Should you market your home for sale through the holidays?  It’s now mid November, and if your property has been listed for sale but not gotten an acceptable purchase offer, you may be thinking of taking your house or condo off the market until sometime in the new year. Is that a good idea?  Below, please find some considerations for you as you decide what to do. We’ll

Pricing: will the home sell for more now, or in the new year or spring?

No one can tell you whether prices will be better or worse in the first quarter of 2012 than they are now.  I just returned from the annual conference for the National Association of Realtors (of which I am a member), and quite honestly, I got conflicting information.  Some reports indicate that prices will be lower in the spring, others that they will be higher – or interest rates may be higher, which puts pressure on pricing since affordability is strained when that happens.   Pricing is local, though – so no matter what’s happening nationwide, it could be different in Silicon Valley, in Almaden, Cambrian, or Los Gatos, or in your subdivision or school area.  But bottom line: we really don’t know what pricing will do, we only know the probable buyer’s value – a range of likely sales prices – right now.

Being disturbed during the holidays

Many home owners really don’t want a lot of traffic coming through the home from Thanksgiving through the New Year due to visiting relatives, events planned such as parties at the home, the presence of gifts and concerns over theft, etc.  They may also be worried about rainy weather and carpets getting soiled.

At the same time, though, during the holidays many of us make our homes warm, bright and inviting, particularly if we decorate for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, etc.  Even the smells can do wonders: gingerbread cookies, Christmas trees, hot mulled wine…. With family and friends coming to visit, we tend to “deck the halls” and make our houses really feel like homes.  For many condos, townhouses and houses, during the holidays these homes really show at their best.

The potential to sell a home in December is actually a lot higher both because of the decor and ambiance, but also because so much of the competition is withdrawn from the market.  The odds shift much more in your favor if you keep your home on the market!

Market the home – but differently!

A great solution is to continue to market the home for sale, but to do it differently:

• remove the for sale sign & outside flyer box
• remove the lock box, showings by appointment only (by agent or seller)
• remove the seller’s phone number from the MLS – all appointments will be by appointment only
• flyer stand, disclosure binder and other marketing materials out of sight
• keep home listed for sale on MLSListings.com but more restricted hours

This sort of marketing will result in fewer showings but showings of more qualified, more motivated buyers.  It will be less intrusive to you and everyone in your household too.

Home sellers in Silicon Valley today worry about things they never had to worry about10 years ago, many of which they have little control over.  Like what? Much of it has to do with online or web marketing via websites, blogs, web portals and social media sites.   Here are a few:

• County records on properties are now public and available online almost everywhere, including permit records, info on the structure and lot size, etc.  If the public or county records are incorrect, buyers still use them – so wrong info on home size, bedrooms, baths etc. can hurt market value, as can incomplete or missing permit files online with the city, town or county.
• If the Google street view of the property happened on a bad day (say, the neighbors were having some sort of RV get together and the street was jammed with trucks and motorhomes or the yard happened to be in disarray), it can kill viewings.  Buyers and agents may skip that house all together if the “street view” makes it look bad.
• Some websites that display the information on listed homes permit consumers to blog or comment about the home.  Consumer comments online  can be devastating if the remarks aren’t good!
• If homes need good “social media exposure” to sell for top dollar, how can home owners know what constitutes good social media marketing – especially if I’m not on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn or any of those popular sites? (Do I need to be on every site?)
• Syndicated errors: If a home’s marketing is incorrect on the MLS but corrected later, will all of the sites it was syndicated to get the correction, or will the info stay wrong and cause us harm in marketing the house or condo?

What can consumers do? To begin with, it would be wise to hire someone web-savvy, someone who knows the ropes with internet marketing at a minimum, to help you to navigate these waters. Additionally, it would be smart to work with someone who’s very strongly proactive, who can ferret out errors and work to correct them.  Understand that even the web-savvy agent cannot fix all problems, but at least they’ll have a head start on understanding what it takes to address them!

