It’s that most wonderful time of the year, when everyone starts Christmas shopping, drinking wassail and dragging themselves from one holiday party to the next.

House hunting? Hiring inspectors? Making an offer on that dream home?

Not so much — at least according to conventional wisdom.

So what’s a homeowner supposed to do if she’s ready to put her house on the market just when the entire living room floor is covered in pine needles and Christmas wrapping paper?

Take heart. Homes do sell during the holidays.

So if you’re considering putting your home up for sale, real estate professionals have a variety of holiday advice, gift-wrapped based on your particular situation.

Consider your motivation

Alan Cooper, president of Wakefield Realtors, says the biggest question for potential Christmastime home sellers is this: Do you need to sell fast?

"I guess the first question I would ask the person is, ‘What is your motivation to sell? Do you have to be out of the house by a certain deadline or are you just thinking about selling?’" Cooper asks.

An impending job transfer to another city is a great reason to go ahead and put your home on the market, he said.

Phil Thompson, broker and owner of RT Realty, also said that if you have an urgent reason to sell a home, it doesn’t matter what time of year it is. Waiting will not help.

"If someone is relocating and has a deadline, they need to go ahead and list," Thompson said. "You can’t just put it off even though it’s not the ideal time."

But people listing their home now should be ready to push the Christmas clutter aside and to show their home when someone calls and wants to see it.

"Are you prepared to be inconvenienced for the next six to eight weeks?" Cooper asks. "You don’t want to put it on the market and then refuse showings because you’re baking a turkey or making candy."

Similarly, any out-of-town guests need to understand that the home is on the market and may need to be shown.

"Tell your family and friends," Thompson said. "You need to be flexible."

Serious buyers

Don’t expect a parade of people to march into your home if it goes on the market between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day.

But the people who do look at your house will be serious about making an offer if they are missing out on the sale at Macy’s in order to check out your kitchen remodel.

"You’ll see very little activity from Nov. 15 to early January," Cooper said. "That being said, the activity will be good activity. It will be people who will need to buy a home. You won’t have tire kickers. You have motivated buyers at this time of year."

Only the most serious clients bother with house hunting this time of year, said Mike Armstrong of Keller Williams Realty Heritage, which makes it a good time to price your house aggressively — perhaps just below comparable homes on the market.

"Everybody is worried about the holidays, but the buyers who are looking are serious," Armstrong said. "They may be coming for a job change or a military move. I would say if you price the house right at anytime of the year, it will sell."

Homes show better

Many real estate agents think people make a mistake by waiting until January or February to list a home for sale.

Why?

Because they look so nice when they’re decorated for Christmas, said Cyndi Broschat of Keller Williams Realty.

"It’s kind of like staging a house," she said. "It’s a more homey feel."

Also, she swears that people keep their houses cleaner this time of year.

"People clean before they decorate," Broschat said. "The houses are usually in better shape."

But don’t overdo the interior decorations because they can make your house look smaller, she said.

Similarly, you don’t need to decorate outside, but a nice wreath on the front door will make a house look inviting. That’s important because many home buyers will drive by homes first, never giving the inside a chance if the exterior looks shabby.

Once you get a potential buyer inside your house, be sure that the house smells like Christmas. Use a plug-in that smells like pine or bake something. Broschat thinks buyers are more emotional this time of year, and that setting the mood will help them connect with a house.

"Definitely play the Christmas music when you do showings," Broschat said. "You need to create the atmosphere."

Little competition

Many home sellers wait until February or after to put their homes on the market, hoping to catch the annual spring and summer real estate shopping spree.

But because so few homes go on the market this time of year and the inventory usually is lower than it will be by springtime, Thompson says that your house may have a great chance of standing out from the pack.

"There’s a built in hesitance to list a home," Thompson said. "Not a lot of people are listing, so you won’t have the competition. And if you wait until January or February, you’ll lose six to eight weeks."

By January, more and more homes will be coming onto the market, Broschat said.

"Serious buyers have fewer houses to choose from right now," she said. "There will be more competition in January."

That being said, many agents still recommend waiting until January of February to list a home, if possible.

If you don’t have a pressing need to sell a home now, Cooper recommends spending the next 60 days decluttering your house so you can hit the market in late January.

And Broschat has been working with two clients who want to list their homes in the spring, but are spending the next few months cleaning up, decluttering and taking care of needed maintenance projects.

Still, three years ago, one of Cooper’s listings went under contract on Christmas Eve. A few days later, he wrote a contract on another house for a client on New Year’s Eve.

"You never know what can happen," he said.

