On January 30th, Realtor.com published an article with the catchy headline, “That’s So 2018! The Most Outdated Home Selling Advice You Should Now Ignore.” I found it interesting to compare the author’s conclusions with my own opinions, many of which I have shared here before. Here is the author’s list of outdated home-selling advice that should be ignored, along with my response to what she wrote:
1) Wait for spring to sell your house. I have written numerous times that winter can be the best time to sell a home, and it’s nice to see how other real estate writers have reached the same conclusion, albeit only recently. The writer for realtor.com made the same arguments I’ve been making for years — that there are fewer competing listings at this time of year, yet there are still many active buyers.
2) Price your home high and leave room to negotiate. This, for sure, is not your best strategy in a seller’s market and even less so in a balanced market like we’re beginning to see in many areas. One agent she quoted in her article said it well: “If you’re not priced at the market, or at least very close, you’re not going to get that many people in the door to begin with. Price your property to sell.”
3) Sell your home as is. The writer said this may have been true in the now-fading seller’s market, but argues that today’s millennial buyers in particular want a home that doesn’t need any work done on it. I addressed the topic of what you should and should not do in last week’s column. Read it at www.JimSmithColumns.com or at www.GoldenREblog.com.
4) Amateur photos of your home are fine. The writer states that your smartphone pictures may have been all you needed during the seller’s market, but that you now need to invest in professional pictures. When it comes to high quality images, Golden Real Estate agents used magazine-quality HDR photos on all listings throughout the seller’s market, so this comment doesn’t apply to us. However, the writer also promoted 3D tours of the home such as those using Matterport equipment, but I’m not a fan. At Golden Real Estate, we believe it’s much more useful to produce a narrated video tour of a property. We’ve been doing narrated video tours for a decade or more and continue to be surprised how few other brokers have adopted the practice. And the Osmo camera we recently purchased makes those videos even more professional-looking. It’s equivalent to using a movie-quality Steadicam!
5) Holding an open house is a must. The writer says open houses only serve the broker and not the seller, but I disagree. You’ll notice that almost every listing we feature in this weekly ad mentions an open house. Since we price our listings to sell, these open houses serve to magnify buyer interest in our listings. (Indeed, the listing I closed last Friday was to a buyer who came to our open house.) Open houses also fit into our strategy of not selling listings in less than 4 days. Our time-tested process is to put a listing on the MLS on Wednesday, advertise it on Thursday (with an open house), and to advise agents and buyers who submit early offers that the seller will wait until after the open house to choose the buyer. Using this strategy, prospective buyers typically bid up the price, which is an obvious benefit to our sellers. An example is last week’s sale of our Wheat Ridge listing for $561,000, which sold on that 4-day schedule for $36,000 over its listing price.
Holding open houses also fits into our belief that you never know what will sell a house, so you should try everything.
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