Shameless plug: This is work I often do. I can’t guarantee results as I have no control over the county records or syndication, but I have had good success in this arena and am also well known for successes with social media!

Related reading:

How important are permits and finals?

Building Permits Are Online and Easy to View in San Jose

Monte Sereno building permit nightmare

Are open houses important for getting a home to sell, or for getting it to sell at a higher price?

In Silicon Valley, only a small percentage of homes sell directly from an open house visit by a home buyer. Depending on whose statistics you believe, it’s somewhere in the 5% to 10% range. Some would argue for smaller figures than those.

The best home buyers, who are pre-approved and serious enough to be working with a real estate professional and have their own buyer’s agent, can come whenever it suits both their schedules and the home sellers. But that doesn’t mean that all of them do.  Some serious house hunting buyers may be out on their own, without their agent because they don’t want to “bother” him or her too much. I’ve had clients like that myself, and no matter how much I reassure them that I want to show them homes and prefer it, even, they want to mostly look on their own until they are either more serious or have found something they really love.  It is not uncommon for buyers to phone or email me that they’ve seen a house that they want to buy.  This seems to be a growing trend.

Knowing that the best Silicon Valley home buyers do have an agent, don’t necessarily need open houses, there are some who move from this thought to the idea that open houses are without significant value to the home sellers.  Some Realtors would assert that open houses only get neighbors and “Lookie Lous”, that they are only used by the agent to get new buyers and are a waste of everyone’s time. That’s an extreme position and I think it’s mistaken.

My sense is that it’s a mix. Open houses do not need to happen every weekend, but I do believe that open houses are a good idea when a listing is new in particular. A well attended open house can motivate buyers because they see a lot of interest in a home. If they only see the property with their agent, they may never get the impression that there’s any reason to hurry.  They could miss a buying opportunity and the sellers could miss a potential multiple offer opportunity. That’s where you really have the chance to sell for top dollar.

Finally, of course it depends on why and how an open house is done. While many agents do open houses primarily to get buyer clients, that’s not the case for everyone (not for me). Many of us utilize the open house opportunity to showcase the home, meet the neighbors and learn more about the area (neighbors often can fill us in on neighborhood history, such as who the builder was), and provide buyers an opportunity to see the home without feeling pressured. It can be great marketing, particularly if there’s a lot of traffic.

In my real estate practice, normally I will hold a listing open the first weekend and possibly the second but not every weekend (too many open houses can make a seller look desperate – too few can make the seller look unreasonable or difficult). When I see a house that is never held open, I wonder what the story is – does the seller object? Is the agent lazy? I do think that never holding a property open (not even once) most likely damages the ability to sell the home for top price since there’s that lack of synergy that can come from having an excited, interested bunch of buyers in the house all at once.

Of course, none of these marketing efforts can be effective in the least if the price is wrong. Before worrying about any marketing or advertising issues, if the home isn’t selling when it seems like it should, take a good hard look at the price and see if it is competitive.  That is the most important part of marketing: appropriate pricing to attract buyers. Make sure that your property is in good shape and that it’s reasonably easy for buyers to see it – too many restrictions and they will skip your home!

Buyers: if a home is never open and is hard to see, you will have less competition and most likely will be in a far stronger negotiating position than if similar real estate is very accessible.  But the red flag is that there may be a difficult situation behind the challenge in seeing the property – either the sellers or their agent may not be easy to work with.

Sellers: to maximize your net from the sale of your San Jose area house, condo or townhouse, there are a number of elements which all must line up.  These involve accessibility, pricing and staging as well as other marketing elements.  Remove any of them and your chances of selling (both at all and for top dollar) are diminished.

Thinking of selling your Santa Clara County home?

If you are a Los Gatos, San Jose or Santa Clara County home owner who’s thinking of selling, please contact me today for a free, no pressure consultation.  When we meet, I will give you a copy of my book on home selling with my compliments.