The Cost of the Unsold Listing

By Scott Einbinder

RISMEDIA, November 28, 2007–What are we paid to do? If you ask that question to 100 real estate professionals you will get 100 different answers. That is both the blessing and the curse of the real estate industry. One can carve out their own answer and create a unique and individual value proposition. There is however a common denominator regardless of what business model you work under. A common thread, that when you look objectively, binds all real estate firms, agents, and models together in one giant pool; and that is the cost of the unsold listing.

It’s funny, with all the different business models, all different commission options, all different marketing concepts and all different fonts and logos, the unsold listing defines not only your business model but business sense. It defines if you are authentic and have the skills and integrity to see the business not as just a brokerage relationship but that of a “partner to your seller.” A partner who invests in their seller. A partner who makes a business decision to take a listing because there is a shared benefit between you and the seller. A partner who takes the listing because you are working for a successful result. And what is that result I refer to? My definition is, “Did you sell the home, manage the transaction successfully, and mitigate risk to your seller, while both you and your partner earned a healthy return on your respective investments?”

There is not a real estate office I have been to in the last year where inventory levels have never been higher. Pages and pages of flyer’s, open house books, and price reduction signs litter the office. Online brokers have page after page of virtual tours and panoramic views. Countless amounts of listings where the agent signed the listing agreement, knowing it would never sell at that price, but thought in time, the seller would “see the light” or “need to reduce.” The agent thought, “If I don’t take it, my competitor will and I will lose it.” And like clockwork we have thousands of listings that are getting reduced, but unfortunately it is too late, as the sellers lag behind the market. The streets are lined with properties for sale, open house balloons flap in the wind and agents sit in homes on Sunday afternoon with sign-in sheets and Yankee candles burning in the foyer.

The culture of our business has been built to believe that an unsold listing bears some fruit. It brings buyers of other homes we can sell. It provides a legal billboard to promote our name. It provides a vehicle to advertise who we are in traditional print. After all, an unsold listing, if played right, is like chum on a blue fishing boat–it’s great bait!

This thought process represents everything wrong with our industry, yet provides the greatest opportunity to separate yourself from the competition, get more listings, be efficient with your resources and earn a higher revenue per sold unit.

The agent with the real estate partner mentality recognizes the cost of the unsold listing and knows how to articulate that to a seller. The unsold listing costs the seller and the real estate professional significant money, and here’s how:

The partner mentality understands that for many home sellers, time is a tangible commodity. The real estate partner, shares with their seller partner that buyers today are extremely aware of ‘Days on Market.’ Today, one of the first questions buyers ask is, “How long has the house been on the market?” The overpriced listing reduces our sellers’ negotiating power as time degrades their strength. Once a listing has gone unsold, this is information in the public domain. Real estate partners who have real value to their clients, never allow their partners to be placed in a position of weakness.

The partner mentality knows the unsold listing carries other significant costs. One of the most misleading statistics agents often promote is their list-to-price ratio. In the recent 2007 NAR Report on Buyers and Sellers it states that “sellers sold their homes for 97% of list price.” Is this true? Is this another smoke and mirror statistic? I wonder if that NAR Survey reflected a number that was derived off the original list price or was it 97% of the three price reductions that took place before it sold. I ask, did the unsold listing ever have a chance? Did the agent who took it ever allow the marketplace to even see it? The partner mentality knows the statistic that counts the most is not list to price ratio but list to close ratio. The partner mentality takes 20 listings a year and sells 19. Their list-to-close ratio is always the highest because they have learned how to say no to an unrealistic expectation. They know the cost to an unrealized result and mismanaged expectation is just way too high. My favorite agent promotes their list-to-close ratio at 100% and a list-to-price ratio of 124%.

Simply put, they sell what they list, reject what will not sell and they price their listings at the lowest pricing spectrum to create a bidding war so the true market price will be realized. Sellers never interview this agent; she interviews them! Sellers beg for her to consider their home. These sellers are taught the value of the greatest partnership investment, called truth.

The highest cost of the unsold listing is far more than that classified ad, broker open house lunch and professional staging services you invested in. After all, you may have even received some leads from them to defer the cost. The highest cost however is to one’s reputation. The partner mentality does not blame the seller for an overpriced listing, because they never take it. The partner mentality knows that if the listing does not sell in this market it is because it was not positioned in a place to sell. It was not priced in a place that made it a sound business decision for both the real estate professional and the seller. ‘The New Professionals’ of today do not gamble with their reputations and would never gamble with a seller’s money. These agents are not into “giving it a shot.”

