Nov. 28, 2006 - Don't Fear the Technology |
Yesterday on Active Rain, Maureen said every prospective home seller should run the name of any agent they are considering through Google before signing a listing agreement. If you can't find them, she theorized, how will any buyers? And if a buyer can't find your agent, what are the chances of them finding your house?
 Real estate has moved beyond the point of entering homes into the local MLS and waiting for the showings to happen. While it may have been this easy a year ago, with the inflated inventory levels, the odds of one of several similar homes being picked out of the MLS are little better than your ping-pong ball coming out of the Powerball machine.
Repeat after me: the MLS does not sell homes. If you're hoping your agent will leverage the MLS and do nothing else and still sell your home, you may be in for a very, very long wait.
There are some factors that help, of course. Pictures are a necessity and the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service allows up to six photos to be entered on each listing. Yet more than 11,000 of the 32,000-plus listings in ARMLS do not have the maximum number of pictures to show to prospective buyers. More than one-third of these listings are not providing the buyers the visuals they demand.
Virtual tours also help - you can argue the merits of 360-degree views of different rooms or a panoramic shot of different areas - but less than a quarter of all listings in the Phoenix area have any type of virtual tour.
Your home needs to be marketed where the buyers are - and 80-plus percent of the buyers now are on the Internet looking for their next home.
Most agents in the Phoenix area have a website for their real estate business. And the vast majority of these websites are seldom visited and generate no business to speak of. They're pretty billboards in the desert - and once you sign the listing agreement, your property picture (and maybe just one picture) will be stuck on that pretty billboard no one ever will see.
Just as many continue to advertise in the local newspapers and real estate magazines, hoping a glossy photograph can make up with a couple of lines of abbreviated text and some likely outdated information. What do you believe is more effective - three lines of abbreviations or a full-color property page dedicated solely to your home?
Many agents curse their e-mail daily as their Inbox fills with e-mail flyers. The vast majority of these end up in the trash bin, just like many of the Just Listed postcards I send with every listing. But if there's the slightest chance of making an agent aware of a property they otherwise might overlook if it was buried in the MLS, then I've done my job. The odds are long but the payoff is huge. And so I e-mail away where others sit back and wait for the buyers to come.
Before signing a listing agreement, think about how you went about purchasing your new home. I'm willing to bet you used the Internet. Maybe it was Realtor.Com, maybe it was a Google or a Yahoo! search. Or maybe you had the wisdom to search Google for "sexy beagles in the Northwest Valley whose owners sell real estate."*
* I don't think this actually brings you to my site, but Tobey demanded the plug.
The odds are you conducted your search much as the prospective buyers for your home are conducting theirs. Is your home positioned in a place where the buyers will find it? If the answer is no, you know who to e-mail for help.
(c) Jonathan Dalton, 2006 / Jonathan Dalton's Arizona Homes |
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