Recently I was out showing homes to a wonderful couple who are retiring to Sequim, one of the 10 Best Places to Retire in the U.S., according to numerous magazine articles.  One of the homes that made it through our filter of searching for the ideal home in the Sequim MLS and the Port Angeles MLS was a custom home built on several acres of private land, and it not only suited these clients, it was almost perfect.  What could ruin this picture?  [Actually, there many things that can and often do destroy the perfect scenario, but here we focus on one major issue.]

THERE’S A BIG LESSON FOR SELLERS IN THIS TRUE STORY

If you were a buyer, and you found an ideal home and looked at the listing and the photos long before you arrived in the Sequim and Port Angeles area, and you saw a price that was within your budget, how would you feel when you arrived if you learned that the price had been increased by $20,000 or $40,000.  If the house had been on the market for a year or more, and it was not being maintained and was vacant, a price increase of that magnitude would turn most buyers off.  And it did turn these clients off.

Why would a seller increase the price in this real estate recession after their home had been on the market for a very long time, and when it was vacant and clearly not being maintained (an indication the sellers were in financial distress)?

Your guess is probably as good as mine, but the answers that come to mind do not include words like “wise,” or “smart,” or “intelligent.”  [How's that for using positive words to express the opposites?]  If this kind of home is listed under these circumstances with a real estate agent, what kind of discussions must have gone on with the home seller?  Well, I don’t want to pick on my fellow agents, but you have to wonder about increasing the listing price in this day and age, don’t you?

Conclusion:  If you want to be sure your home does NOT sell in this market, and your home has already been on the market for a long time, increase the listing price.  That should all but guarantee you won’t be receiving any offers from intelligent buyers.

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I had an interesting experience this past week with clients from out of town.  It was a reminder of a recurring mistake, a major mistake, that sellers often make in selling a home.  Here’s what happened.  I’m showing these clients homes that fit their general parameters, and we’re having a great time.  I always have a great time with clients as we are looking at homes and talking about their retirement plans and what they hope to find in their ideal Sequim or Port Angeles home.

We narrowed down the list of the best prospects, and that included a nice custom home in an area that appealed to my clients.  This home had been vacant, and it appeared to still be vacant, but when we arrived, we were promptly met by a nervous couple on the front sidewalk.  They were new tenants just moving in and were not interested in showing the home, not without the statutory 24 hour notice.

My clients were not impressed with that less-than-stellar greeting, the fact that we had to drive away without seeing the home, and the fact that the property had clearly not been maintained on the outside.  No mowing had been done.  Weeds were popping up everywhere, and there were unfinished projects.  And the tenants were not very friendly.  In fact, their behavior really turned my clients off, and my clients expressed concerns about dealing with sellers who would be responsible for this.  My clients wanted to leave the property and take it off their list of possible homes.

The Washington Landlord-Tenant Act does provide for a 24 hour notice to tenants before showing a home the landlord has for sale.  That’s not the issue.  The real issue here is that homes that are for sale and have tenants are almost always much harder to sell.  If you haven’t been a buyer from southern California or elsewhere who has come to Sequim or Port Angeles to look at homes for a quick weekend trip, you may not know how inconvenient it is to find out you have to jump over some hurdles to see a home.  The greatest inconvenience is that it may not be possible for a couple to reschedule 24 hours later if they have to get back to SeaTac to fly home.  (It’s not always possible to schedule every home clients want to see before they get here.  There’s much more to how this works in practice, but I don’t want this article to get too long on the main point.)

A home that is rented is harder to sell because of all the coordination that must take place.  The tenants are not always home when the agent calls, so they must play phone tag to get a time.  Meanwhile buyers don’t like waiting to find out if and when they can look at a home, so they typically scratch it off the list entirely.  There are many homes in the inventory in this slow real estate market.  There are plenty of homes to choose from.

So if you want to make the sale of your home much more difficult, rent it out.  And if you must rent it out, make sure your tenants agree in writing to waive the 24 hour notice requirement to show the home.   As a matter of fact, any homeowner who is serious about selling their home ought to agree to show the home (or have his tenant show it) to a prospective buyer ANY TIME the buyer wants to see it.   If an agent calls and asks if he can show your home in 10 minutes, let him!  If an agent and his clients showed up on the front steps with no advance notice and asked to see the home, SHOW IT!  Do not turn away potential buyers in this market!  They normally will walk through the home and be gone in less than 15 minutes.