The agents making the real money today make more commissions per unit and obtain more listings because they have deviated from the conventional thinking that listings are assets. Listings are liabilities until they close. They embrace the ability to say no. They have the courage to reject an unsuccessful result. This is what the public needs. Do you have the courage and vision to deliver? Imagine if agents were required to “purchase” a listing opportunity from a seller. An agent who had to invest their own cash and put their opinions of market value on the line? Imagine a seller that demanded the upfront payment of $1,000 for the right to sell his house. My gut tells me that many real estate professionals would learn very quickly to reject the listing if the seller was not realistic on price. I asked this question at one of my recent seminars and there were lots of laughs and most of the room said, if it comes to that I am out of this business. I then asked the room, “Who here thinks the value they give to a home seller is less than $1,000 and please stand up.” There was silence but worse, there was confusion. The real estate partner mentality invests much more. They see their investment as just as tangible if not more tangible as the $1,000 out of their checking account.

Do you want to turn your career around? Think and act like your seller’s partner.

In life and in business the largest costs are often the ones you don’t see or do not directly feel. Challenge yourself to reach beyond conventional approach. You will find once there, it’s where most of your competition has yet arrive.

Scott Einbinder is a national real estate sales trainer and motivational strategist specifically to the real estate industry.

Please let me know what you think when you have a minute.  Does this sound like your business model regardless of what your business is?

The biggest challenge that sellers face today is the abundance of standing inventory, whether it be from the unmotivated seller to someone that is just testing the market.  If you are truly interested in selling your home in a buyers market, the key is price! 

Check out this great article found in the L.A. Times last week that I believe you will find value in!

AS SEEN IN:

Motivated folks only
More realty agents are refusing to cater to stubbor
n sellers and looky-loo buyers.

By Ann Brenoff
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

October 28, 2007

ATTENTION, you picky buyers who think you have all the time in the world to house hunt before you ink an offer. (And this goes double for those of you who think that a listing price is just some silly number pulled from the air and that you can offer 30% less.) Listen up: Agents are mad as hell and aren’t going to take you anymore. 

And sellers — those of you who don’t believe that your palace won’t fetch what the shack up the street sold for a year ago — you aren’t making any agent’s short list of whom to call back today.

Here’s the realization that some agents and brokers are taking to heart: They have neither the time nor the money to waste on a lot of us.  They are done spending days driving buyers around who want to leisurely ponder whether House A’s carpet is the right shade of beige or House B’s basketball hoop will leave marks when the sellers take it down. And the real estate profession’s once-popular practice of treating listings as a land grab — get as many as you can as quickly as you can because they pretty much sell themselves — has fallen by the wayside. Advertising those listings costs agents money, and payday doesn’t come until the sale closes. Do the math: No sale, no payday. And who has thousands to throw away on homes that will never sell at the prices their owners think they are worth?

Walter Sanford — a top-producing realty sales agent for more than 20 years and today a sales-coaching guru — is brutally blunt on the topic. In a down market like this, he tells agents, dump the buyers and spend your time and budget cultivating more listings of motivated sellers and only motivated sellers. It’s a way for agents to avoid financial ruin.

"Buyers take longer to make decisions, they ‘nibble’ more, and they will actually eradicate your net profit if you continue to work buyers as a major part of your income flow," Sanford says. 

He adds: Nothing saps an agent’s time and energy or cuts into potential income like showing unmotivated buyers house, after house, after house, and still not making a sale. "So don’t do it, is what I tell them."

Them’s fightin’ words.

Valerie Van De Zilver, broker-owner of the Zilver Realty Group in Tustin, shares the sentiment. If a buyer doesn’t commit after being shown available properties, he or she is enrolled in Van De Zilver’s automatic e-mail program. Those buyers receive instant messages about new listings on the market, price drops and changes of listing circumstance. This enables buyers to keep current on the sales inventory and ensures they won’t miss out on a property they have their sights on. It also means they won’t tie up Van De Zilver’s time.

"If they see something they like," she says, "they call me." She has dozens of buyers on her e-mail program. "And it’s working just fine." 

Sanford has a multi-step process to help realty agents separate the serious buyers from the looky-loos. Only he doesn’t call them "steps;" he prefers "hoops" — and he expects buyers to jump through them.

The first hoop is a 35-question form that begins with a version of "How long have you been looking and why haven’t you bought yet?" He builds up to requiring that buyers get pre-qualified for a loan — not pre-approved, which he says is just a meaningless letter from a mortgage broker saying everything looks rosy — but actually pre-qualified with a lender’s commitment. If a buyer’s credit is in need of repair, Sanford enrolls him or her in a budgeting or credit repair program with his lender. And somewhere along the way, he insists on a loyalty agreement, restricting the buyer from agent-hopping.

Sellers too — at least the unrealistic ones — are getting the same tough-love treatment.

"Sometimes," Van De Zilver says, "I have to tell a client that he just isn’t going to be able to meet his price goal in this market and that maybe he should think about holding off on his plans to sell." 

Other agents are turning down potential listings if they sense that the seller is inflexible in price.

