due diligence on. It may have come from a referral from a friend or maybe you found one online or however it is. But it is important for you to do that due diligence, but one thing that should be clear is that we don’t really feel that Realtors® are in competition with each other.
Leigh Anne Monk: Right, that’s kind of a myth isn’t it? They think we are, but we really aren’t.
Mark Wozniak: The Realtor® community is really cooperating on a home transaction obviously representing the interests of our buyer and seller clients, but we’re cooperating. The real competition is that the homeowner’s home is competing with other homes on the market. So when you’re trying to select a Realtor® make sure to understand how they are going to make you home compete as effectively as possible with the other homes that are on the market.
Leigh Anne Monk: Right and one of the first things that we would encourage you to do when you’re talking to agents trying to make that determination which is the best agent to choose is how they go about determining the market value of your home. As you know price is all important and you have to select the right price and it's clearly easy that an agent can go online and look at some previous homes sold in the neighborhood, but do they do things like check on the square footage? Is the square footage of your house comparable to the house that they are comparing it to? Look at the lot sizes. Is it a half acre lot? Is it a full acre lot? What school district does it go up to? All those factors help determine market value so we would encourage you as you’re selecting your agent to ask some questions to help you understand best how they go about that process. Again, focus on how they’re helping you present your house in the best possible light to get that house sold since in fact your house is what’s in competition.
Mark Wozniak: Yeah and really doing that type of marketing analysis is in some ways a science doing all those correct slices and dices of the data, but there’s a bit of an art to it as well. But one area that is truly an art form, if you will, is the way they are going to present your home visually because as we all know the home selection process from a buyer’s standpoint is very visual in nature. And the first way that most buyers are going to see your home is through the photographs of your home -- be it online or in a brochure. And it’s that art of how the realtor photographs your home that often gets ignored but is incredibly critical.
You need to understand that if they are going to take the maximum number of photographs that are allowed by the local multiple listing service and within those photographs are they going to be using high-end equipment or a point and shoot camera because it really makes a difference. Have they been trained and do they use correct lighting for your home? All those things are going to make your home really standout against the others on the market and not only that it’s how do they describe your home.
I think we have all seen descriptions online where things are misspelled and clearly once you visited the home that things were left out that were really important for buyers to know. Get a good understanding of how that Realtor® has performed in the past with describing homes. I would ask for samples of not only their photography, but of the written materials. Ask for their brochures. Ask for examples of the remarks that they’ve made in previous MLS listings to find out do they really make that home come alive.
Leigh Anne Monk: Right and the whole concept behind having good photography is that the home has been prepared and staged properly to have the photography stick out. You could have the best possible picture but if there is clutter in the corner or if there is furniture arrangements that may not show off the house in its best possibly light, all of a sudden that photography still can’t help that home. So really it is a combination of preparing the home and staging the home.
So what we, again, would recommend that you do is talk to your agent about how they help you with that. What steps will they make in terms of preparing the home? Will they give you a room by room description of what you can do to improve the look of the home in preparation for that photography? Will they come in and stage the home? Will they bring additional pictures and accessories and things like that just to really make sure that the pictures are really going to look top notch because of that? And I’ll tell you quite frankly just this past week, Mark, I was helping a buyer go through houses and we saw eight houses and only one was staged and guess what house they liked the most? The staged home! Staged homes sell for more money and sell in less time. It is a proven fact and so we think it so important that your agent help you with that, as our team does.
Mark Wozniak: Yeah because, again, the whole home buying process is such a sensory experience for the buyers and we just can’t state that enough. You need to make sure your Realtor® understands that and knows about staging, presenting the home visually - even the smells, the feel of the home - are so important because when they buyer comes to your home ultimately those are going to help kick off the buying signals. But before they ever get to that home and walk through the front door in the first place…
Leigh Anne Monk: They have to want to…
Mark Wozniak: They have to be interested in your home and to that end, especially today, it’s absolutely critical that the Realtor® you’re using is marketing your home using the buyer’s preferred mediums, which right now means online. The latest statistics we’ve seen are that over 95% of all buyers are beginning their search online and it makes an incredible difference if you home shines online or not through the quality of the photography, through the staging. But not only that, but are you reaching those buyers online and to that end you need to make sure your Realtor® is knowledgeable about getting your home on as many buyer websites as possible.
Do they understand how search engine optimization works? So buyers searching for qualities that might be related to your home are going to find your home that you’re are going to pop up near the top of the rankings. Do they understand that? Do they understand how to use social media to get the word out about your home? There are just so many facets of online marketing these days. Be sure your Realtor® knows how to use that effectively.
And really, in the whole process I think it’s much, much more important to gauge - Is the Realtor® spending more time talking about themselves or about how they are going to make your home standout against the competition in the way it’s marketed? At the end of the day just remember that’s what’s going to be important. It’s not, "Have you sold a lot of homes in my neighborhood before?" or "How long have you been the business?" They should be able to demonstrate to you that they understand how to make your home stand out among the all competition.