Today’s blog is for Realtors.
Getting listings sold isn’t luck, it’s a technical skill that can be tracked, quantified, and compared. If you’re going to list property, you might as well maximize your chance of actually getting paid.
Did you know that 4 out of 10 of the average Realtor’s listings actually sell? The more often you sell, the more often you get paid. So you want to be higher than 4. My company’s around 6 or 7. Here’s some of what we do differently with Sellers:
1) Our State Certified Residential R.E. Appraiser does a real market value appraisal for each listing – “Price it Right and you’re Done!” No more listing it too high, only to lose it later to another Realtor who gets paid because the Price is finally Right.
2) Our fees are pay-as-you-go. Only serious Sellers part with some of the money in the beginning in return for a 5% commission. It also causes them to stay with us if price changes become necessary. They now have skin in the game.
3) We do updates and pricing recommendations based on what has been listed and sold since the Seller listed.
The system we use is based on testing and tracking everything and then going with what works, rather than what you wish worked.
If you are competing for a listing, the Seller will grill you on high estimates of value, volume of sales in the area, and marketing programs. But it’s not about those things. It’s about getting the home sold for the highest price in the shortest amount of time. That is the only thing the Seller actually cares about.
The best way to do that is to price it right, offer incentive for any and all Realtors to sell it by putting it in their inventory (MLS), and making it easy to show. If you do those three things correctly, it’ll sell, no matter what else you do. If you don’t, it won’t sell no matter what else you do.
The average listing starts 29% over market value, using a contract that basically says, “we‘ll try to sell your home. If we do you owe us this much. If you decide you hate us, it‘ll cost you this much to fire us.” We don’t use that contract. Our listing contract spells out exactly what we’re going to do so there’s no misunderstanding. We charge our Sellers a little less than our competitors. They like that. In return, they’re willing to pay some of the commission up front for specific items. We charge for a real market-value appraisal so we can recommend a price that will cause it to sell. We report the results of that appraisal in person. If they still want to sell, we charge a fee to put it in MLS. The Seller can fire us at any time without owing any additional money. No hard feelings – We’ve already been paid for what we’ve done so far. No one’s done that yet, though. Since we started doing it this way in January 2007, not a single listing of ours has walked away and sold with someone else.
Kerry Silva is the president of Price, Wright, and Dunn, Inc. (priceright.biz, residential Realtors and Expert Witness Appraiser. He sells homes, supervises Realtors and Referral Agents, and does appraisals for attorneys in Hillsborough, Pinellas, and Pasco counties, Florida. A good referral is someone who’s trying to choose a Realtor or company and wants to compare a couple. He has a web site that does that, RateARealtor.biz.