"You can’t waste time with cement-head sellers," is how Sanford, formerly of Long Beach and now based in Kankakee, Ill., puts it.  Sanford advises his disciples to do their best to talk current-market sense into the seller, but should the asking price remain unrealistic, he says, agents should lateral the listing to a newbie agent in the office, politely explaining to the seller that the new agent will have more time to try to help him or her meet those goals. And, he adds, the original agent will get a referral commission in the unlikely event that lightning strikes and the house actually sells.

By his estimates, 30% of experienced agents are walking away from overpriced listings. Florida Realtor Magazine reported that some sales associates said in the last year they’ve regularly refused one out of three listings because they believed them to be out of the ballpark. 

Many agents entered the business during the flush times when listings flew off the shelves, Van De Zilver says, and they functioned pretty much as order takers. 

"Now, you really need an agent who knows what it takes to get the home sold," she says. "And if a seller doesn’t want to hear it, there isn’t much point in taking the listing because it won’t sell."

Occasionally, she says, she’ll take an overpriced listing anyway because she wants to put out Valerie Van De Zilver, broker-owner of the Zilver Realty Group in Tustin, shares the sentiment. If a buyer doesn’t commit after being shown available properties, he or she is enrolled in Van De Zilver’s automatic e-mail program. Those buyers receive instant messages about new listings on the market, price drops and changes of listing circumstance. This enables buyers to keep current on the sales inventory and ensures they won’t miss out on a property they have their sights on. It also means they won’t tie up Van De Z
ilver’s time.

She recently declined to list a property when the owner wanted to put it on the market at 100,000 more than what he paid for it in January. He had painted the property and made minor cosmetic repairs. "I told him that this was perhaps not the best time to list the house if getting that price was his goal," she says. Another agent took over the listing; it remains unsold. 

Lonnie Maples, who has been selling real estate for 29 years in inventory-saturated Riverside, says he too has turned down listings. Over the summer, he had a listing appointment with a seller whose property had been in the Multiple Listing Service for more than a year. The owner had made several price reductions from it’s original $1,095,000, and he was now ready to list at $895,000. 

"I knew it wouldn’t sell for even that," Maples says. "That house, in this market . . . $750,000 was more like it. I declined the listing because I didn’t want to waste my time and money."

Maples says it would have cost him $100 a week just to advertise the listing in the local newspaper. Beyond that, there are fliers to have printed, lock boxes to install, mailings to send out.

"It all adds up to a big zero if the house doesn’t sell," Maples says, adding that he would rather "catch the listing" on the second or third round, once it expires from its initial agreement. "Sellers get more realistic then."

Some agents are tempering the touchy situation by compromising. They’ll agree to take a listing at the seller’s desired price for 10 to 21 days if the seller agrees in advance to drop the price if it doesn’t sell in that time frame. And then there are those who say they never walk away from a potential listing. 

Anthony Marguleas, broker with Amalfi Estates in Pacific Palisades, says he and his agents never turn down listings. Period. The onus, he says, is on the agent to educate the client. "If all the comps show a house is worth $1 million and the seller wants $2 million for it, it’s the agent’s job to explain to him why that’s not possible. We won’t give up. We show the seller market analysis, comps of recent sales; we
show him what else is currently on the market. It’s our job to not let him make a mistake."

As for agents who sideline buyers if the buyers don’t want to commit, Marguleas says that behavior is just plain "lazy."  "It’s actually more than lazy; it’s insulting," he says. "Buying a home is the largest investment of someone’s life, and an agent doesn’t have the patience or time to show them homes anymore? That’s not right."

Marguleas says he’s shown some clients more than 100 homes before they’ve made a successful offer.  "Some buyers look at five houses; others need to see more. That’s what we agents do: show them houses."

I saw this video in a presentation a few weeks back and it just made me feel good.  I hope that you enjoy it!  Have a great day!

Tips on selling your home in a slow market

Take a look at this great article that was in the O.C. Register this morning. Where do you fit in? Time to Buy? Depends on who you ask!

While the financing industry is having challenges, I felt that you could learn a lot from this great video…

I’m not familiar with foothill financial; however if you need help or simply have any questions regarding your financing needs, please give me a call and I will gladly refer you to a professional loan representative that will look out for your best interest!

I found this article to be very interesting and I wanted to share.  Please let me know what you think…

Why don’t most Listing Agents offer a Real Estate Staging Service?

I recently returned from a very empowering 2 day seminar.  What I realized was… I’m doing very well; however for as techno friendly as I am… I’m still not using the lastest and greatest technology to help my clients, family, friends and the industry itself.  With that said… I’m taking my first steps and heading out into the world of blogging!  I will look forward to posting something new, and fresh soon.  Stay posted!   

P.S. Who do you know that is currently looking for an incredible opportunity?  My seller’s at 803 E. Del Mar Ave. in Orange have reduced their price to $499,900!