An article yesterday in the Arizona Republic talked about a number of steps home sellers can take to get their home sold.  One was: “Ask your listing agent to burn up the phone lines with calls about your home.  During the heady seller's market a few years back, well-priced properties in popular neighborhoods practically sold themselves and listing agents had relatively fewer marketing duties. But now that the buyer is king, the well-honed marketing skills of an experienced listing agent are more important than ever.”

I couldn’t agree more.  But the article devoted far too little space on what may well be the most important duty of a real estate agent: marketing your home.

In the report, “11 Must-Know Seller Secrets: Don’t Try to Sell Your Home without Them” which is free on my website, I talk about the importance of marketing: “Mistake #2: Signing a listing contract with a real estate agent without a verifiable marketing plan.  Most agents require their clients to sign a listing contract that binds you to stay with the agent for a specified period of time – and imposes penalties for cutting out before the contract has expired. Yet many listing contracts don’t require the same of the agents (they can simply stop actively marketing your home).

Talk with prospective agents about options for early contact termination, without penalty, if you’re not happy with the service they’re providing. Write your service expectations into the contract so your agent understands what you expect him to do – and get the agent to agree in writing to the service he will deliver (while an agent can’t guarantee he will sell your house in a specified time frame for a specific price, he can guarantee, for example, that he’ll call 25 prospective buyers each day, or send you weekly market reports, or give you a staging consultation).

The real estate experts at MyPhoenixMLS.com offer a verifiable marketing plan. We’ll lay out our plans for marketing your home when we begin our work together. Then we’ll give you access to the Personal Update Center where you can check on what we’ve been doing to market your home. There you can read prospective buyer’s comments, see who we’ve contacted, check out who’s come to see your home, verify all the places that your home is currently listed, read notes from our weekly touch-base phone calls, and more.”

The fact is that marketing is always critical -- it’s how your real estate agent gets the word out about your home, and entices buyers to come see for themselves.  In the strong seller’s market of 2004-07, sellers could get away with lackluster marketing efforts; not so today.  If you want your house to sell, quickly and for a good price, you’ve got to market like it’s going out of style.

What do you think?   How have you marketed/would you market your home to sell?  Click on the “Comments” link to join the discussion!