sell your home for top dollar

Get top dollar for your home

Getting inside the head of the Buyer

How the buyers brain works:

Discuss the new paradigm of the information age.

Wow! How the world of real estate has changed! For decades, a real estate salesperson only needed to put up a ‘for sale’ sign, submit a few lines to the property section of the local newspaper and wait for the phone to ring.
Today we have the Internet, digital photos, floor plans, virtual tours, copywriters, buyer’s agents and property presentation experts. A complete industry has been developed around the process of buying, selling and financing real estate.
It’s true you may not need every ‘bell and whistle’ when you place your property on the market, but in such a high stakes game, it’s essential to know what’s available and how you, as the seller, can use it to your advantage.

Most buyer enquiries occur during the first few weeks after a property comes onto the market. This is because it’s fresh news and it represents what we call the peak enquiry period.

Top Dollar! It’s what every homeowner wants. The price you’ll get for your home is going to completely depend on the effort you have put in before your home actually hits the market.

By the time your home is advertised on the Internet or in any other media your preparation will determine the price.

This book is designed to make you aware of the steps you need to take as well as how clever marketing and advertising combine to get you top dollar.

You will learn how to prepare your home for sale and what are the killer weapons in your marketing arsenal.

You will learn step by step how to prepare your home and read case studies on ways real people have sold their homes using the systems outlined in this book.

The top three essentials for selling your home:

  1. Preparation
  2. Information
  3. Presentation

All three of these are covered in great depth during the first half of the book with checklists and tips for all of these areas then taking up the remainder of the book is the science behind marketing your home and getting top dollar for it.

As well we have prepared a valuable online resource, which gives you lots of examples and checklists of things covered in the book. You can download all this material at no charge simply by owning this book. Visit real estate marketingtopdollar to take advantage of all the extra material.

Preparation:

  1. Know what your house is worth to the bank
  2. Market research on all the houses nearby
  3. Understanding the buyers brain
  4. Setting the right price and why that’s so important
  5. Marketing your home
  6. Advertising your home

Clear the Clutter:

  1. get a storage shed while you have your home on the market
  2. take at least half your furniture to the shed and keep the nicest pieces at home for presentation
  3. buy some storage boxes and just pack all excess items into the boxes and take them to the shed as well
  4. when people look into cupboards and at your kitchen particularly they need space to sell them on your home
  5. The smaller your living areas and kitchen are the more stuff you need to remove eg. my parents house. They have a 700m2(69sq) house which is only lived in by the two of them and you can barely move in the house for clutter, if they try to sell they’ll be renting a warehouse
  6. Often you see a formal dining room with a massive dining table making the room look much smaller than it is. Move the table out for the selling period or swap it for a smaller one. Even if the small table is ugly you can cover it with a white table cloth and leave it made up looking nice with candles and wine glasses etc.

Depersonalize:

  1. all personal photos off the fridge
  2. Remove the majority of photos off walls, benches etc.
  3. if you have huge wedding shots on walls or glamour photos of someone half dressed hide them fast
  4. the beautiful wall where the kids crappy drawings are stuck has to be cleaned off and tidied up
  5. Unless the nude artwork is extremely modest then it should be replaced with something far more appropriate, some people are very easily upset by nudity and it could cost you a sale. Not to mention how uncomfortable it can be when people say who’s the good looking sort in the image and when the owner says me they get stared at like they are on drugs because possibly time has moved on since the shots were done. Often religious people are offended by nudity as well.
  6. Photos of pets, stuffed animals and really unusual artwork should also be swopped for more conventional items.
  7. Controversial or bizarre pieces of “Art” just have to be hidden. Anything that can possibly offend someone just has to be placed out of sight.

Fix the Glitches:

  1. Fix blown light bulbs – replace dull ones with really damn bright ones and white
  2. Make sure small things all work
  3. Make sure the handles are all perfect on cupboards and doors.
  4. Weed the garden and make sure it’s perfect
  5. Doorbell or Doorknocker? Is it clean?
  6. Do the doors in the property open quietly? Do they shut easily?
  7. A rug to wipe your feet on says you are clean and fussy ie. Your home will be goods
  8. Buying a home is a very emotional experience. It’s buyer beware. When a buyer spots something faulty it leads to fear. The faulty light fitting can mean the electrical system needs replacing. Leaky taps mean dodgy plumbing. Bad odours mean there is someone buried under the house. These small issues lead to big fears and must be stopped before they even start.