Alternatively, you can pull up the pdf of my 60 page booklet on preparing to sell your home online, without registration:
Pre-listing package for Silicon Valley home owners

How important is the marketing of homes for sale in Silicon Valley?  First it’s important to understand what we mean by the term marketing: generally, it is the way we attract potential buyers to the homes for sale.  This is more than just the flyer or newspaper ads.  It includes:

• pricing the home
• photographing the property
• describing the home on the MLS (and including good pictures)
• the quality of the flyers
• the print advertising
• the online advertising & exposure
• the networking with other agents
• the direct outreach and appeal to consumers
• the accessibility of the home
• staging the home to sell (appeal, cleanliness, no odors, etc.)

Marketing can be good, bad, or somewhere in between. Bad marketing will likely cost sellers money and good marketing will likely make them money.  

Today we’ll go over the most important elements of marketing because sellers should evaluate them when hiring a Realtor to assist them in the marketing and sale of their home.  While there are many areas of marketing, the most crucial, by far, are these three: pricing, photos, and the description on the MLS.

Pricing:  The biggest marketing mistake which is commonly seen is overpricing.  Sellers sometimes believe that their home is worth more than the buying public do and a home will remain unsold no matter what else is done right.  In fact, you could fly airplanes aroud the home and put full page color ads in every paper around the world but if the home is overpriced, it still won’t sell!  Pricing is the most important part of marketing.   With a too-high price, traffic will be diminished and offers will be low at best (lower than actual market value).

Of course, most homes are worth not just one exact dollar amount but somewhere within a range of prices, depending on terms, the speed of the sale etc.  If the pricing is well done and the rest of the marketing is also quite good, the home ought to sell on the high end of what is possible at that time.

Pricing mistakes are very costly and very easy to make.  Here are some of the ways which sellers can be misled about the probable market value of their home:

• using old comps
• relying upon online home valuations
• basing their home’s sale price on what they “need”
• hiring an agent based on his/her suggesting the highest list price (we call that “buying the listing” when an agent overstates value to secure the listing)
• expecting 100% back from all improvements done to the home
• believing buyers can “always make an offer” (if it’s overpriced, they usually won’t)
• thinking there’s no harm in just reducing the price later (if the market is going down, you will be “chasing the market down”)

The one thing that neither the sellers nor their Realtors control is the real estate market, which is fickle and can change.  In recent years it’s been up and down, depending upon location, price point, school districts and more.  Using six month old comparable sales to establish current market value just isn’t appropriate.  Sometimes even the most recently closed sale is not enough, especially if the market is sliding.  Instead of just relying on the solds, also look at the pendings and the current competition.  The less competition your home has, the better odds you have of selling it – and for more.  But a surge of inventory will cause home values (including yours) to drop.   To understand the probable buyer’s value, all of these must be factored in together.  (The online valuation sites do not do that.)

I should add that it is harder to sell a property that has issues such as high voltage power lines, deferred maintenance, messy tenants who make showings difficult, busy road, junky neighbors, or some other undesirable element.  Many agents will suggest a lower price to compensate for whatever issue is hurting the marketability of the home.

While it’s true that there is no problem that a better price cannot fix, most sellers are trying to maximize their sales price.  For that reason, I’d always suggest asking your real estate agent if there’s anything that can be done to improve the market value aside from that lower price.  Sometimes fresh paint and carpet and a professional house cleaning can do wonders for the home’s saleability.  Or giving tenants a lower rent in exchange for their cooperation during the sale will create an easier time for buyers wanting to see and purchase your home.   A little effort may have a great payoff.  (Some agents focus almost exclusively on price and may not be worried about any other element of marketing.  This is a mistake, so be aware that you may run into an agent with this belief.)

