It isn’t that hard.  In fact it is downright easy.  Selling a home in a week or less is pretty simple.  It only takes a few simple steps.

• Saturate the market with marketing.  If nobody knows it is for sale, it won’t get sold.
• Make it look perfect.  It has to beat out ALL of the other homes on the market.
• Have a stunning presentation, perfect pictures and excellent virtual tour.
  
  
• Get in front of any surprises.  Get a pre-listing inspection so that there aren’t surprises from the buyer’s inspector.
• Find a hook… something different… like a virtual interactive floor plan.

photo credit: rileyroxx

These are all well known techniques… although about 75% of the listings on the market right now do NOT have all of these going for them.  Every day as I go through listings in the local MLS, I see homes that look terrible, or worse… don’t have enough or even any pictures.  I go to visit homes and I see them messy and unkempt.  I run across flyer boxes that are empty.  I see agents and sellers that have their heads in the sand trying to maintain “plausible deniability” about property defects.
I can list a few hooks, but most of them are really just gimmicks.  Giving away cars and plasma screen TVs with the house aren’t that exceptional anymore.  And they don’t make a better buying experience… and most of these lead to the biggest problem…

photo credit: fazen

• The price has to be amazing.

Not good.  Amazing.  That is where things get interesting.  ANY house will sell immediately at some price.  But, that price might very well not be a price at which the seller wants to sell.  But here is the surprise…

If the house is going to sell, it will likely sell early in the listing.

That’s right.  The single most critical time for the marketing of the house is the first week.  When it is a “new listing” it gets the most attention.  The waning attention later in the listing period can be improved with price reductions or other “fresheners.”  But, it still won’t get the eyes like it will during the first week.

So, what does all of this mean?  It means that if the house is priced aggressively, it will get offers and likely sell in the first couple of weeks of the listing.

So, Lane… why are the average days on market usually several months?  There are a couple of reasons.  To start with, it is an average… a lot of homes sell faster, and a lot sell slower.  If you look really hard through the listings, you will see that the homes that sell late in the listing period, you will see price reductions.  Had they been priced that way to start with… they would have sold faster.

Another reason goes back to the first few points I made.  Many properties are rushed on to the market.  “Get the listing, get the sign in the ground, get it on the MLS and then do the collateral work.”  That is the way most agents operate.  The first week (the most critical time) the listing doesn’t have flyers, doesn’t have a web site… doesn’t even have pictures on the MLS, much less a virtual tour.  We know that this is the most important time, and yet… 3 out of 4 listings WASTE this important time.  

Ok, you’ve convinced me… I’ll give you a week to sell my house.  If you let me price it like it is on fire… I’ll take it.  However, if you want to preserve equity, we might need more time.  I think a year is outrageously long (except for some VERY high end homes with a limited market), but even two months is a pretty short time frame to risk spending much money on while marketing a home.  Six months is a good medium… but we’ll know if we are getting good results much quicker than that.

If you are ready to sell your home, let me know.