Buyers are few and far between these days, so a seller can easily lose a buyer by not cooperating to make it convenient for the buyer to see the home.  Of course, a tenant doesn’t have to agree to less than a 24 hour notice.  Again, that only makes my point.  A rental is harder to sell, and turning away a prospective buyer is not wise in this market.  Someone may argue that everyone deserves a 24 hour notice.  After representing many buyers going back 30 years, there are many reasons that doesn’t always work for buyers.  Serious sellers must recognize that they are not in control of this market or the buyers.  This is a buyer’s market, not a seller’s market.  Cooperation with buyers is critical.  Anything less can mean a lost sale.

I have listings myself in which there are tenants, but these tenants are friendly, cooperative, and quick to show the property and its features to prospective buyers.  That makes all the difference in selling a home.  But this isn’t the case for many homes, and I’ve experienced first hand how buyers will turn away from a home they might have made an offer on, if only they could have gotten inside when they were ready, willing, and able.

Possibly Related Posts:

• How Not to Sell a Home: Increase the Price
• Homes for Sale – They Come in All Sizes and Shapes
• Selling a Home in Sequim is More Than the MLS
• Selling Your Home Fast, Slow, or Never
• Sequim Homes Listed for Sale: Marketing Techniques

No one knows better than buyers how different and sometimes incredibly unique each home can be.  After months of filtering through the MLS online listings and then arriving in Sequim or Port Angeles to look at homes with their buyer’s agent, a buyer gets first hand experience with the various architectural styles of homes for sale.  We don’t have tract housing here with cracker box homes all lined up in a subdivision where the only way to tell which house is yours is to look for a familiar car in the driveway.  We do have a variety of custom home designs, standard house plans, and truly unique homes that have been designed by homeowners themselves or have been remodeled or have rooms added.

Homeowners that have a home built or who remodel or have built an addition onto their home do not always consider the resale effect of their design.  When it comes time to sell your home, if your home is not in the bell curve of homes that buyers want, you will find your home on the market longer, it may sell for less than more standard house plans, and if it is unique enough, you may not find a buyer at any price.  This is no exaggeration.  There are homes for sale in Clallam County that have not sold after two years or more on the market.  Some of these homes have been listed for sale, expired, re-listed, and withdrawn as sellers reach their emotional exhaustion threshold.

But here’s an interesting irony.  Some homeowners who have a truly unique home that is not within the bell curve of 67% of homes that appeal to the majority of buyers, will often be so emotionally attached to their homes and so individually identified with unique features suitable only for their personalities and lifestyles, that they will often add a premium value to their homes.  This homeowner will support their notion of value with esoteric arguments that make sense in their mind but make little or no sense to prospective buyers.  In other words, a minority of homeowners cannot be objective about the value of their homes.  How do I know this?  Buyers teach me a lot of things, and this is a common lesson buyers teach me regularly.

When it comes to the fair market value of a home, intelligent buyers who have been doing their due diligence to search for a home are most often better qualified to identify the fair market value of a home than the homeowners.  I have seen this to be true again and again and again.  Sellers are not typically doing all the homework that buyers are doing.  Buyers have looked at and compared literally hundreds of homes online, examining the features, the photographs, the locations, and the prices, and these buyers also walk through the homes they have identified as the best values.  A buyer may walk through dozens of homes, still doing careful comparisons of all features, locations, and prices.  Sellers rarely, if ever, do all of this due diligence.  Buyers are usually more knowledgeable about the fair market value of a home than the homeowner.  After 30 years in the real estate business, I have seen a lot of evidence that this is true.

Buyers will either buy a home or not, and if they do, it is because they came to a resolution in their minds regarding the value of the home they decided to buy.  Sellers will either sell their homes or not, and if they don’t it is often because they came to a resolution in their minds regarding value, but they were wrong and buyers refused to pay that price.  But there is more to the story.  I have had buyers tell me that a house is “just wrong,” and at any price they would not buy it.  A house has to be right for a buyer to consider living in it, and this is where extreme uniqueness can make a home wrong for the vast majority of buyers, or all buyers.

Sometimes it is hard to think objectively about our homes or to step outside ourselves and see through the eyes of a buyer.  The seller who cannot do that may simply be stuck with their home . . . forever.  That’s a long time.