Photographs:  Beyond pricing, the next biggest area where we commonly see bad marketing is in poor photography of the home.  Buyers care a tremendous amount about the photos of the home, both outside and inside, and will not bother to see properties where the pics are absent or skip main rooms (such as kitchens and bathrooms, which are expensive to remodel). The presumption is that if it’s not photographed, it’s because it’s horrible.

Good photography will show the home in its best realistic light.  It will not have over-saturation (somewhat surreal looking, which seems to be in style now). 

A good main photo will show front of the home and include the front door and windows (without focusing on the garage).  Bad photography will not only zero in on the garage and driveway, but will likely include a car parked there (too much trouble to ask them to move it!) or maybe garbage bins, toys, hoses or other distractions laying about. This main photograph will show up everywhere from the MLS to the house flyer to a myriad of online websites; I cannot stress enough how important it is that it be nicely done!

The photo below is of a home in Saratoga that my parents owned for about 20 years, and which I sold for my dad after my mother’s passing.  This house is on a flag lot -  it’s behind another home and to get to it, you have to go down a long driveway.  At the end of the driveway, naturally, is a garage.  When photos are taken from there, what is prominent is a 3 car garage and a whole lot of concrete.  That’s the easiest place from which to take photographs, but not the best!

Photograph of home with front door as main focus

The interior and backyard shots also need to be good, of course.  Pictures should not be taken until the home is clean, staged and “show ready”.  For some home owners, it’s not difficult to get their home in shape for the public to view it online and in person. For others, it’s an immense effort.  If you fall into the latter category, get help!  It is cheaper to hire a stager to assist with decluttering and staging then it is to lose the buyer.

Remember, any main area of the condo, townhouse or house which is not photographed will be presumed to be bad by the buying public.  Make sure that the bathrooms and kitchen, especially, gleam and are well photographed!

The MLS:  The multiple listing service (MLS) is the # 1 way we reach buyers in the San Jose – Los Gatos – Saratoga – Silicon Valley area.  The description and photos there are key to getting qualified traffic into the home.  In addition to good still pics, it’s helpful to have a high-quality virtual tour.  Today many of the virtual tours are really just slideshows of still photos.  The better ones, though, include pan shots or actual videos.  (When I do virtual tours they include many photos which I stitch together to create pans of rooms and yards. In the last year or two I’ve been doing 40 – 60 photos per tour.)

The description on the MLS is also key. There are a limited number of characters for comments.  Using precise, descriptive words can be very powerful, while using vague descriptives can be very unconvincing.  Here are some examples:

Weak:
Nice floors
Gorgeous kitchen
Beautiful
Newer appliances
Well maintained
Updated kitchen
Newer roof
Newer windows
air conditioning
(also weak: no permits or finals or “permits unknown”)

Strong:
Hardwood floors, just refinished
Slab Granite countertops, stainless steel appliances
Wolf range, Bosch dishwasher, (brand names)
Kitchen remodeled 3 years ago
Presidential roof, 1 year old
Trane heater & A/C, 3 years old
(Brand name – Andersen, Pella etc) windows installed 2 years ago
If work done with permits and finals, say so!
If work done by well known builder or kitchen remodeler, say so!

Obviously, only offer the age of the components of the home if they’re newer!

Flyers and Print ads: Usually if there’s a problem with the flyers or ads, there’s a bigger, underlying problem with the photos or MLS and the bad flyers and ads are something of a trickle-down problem.  But let’s touch on the print media too since it’s a hot button for many, including me (I cringe when I see awful flyers).  

Recently I saw a one-sided house flyer of a million dollar home that has one terrible “main” photo which showcases the garage door & driveway and the street in front of it (with the manhole cover being prominent) and a bunch of very tiny thumbnail pics on the side which are too small to even figure out.  Takeaway: the garage is the big deal here. Forget the house. Oh and to top it off, there’s a car in the driveway! (Sorry folks, it’s not included in the sale.)

The description on this marketing piece was awful too.  The main title was a non-descriptive line: “Gorgeous Home”. That could mean almost anything, it’s so vague!  And the address line included the state – very silly since we are hundreds of miles from anything out of California.