Information:

  1. Nothing to hide – build consumer confidence
  2. Know what your house is worth to the bank
  3. Market research on all the houses nearby
  4. Setting the right price and why that’s so important
  5. Marketing your home
  6. Advertising your home

Nothing to hide:

If you can afford it get your own building and pest inspections done. This is like going to buy a car that already has been checked over by the RACQ or NRMA. It says the place is quality and makes buyers more relaxed.

It might alert you of any items of immediate personal concern, such as radon gas or
active termite infestation.
You can assist the inspector during the inspection, something normally not done during
a buyer's inspection.
You can have inspector correct any misstatements in the inspection report before it
is generated.
The report can help you realistically price the home if problems exist.
The report can help you substantiate a higher asking price if problems don't exist or
have been corrected.
A seller inspection reveals problems ahead of time which:
·  might make the home show better.
·  gives you time to make repairs and shop for competitive contractors.
·  permits you to attach repair estimates or paid invoices to the inspection report.
·  removes over-inflated buyer procured estimates from the negotiation table.
The report might alert you to any immediate safety issues found, before agents and
visitors tour the home.
The report provides a third-party, unbiased opinion to offer to potential buyers.
A seller inspection permits a clean home inspection report to be used as a marketing
tool.
A seller inspection is the ultimate gesture in forthrightness on your part.
The report might relieve a prospective buyer's unfounded suspicions, before they
walk away.
A seller inspection lightens negotiations and 11th-hour renegotiations.
The report might encourage the buyer to waive the inspection contingency.
The deal is less likely to fall apart the way they often do when a buyer's inspection
unexpectedly reveals a problem, last minute.
The report provides full-disclosure protection from future legal claims.
Include in your promotional packets, copies of the report along with receipts for any repairs
made.

Know what your home is worth

  1. Get your own valuation done so you know what your house is close to worth
  2. Get a local agent or two in to give you an idea of possible price

Market research on local homes:

  1. Spend several weeks snooping through other peoples houses
  2. Research on the internet any homes that have enough photos to get a good idea of

Understand who your buyers are and where they will come from.

  1. Your buyer is a woman
  2. She found your home on the internet
  3. Maybe she drove past it and saw the sign.

Presentation:

  1. Present each area of your home as if it’s about to be used. Ie BBQ area should look like it’s ready to go. Have the BBQ uncovered and the table set.
  2. Photography! You need professional photos! End of Story!
  3. A good photographer will more than likely bully you into moving furniture to get the right shot. They will know that what looks good in a photo isn’t what looks good in real life.
  4. Make sure someone with muscles is home when the photographer comes for small on the spot renovations
  5. Lots of candles and all lights should be on; lamps etc should be checked for bulbs etc.
  6. If you have spent good money making your home look amazing at night you may get more out of showing people through at night. Night hides lots of flaws but be aware they will always want to look through during the day at a later stage
  7. Theme an Area - Furniture stores do this, check out Freedom or similar stores for great ides on this, works brilliantly

Understanding the science of marketing your home:
You can’t sell someone a home. Most times it’s a very emotional purchase. Even investors will buy with some degree of emotion involved.

Even if the person is an investor the better presented the property is the more it appeals. The investor is aware the house has to appeal to renters as well.

Photography:

I can’t emphasize enough how important good photography is. If you do one thing to sell your home then organise professional photography.

You only have to spend five minutes browsing any suburb to see how bad photos taken by real estate agents are. Anyone expecting a good price for their home knows they need good photography.

There are so many elements to good real estate photography it takes years of practice. It takes the right equipment and it takes good post shooting processing. This means working on the images in Photoshop. The same way celebrities get made over in photo shoots your home can be made over on the computer.

You can see how much images can be adjusted by going to our website at real estate marketingand having a look at some before and after examples.

