by Lex Shan
[dropcap]I[/dropcap]f you followed our secret to prepare your property, you probably have one of the best looking houses in your neighborhood without breaking the bank. That’s what I call “the house will sell itself condition.” But wait! There is just one catch: your house will sell itself only if people know about it.
Many real estate agents believe that marketing real estate means taking nice photos and entering the home in the MLS database. In fact, they’d quote you “Over 95% of buyers start their home search online, based on NAR statistics.” That’s what they are taught to say by their brokerage.
You don’t expect average from the Cal Agents, do you? What I’m about to reveal to you are secret techniques we practice every day when we sell homes for our clients.
Hire a professional photographer.
This is a no brainer. You’ve spent so much effort preparing the home, don’t be penny wise and pound foolish. Many real estate agents include professional photography in their listing services. If an agent tells you they will do a virtual tour, you probably want to stop talking to that agent. Virtual tour refers to a slideshow put together with still photos with panning and zooming effects to look like a video. That’s last decade’s marketing. What you want to hear from an agent is that they will use 3D WALKINTOUR.
Capture the house in 3D.
3D WALKINTOUR started in 2015, is becoming popular in marketing luxury real estate. It uses a special 3D camera to capture thousands of images of your home and recreate a 3D model of it, allowing the viewer to freely walk inside the home from room to room, at the viewer’s own pace. It supports virtual reality headsets as well as mobile devices and desktop computers.
One huge advantage of 3D WALKINTOUR is that it truly opens your home to remote and foreign buyers. Regardless of how beautiful your photos are, few buyers would take the photos at their face value and make an offer on your home sight unseen. With 3D WALKINTOUR, we are seeing more and more offers from out-of-state buyers. In the bay area, our statistics show each additional buyer translates to a $3,000 to $8,000 increase in sold price. That’s why hiring an agent who can truly outmarket the competition goes a long way.
Pack your home with people during open hours
More people in your home will create a sense of competition among buyers. The more people they see, the more competition they perceive, the higher they will have to offer if they truly want your home.
There are many techniques to create a full house. Here is how we do it:
Postcards
Neighbors are nosy, although many of them will come to the open house uninvited, we actually send out postcards one week in advance to invite them, and make sure as many of them show up as possible.
More Open House Signs
We also use 2-3 times more open house signs than other agents in the neighborhood to drive a massive amount of traffic to your home. Most real estate agents put up 4 to 6 open house signs during the open house and place them on the major traffic corridor according to proximity to the house. If they run out, they run out. Our approach is different, we study the neighborhood ahead of time and make sure there are enough for all major corridor AND we place signs outside competing listings to make their traffic ours.
Before I founded The Cal Agents, I was at a well-known nation-wide real estate brokerage. I remember other more senior agents laughed at me for taking the longest to collect signs after open houses. It is true. It took me 2-3x more time to place them and to collect them.
Not only do we use more signs, our signs are 6″ taller than others. When you stop at a busy intersection, and there are 4 open house signs on each side of the street, where will your eyes land? Of course the tallest signs. While cities have regulation on how big open house signs can be, we maximize to the last inch.
Sometimes the most basic method works the best, but not everyone is willing to put in the work.
Stall Everyone
Many real estate agents were taught that they should get the nosy neighbors out of the house as soon as possible, so that they can focus on the real buyers. WRONG! On the contrary, we have discovered that the longer the neighbors stay, the better offers we get. In fact, encouraging each visitor to stay as long as possible has become our signature strategy. The reason is very simple: The longer they stay, the more people there are in the home for any given time, the more competition the true buyers perceive.
Keep Them Busy
We will ask you to write a letter to explain what you love about the home and the neighborhood and put it in a nice frame on the dining table. You will be surprised how many people will pause and spend an extra 5 minutes reading it.
Dance Dance Revolution
Just kidding. We don’t put up a DDR machine during open house. However, we do put up an extremely eye-catching 20-foot air dancer — like the ones you see at car dealerships — in front of the properties we sell to draw neighbors’ attention. We guarantee your open house will be the busiest.
We also have proven scripts to keep neighbors hanging out longer and make the serious buyers aware of the amount of demand on your home. At the end of the day, there is no secret to generate more buyers than already exist. The secret lies in making sure they know about your property and perceive its popularity, so your property will sell itself.
To sum it up
All in all, everything we do serves one goal: to give your property way more exposure than competing listings and drive up the demand for it.
A huge factor that contributes to the Cal Agents’ success in selling your home for 3-5% higher than other agents lies in our marketing.