To top it off, the price was missing on this info sheet, and so was the MLS number.  Why?  Usually agents do that so they can get the “up calls” and try to convert leads to buyers.  (So too was the agent’s license number missing, which is now required by the California Department of Real Estate.) 

It’s frustrating to see really terrible marketing, because I know that the seller is going to be hurt by it, but once a home is listed, other agents cannot interfere.  I wish that managing brokers paid more attention to the marketing that their agents did – it would help both the consumers and the real estate businesses to do a better job.

So what should you expect in a home flyer if your home is listed for sale by a Realtor?  Ask before you hire so you are not surprised!  Some agents (small minority) will do no flyer or just print out info directly from the MLS.  Some will do a lousy one sided piece.   Most agents will do a nice 2 sided, color flyer with photos on both sides for most homes, including condos.  For very high end or luxury homes, there may be a large handout with four sides and many photos and text.   (Some agents will produce a 4 sided flyer but reserve the last page to advertise themselves rather than their listing.)

But do flyers really matter at all? 

I believe that they do matter.  Buyers, their family and friends use flyers on the for sale sign’s post box to screen homes to see.  Great flyer? Go see the home!   Lousy flyer? Forget it.  (Buyers also use the flyer as a memory jog after seeing homes so they can keep them all straight.)  It’s not a huge percentage of impact, perhaps somewhere between 3% and 10%, but would you want to eliminate any significant chances of your home selling for top dollar? 

Print advertisements, on the other hand, are not effective for selling homes anymore.  They are effective for marketing the listing agent, though!  Buyers and their agents are not looking at the local newspaper or homes magazine but instead are browsing homes online. 

The magazines are beautiful but have a deadline several weeks prior to production, so by the time they are on the shelves at the local grocery store, the homes advertised may be long gone.  Newspapers are more current but still not 100% up to date for the same reason. 

But visit www.MLSListings.com (the public and the data you pull is current to within 15 minutes.  Can’t beat that.

So forget the print ads.  They make the sellers feel good to see their home in print but they are not effective at marketing the property, just the listing agent. 

To get the most bang for your buck with real estate marketing, focus first on correct pricing, fabulous photographs and ideal MLS description & comments.  These are the foundation for excellent realty marketing of homes for sale in Santa Clara County and throughout the state.  Also pay attention to staging (in conjunction with photos) and the home flyers.  Keeping the home accessible and pleasant not just on the day the photographs are shot but throughout the listing period is important too, of course. 

It’s a great bonus if your agent is a good networker, since often homes “sell twice”, first to the real estate community and second to the buyers themselves.  In some cases, this is extremely important, but most of the time the networking element is icing on the cake.  As long as the fundamentals are right, this last bit of marketing may not matter too tremendously in the majority of cases, but if your agent does it, consider that a plus.

Normally I do not reference other Realtors’ blog posts on any of my blogs or sites, but this morning I read one worth calling out because it raises a good issue that home buyers and sellers often never consider: the ongoing exposure of sold listings’ information, videos and photos on the web will continue to be present long after the home sale is closed.

The post, by Norma Toering of ReMax Palos Verdes Realty, is entitled “Please remove my home from the internet” and can be found on the Active Rain website at the link provided above.  This conscientious Realtor sold her listing and got it closed last week.  Now the buyer, the new owner, wants all traces of the listing removed from the internet.  Many people are private and may be uncomfortable with videos and pics of their home online (even if with the last owner’s consent, decor and furnishings).  But it is nearly impossible to remove all online photos because they are syndicated or pushed to other sites where we agents have no control. 