Buyers want to see an attractive well-lit house. Good photographers can really make the most of lighting. Whether it’s added during the shoot or post production on the computer they will make your home look very well lit.

Also available at real estate marketingis a list of professional photographers who service all the capital cities.

The first photo is the main shot or hero shot, as it is known. This should not be the front of your house. Why?
You will read more on this later in the chapter about advertising and real estate. To sum it up your hero shot should be on each ad and it should be the best feature of your home.

The things that you loved that made you buy the home in the first place.

Possibly the best thing to do is prepare a page or two of information about the home and what you love about it and what features in the neighbourhood are really good.

Buying a Home:

This should be a fun and hassle free adventure but in Australia it’s very definitely buyer beware.

Buying is different depending on the current market. There are two types of market in home buying.

  1. Sellers Market:
  2. Buyers Market:

Sellers Market:
This is when as a buyer you need to be at your sharpest because it’s all going to happen so fast it’ll drive you insane. You need to be very prepared and have everything ready to go because houses will be going in days and you’ll simply miss out on the one you want. Then it’s back to the drawing board of frustration.

Buyers Market:
This means homes aren’t selling quickly and real estate agents are actually earning their money.

Getting inside the brain of the buyer:
When buying a house the buyer has lots of concerns ranging from is the price right to is the house ok or is it a financial disaster waiting to happen. As sellers we need to understand how the buyer is thinking and feeling to make the sale go through quickly and for the right price.

Top Dollar!

To understand the buyer’s brain we need to understand the psychology of buying anything.

When buying the decision is apparently made on an emotional level within seconds and the rest of the time building up to the purchase is spent justifying the decision to our analytical brains.

With buying a house the process is slightly different. We have a range of criteria that must be met.

The house must appeal to us emotionally. We are all looking for different things when we buy. Last house my wife and I purchased we had a list of things, virtually all essential for us.

This was our list:

We researched for six weeks on the Internet staying aware of prices and looking at homes online.

At the time correctly priced houses were selling within days in the area we wanted to buy in. This made the buying process more challenging. We would ring up to go see a house we liked and be told it’s under contract.

The really interesting part was dealing with the local agents. They didn’t return calls and if their property was under contract just said sorry and click. We found one agent who suggested he would add us to his database and email us properties as they became available.
Strangely since we spoke we have never received even an email from that agent. But at least he was lovely and polite on the phone.

The house we ended up buying we had seen on the Internet and thought it looked like complete crap. There were three photos all of them terrible.  The main shot was of part of the front of the house hidden by trees, a partial of the pool in really bad shadow and a dark shot of some bedroom.

There were three lines of text that told us nothing. It had also been on the net for some time, which said to me it had problems with everything else selling so fast. We had ignored it and moved on, so how did we end up buying it?

We rang an agent about another property, which was just listed so we went straight there to have a look. My wife didn’t like it despite it fitting most criteria. No emotional connection to that particular property. The agent mentioned he had another one nearby that might suit us if we had a few minutes to go look.

We headed off and before you know it my wife is in love with the second house we have actually entered. Did we keep looking? Did my logical reasoning on price and other criteria have any effect on her attachment to the home? Did the fact that it was timber stop us from putting in an offer on it immediately?

The result? A property sold by accident despite the best efforts of the real estate agent to make it look bad. The fact was the house had near new kitchen and bathroom and all the living areas were large and very attractive. How clever of the agent to not show a single nice feature of the house in their marketing.

Is it any wonder we were able to knock almost $30,000 off the price in a sellers market where prices were going up everywhere else and every other home was selling at full asking price in days?

This is the very real danger for the unsuspecting person selling property in any market. People don’t meet an agent and get in the car with them and get dragged around to 7 different houses until you are so exasperated you sign up for one.
People research online and don’t waste their time visiting until they are sure the property meets at least some of their criteria.

Was this low price the owner’s fault? Partially, because they listened to the agent and didn’t question why the best parts of their property weren’t shown in the marketing. My opinion is that the agent should have been responsible enough to know how to get people the best price.

People pay top dollar for commission, in this case over $15,000 and think their agent is getting them the best deal possible. In this case their property should have sold weeks earlier for full price, possibly even a higher price

scientific marketing