SELLING YOUR HOME

Marketing? Yes, But What You Really Need Is a Skilled Negotiator

Most REALTORS seem to assume your primary goal is to find an experienced home sales agent to "market" your home to get it sold as fast as possible and at the best price. However, "marketing" your home really means simply getting it placed in your regional Multiple Listing Services (MLS) platform as soon as a listing contract is completed. It is the main tool ALL real estate agents use to search out showings for their home buyer clients. What's even better? The MLS database is also automatically shared with popular home listing websites such as Zillow, Realtor.Com, Trulia, Movato, HomeSnap, HomeASAP and others. Do you recognize most of these entities and have you used them yourself?

Of course, there's the traditional and obligatory sign in the front yard and the conducting of open houses that I like to do.

My focus for this webpage is to concentrate on the traditional selling of a private home in Hampton Roads or Northeast North Carolina where basic "marketing" concepts are a given within the industry. The exception to this is the marketing of oceanfront and other similar high value properties that advertise to a specialty clientele through, for example, luxury property publications and websites. In these cases, yes, marketing is as important a role as deal negotiating and follow through.

Using a well-known and marketed real estate brokerage and/or agent to list your traditional family home is really no more of an advantage to getting your home sold faster than a smaller company or agent. Everyone does the same thing using the same tools when it comes to marketing your home for sale.

Negotiation is Key!

After doing research by performing a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) that compares your home to other similar nearby and recently sold properties, generating response will most certainly come when we list your home for the best optimal price for the market.

What happens after that is where my value to you really comes into play. Because a home is most people's primary asset and the associated large monetary values typically involved, the real estate industry is heavily regulated to ensure that all players follow ethical and legal rules during a transaction with serious career, and even criminal, consequences for not doing so.

In the real world, my experience is that if you follow these established rules and processes explicitly and know what you are doing, it makes it easy to see when the other negotiating party tends to "push the limit" or attempt to play a perceived ignorance about a certain detail to their advantage. Both sides are bound to looking out for their client's best interests and business negotiation is the name of the game.  Experienced real estate agents will most certainly play it depending on their feel for the other party's negotiating skill level or experience.

I find the real estate industry incredibly interesting, as well as particular details that arose through many past transactions. I've written several anonymously-based, but true, blog article case studies that I hope will educate you on the number of unforeseen circumstances or issues that presented themselves and how they were resolved.