One commenter suggested that perhaps we need another disclosure so that buyers know and understand that what’s out there on the internet cannot be removed (and for that matter, that agents don’t want to spend many hours to remove them – a challenging task for which there is no compensation).  Having photos on the web is part of marketing and once it’s done it simply cannot be undone (at least not fully and certainly not easily).  I don’t think a new disclosure is a bad idea.  Our purchase agreement forms or contracts inform buyers and sellers that there will be dissemination of information on the MLS regarding the sale status and later the closing price and terms.  It wouldn’t hurt to also warn the parties that once images are disseminated on the internet, they are very likely to remain online a long, long time.

Recently I took a client of mine to see about a half dozen homes in San Jose (Cambrian and Blossom Valley areas) and Campbell; all of them happened to be Open Houses situations. We saw an incredible range of marketing styles. Some agents were so “sleepy” that they didn’t get up to greet us. Others were orchestrating traffic of such high levels that we felt like it was some sort of overpacked party. It was so busy that you could hardly even pay attention to the house.

In that last example, with the frantic levels of visitors to the property, the listing agents had grossly underpriced the house to attract attention. It did – there was virtually no place to park on the street!

Why would the Realtors underprice a home by a very large amount? Here are a few reasons why they might:

• traffic – the agent can bring a lot of people through the house (granted, many cannot afford what it’s actually worth)
• that traffic can provide great leads to the agents for future buyers and sellers – the spin is “look how differently I market the home”
• get a ridiculous number of offers on the home – with more offers, agents hope to get massive overbidding and sell at a premium

By creating an extraordinarily chaotic environment, the listing agents hope to motivate serious buyers so that they feel compelled to write their best offer. But if it’s underpriced by $100,000 or more, how many of those buyers will be able to compete or really understand the game at hand to write a viable offer on the home?

Those browsing Silicon Valley real estate & visiting open homes may not be armed with a good agent. In a scenario like the one I described above, hapless consumers may find themselves with an aggressive listing agent who’s (understandably) anxious to claim more clients. My client and I overheard a consumer speak with an agent and tippey toe around the subject of whether or not he had a Realtor. “You’re working with me, now!” exclaimed the hungry agent. It felt downright predatory.

Should the buyer work with that agent to write an offer on the home? Would you?

For the agent, if successful, we’d call this “double ending the deal”. Naturally many realty professionals seek out this opportunity because it means two sides of the transaction (like two sales). Most are not so aggressive as what we experienced yesterday, though.

It’s not always the agent who instigates dual agency. Some homebuyers aproach the listing agent and discuss potentially having him or her write the offer. For this strategy, they’re hoping to lowball their way into homeownership and pressuring the agent to take a reduced commission to get the deal through (make a low offer, get the agent to reduce his or her commission to lessen the blow to the seller). Others seek out the listing agent to write up the offer and ask for the agent to rebate some of the commission to the buyer (playing on the agent’s greed – you’ll make more, so give me some of it). Either way, if the buyer’s looking to eliminate a buyer’s agent, it’s usually because the perception exists that they “don’t need an agent” and that they can either get the house for less or get cash back if they just work with the listing agent.

Whether the agent is pressuring the buyer to work with him/her OR the buyer is seeking out the agent who’s listed the home for representation, it’s wise to stop and ask: is this a good idea?

Would you do it?

The most important element of having an agent assist you in home buying is “representation“. That is, the agent has a fiduciary relationship with you, the client. The agent’s supposed to take care of you, your money, assets, and position as if it were her own.

The topic of agency is huge. In California, agents can represent the seller exclusively, the buyer exclusively, or be a dual agent (if disclosed), legally.

If you want the listing agent to assist you when you purchase that home that he or she has listed, you are either asking for dual agency or for no represenation at all. Do either of those sound ideal to you, if you’re buying a home?

If you’ve considered doing this or have felt pressured by an overly-assertive listing agent to write up an offer on the house with him or her, please slow down and learn about about agency & representation.

Here’s some “further reading” to assist you:

Agency Relationships in Real Estate: Dual Agency vs. Single Agency

History of Agency Disclosure in California

We’ll discuss dual agency more in a future post, but for now, happy reading!