Possibly Related Posts:

• How Not to Sell a Home: Increase the Price
• How Not to Sell a Home in This Market: Rent It
• Selling a Home in Sequim is More Than the MLS
• Selling Your Home Fast, Slow, or Never
• Sequim Homes Listed for Sale: Marketing Techniques

Selling a home in Sequim requires much more than just listing it in the Sequim MLS, whether that is the Olympic Listing Service or the Northwest MLS, or both.  It used to be a Realtor could just put his listings in the MLS and run a little ad in the Sunday paper once or twice for each home, and that was marketing real estate.  Wow, things have really changed since then.

Selling a home in Sequim or Port Angeles, or anywhere in the country for that matter, is not what it used to be.  It has dramatically changed in recent years.  I’m not talking about  changes in the economy, the mortgage debacle, or the state of the real estate market.  I’m talking about the marketing and advertising of real estate for sale.  The way buyers and sellers are connecting has taken a leap into the future, although I admit that leap was more like a frog in a pot of water slowly getting warmer until finally we have reached a steady boil.  There is no precise point in time when this dramatic change took place, but it certainly has.  As far as marketing real estate is concerned, I think it is fair to say the future is here.

Most real estate brokers and agents around the country are still operating with a 20-year old business model.  They are relying on what used to work, what they’ve done for 20 years, and it made them some pretty good money for a long time.  But today brick and mortar buildings, impressive conference rooms, billboards, multiple page advertisements in the real estate magazines and massive advertising in print newspapers almost go unnoticed by the astute buyer who knows how to do his due diligence to shop for a home.  This discerning buyer knows how to research and find a competent and trustworthy Realtor.  This buyer is not fooled by gimmicks or “loud advertising.”  Today print advertising plays a small role in capturing buyers’ attention.

USA Today had a great article on August 8, 2008 in the Money section, entitled, “Faster, higher, stronger – and digital.”

Marketing around the Olympics used to be like a 100-meter cakewalk.  You’d pay a gazillion dollars to the International Olympic Committee, then pay a gazillion more to brag like heck about it on TV and in print ads.  That was then.  This is now:  Add on a multi-pronged digital ad strategy that feeds on megabuzz.  It must touch all the hot buttons from the hippest social-networking sites to the coolest blogs to the cellphones of those most coveted by marketers – trendsetters 18 to 26.

Technology, the digital age, and the Internet, have changed the rules of the game  for selling a home in Sequim or Port Angeles.  Of course most buyers and sellers are not 18 to 26, but even people in their 70’s are using the Internet for email, for shopping, and for research on buying and selling real estate.

Selling a home in Sequim requires much more than simply listing it in the MLS and running an ad.  Effective marketing today will include an Internet strategy that has more power than any local newspaper.  That’s especially true for Sequim since most of our buyers are coming from out of state.  Of course, there are principles of advertising that will always be true.  There are principles of sales and the effective use of words and images that a professional learns to use.  But the medium and the techniques of selling a home in Sequim have changed.

Does your Realtor comprehend these changes and this new frontier?  What is your comprehensive plan to market and sell your home?

Possibly Related Posts:

• How Not to Sell a Home: Increase the Price
• How Not to Sell a Home in This Market: Rent It
• Homes for Sale – They Come in All Sizes and Shapes
• Selling Your Home Fast, Slow, or Never
• Sequim Homes Listed for Sale: Marketing Techniques

Today we entertain another question from our Sequim and Port Angeles readers in our continuing series of Q&A with retired real estate attorney, author, and now real estate broker Chuck Marunde.   Chuck is the Broker of Sequim & Port Angeles Real Estate, LLC.

Question:   Does it matter who I list my home with?   Any Realtor can earn 1/2 the commission by selling it, so all Realtors are motivated to sell my home.   Right?

Answer:   The answers are “yes” and “no.”   Here’s an explanation.

It’s true that a Realtor who sells another Realtor’s listing can earn a commission, but there’s more to the story.   If you are selling your home, understanding how this works is critical if you hope to sell your home within a reasonable period of time.   The other two options are selling your home slowly or never.   I don’t have to prove to anyone that many listings are in the slow mode or haven’t sold after 276 days or 362 days on   the market.   There are many possible reasons why a listing hasn’t sold, but the focus of this answer is on the pool of Realtors out here selling.   Are Realtors equally motivated to sell listings, regardless of who listed it?   (more…)

Possibly Related Posts:

• How Not to Sell a Home: Increase the Price
• How Not to Sell a Home in This Market: Rent It
• Homes for Sale – They Come in All Sizes and Shapes
• Selling a Home in Sequim is More Than the MLS
• Sequim Homes Listed for Sale: Marketing Techniques