Getting Ready for the Market

Today’s instant information age requires that we have all the marketing preparation completed before your listing hits the market. It also means that you have to move quickly to get your home prepared for sale.

Before the internet age, getting a listing on the market was a simple thing. The agent would get the disclosures and agreement signed, fill out a few forms, and drop them off to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) by the next day. Then the MLS would take all the new listing information that came in and print them up on index cards and sheets, then mail them to participating brokers. The whole process took about a week from the time that you signed an agreement before any brokers actually knew your home was for sale.

Today, properly marketing a home for sale requires an enormous amount of preparation before we even submit the listing to MLS. In an age of digital information, the minute that your listing hits the market, hundreds of buyers with saved searches are going to get emails about it, thousands of buyer agents
are going to see it pop up when they log into their MLS systems, and all the pictures, descriptions, and information will instantaneously appear on hundreds of real estate and media websites. Your home will get enormous amounts of attention in the first week you are on the market, so it’s important to get things done right at the start.

What Your Agent Is Doing

Your agent has an enormous amount of work to do right away to make sure that your home is properly prepared for marketing with pictures, descriptions, showing instructions, and everything else that needs to be done.

Here’s just a sample of all the items that are on the Client-Oriented Real Estate New Seller Project Plan:

•Making sure the property information is properly submitted to the MLS.

•Ordering signs, ordering a lockbox, writing up showing instructions, and writing broker remarks.

•Checking the correct tax information in the local municipality.

•Writing up a property description for third party websites, and a longer enhanced description for RandRealty. com, Realtor.com, Zillow, and some other sites.

•Scheduling with you to take pictures, download them, review them, crop and edit them, and then upload them to the MLS and enhanced photos for RandReal ty.com and other sites.

•Setting up marketing mailing lists for buyers who might be interested in the property.

•Submitting the listing for BHG Rand’s internal “new listing hotsheet.”

•Confirming that you are enrolled for your weekly email marketing updates.

So your agent has a lot of work to do to make sure your listing is ready to hit the MLS and the websites with beautiful pictures, full descriptions, and accurate information. We want to hit the ground running.

What You Can Do                                                                                                                                      

Similarly, if buyer agents are going to find out that your listing is for sale right away, you have some things you need to do as well. As you know, our philosophy is that sellers should be proactively engaged in the sale of their home, because there are some things that their agent simply cannot do for them.

What can you do to help get your home sold now? You can spend some time, energy, and a little bit of money getting your home prepared for sale through detailing, cleaning, and staging. Your agent can go through a comprehensive checklist of items that should be done so that your home makes an amazing
impression on buyers, and help you along in the process, but it’s really up to you.

Below, we cover all the things that you can do to maximize the appeal of your home to potential buyers. Specifically, we’ll address the concept of detailing your home like you detail a car, cleaning up your home so that it looks like a developer’s model home, and then a little about the art of staging. In Stage Two of the Orientation Guide, we will be covering all the things that you can to maximize the appeal and availability of your home to potential buyers. Specifically, we’ll address the concept of “detailing” your home like you would prepare your car if you were selling it, and also the idea of “staging” your home to make the maximum impact at showings. We’ll also discuss how you can keep your home in showing condition, and how to stay abreast of any changing market conditions. So make sure your agent provides you with Stage Two once you’ve completed the consultation process.