What is the Ultimate home selling plan?

 Curb Appeal, A First Impression That Lasts

Most buyers form their first impression of your home before they even get out of the car. Curb appeal is the view from the curb that gives potential buyers the first chance to fall in love with your home.

The exterior of your home should be in pristine condition - clean, cleared of clutter, with no visible repairs needed. A broken step, overgrown bush, or abandoned toys in the yard can spoil the home's appearance and the potential buyer's first impression.

Here's a simple cleanup and spruce-up checklist to make sure your home leaves a stellar first impression:

• Clear driveways and walkways of snow, weeds, and debris. Repair or replace cracked steps or pavers. Whenever possible, driveways should be clear of vehicles.
• Keep your lawn mowed, edged, and watered. Prune dead branches and plants. Weed flower beds and replace leggy, thin landscaping with fresh plants and flowers.
• Replace loose or damaged roof shingles, clean the gutters, paint, and caulk window trim and doors.
• Make the front door area shine: consider repainting your front door and placing a new welcome mat. Polish the door hardware and make front-facing facing windows clean.
• Power wash siding, brick, windows, and porches.
• Replace light fixtures -and if possible, pick new fixtures with the same mounting system to save time and hassle.
• Install new house numbers that match the finish of your light fixtures.
• Consider upgrading your mailbox; it's an inexpensive fix and the first thing that buyers will see when they pull up to your home.
• Install flowerboxes or pots of blooming flowers for a pop of color.
• Hang a seasonal wreath from your front door.

Staging Your Home  

When you list your home for sale, it becomes a product rather than your personal retreat. You want potential homebuyers to be able to envision themselves living in the home, which can be difficult if your family's personality is still evident. Before going on the market, your agent will recommend decluttering and depersonalizing, but you may also want to bring in a professional stager to help guide you through showing your home in its most marketable light.

When done correctly, staging will not only set the right emotional tone for buyers about the home, but can also help highlight the most attractive features of the home. Staging can potentially make you money, too: 77% of listing agents said a well-staged environment increases the dollar value buyers are willing to offer, according to the National Association of Realtors Profile of Home Staging. Staging can also shorten the length of time your home is on the market, with agents reporting that their staged homes were going under contract faster than those without.

A professional stager will typically begin with an in-home consultation, where they will walk through your home with you, review the property, and provide a report with their advice for the home. The report will include advice on de-cluttering, storing items, reorganizing furniture placement, and possibly changing out paint colors in different rooms. The stager may also give tips for improving curb appeal. The most common rooms that are staged are the living room, kitchen, master bedroom, and dining room.

Depending on what your home needs, and whether you want to do the work yourself or hire it done, your stager could handle bringing in supplementary furniture and décor items, manage painting or other contractors coming to your home, and have a more hands-on role in getting your home ready to go on the market. The cost of services provided will vary depending on how much assistance your home will need. 

Below are two staging checklists that can get you started, while you make that appointment with Vanessa and Garrick to assist you in preparing to sell.

 Pricing a home for sale is as much art as science, but there are a few truisms that never change.

• Fair market value attracts buyers, overpricing never does.
• The first two weeks of marketing are crucial.
• The market never lies, but it can change its mind.
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Fair market value is what a willing buyer and a willing seller agree by contract is a fair price for the home. Values can be impacted by a wide range of reasons, but the two biggest are location and condition. Generally, fair market value can be estimated by considering the comparables - other similar homes that have sold or are currently for sale in the same area.

Sellers often view their homes as special, which tempts them to put a higher price on it, believing they can always come down later, but that's a serious mistake.

Overpricing prevents the very buyers who are eligible to buy the home from ever seeing it. Most buyers shop by price range and look for the best value in that range.

Timing  

Your best chance of selling your home is in the first two weeks of marketing. Your home is fresh and exciting to buyers and to their agents.

With a sign in the yard, full description and photos in the local Multiple Listing Service, distribution across the Internet, open houses, broker's caravan, ads, and email blasts to your listing agent's buyers, your home will get the greatest flurry of attention and interest in the first two weeks.

If you don't get many showings or offers, you've probably overpriced your home, and it's not comparing well to the competition. Since you can't change the location, you'll have to either improve the home's condition or lower the price.

Consult with your agent and ask for feedback. Perhaps you can do a little more to spruce up your home's curb appeal, or perhaps stage the interior to better advantage.

The market can always change its mind and give your home another chance, but by then you've lost precious time and perhaps allowed a stigma to cloud your home's value.

Intelligent pricing isn't about getting the most for your home - it's about getting your home sold quickly at fair market value.

Our marketing plan defines our strategy of identifying the best activities and channels to market your house to buyers. The plan will promote your home using the most effective tools and techniques to make an emotional impact on buyers. More importantly, our promotion is designed to show the value of your home so that qualified buyers will make an offer that reflects the value that we are promoting.

In our realtor network, the multiple listing service (MLS) is indispensable. The MLS is our local database of homes for sale, sold and unsold. This database allows us to see the entire selling history of just about any home sold in our area if it was sold by a realtor. The MLS is the foundation of every real estate transaction in our area, and it is the foundation for how every home is marketed. 

As a marketing tool, the MLS is a good tool. It alone can help sell your home, but what if you could improve the photography, add video, and post information about your home on social media, -- even create a dedicated website to highlight the home beyond the capabilities of the MLS. Here is where true promotion begins. 

Promoting your home. Showing it in a special light, highlighting features that can’t be shown in the MLS and making your property shine adds to the home’s perceived value. As your realtor, I want to increase the perceived value of your home to attract more buyers. 

Marketing is just one of the areas where I excel, and compared to other realtors, you will not find a realtor that can promote your home better than me. The chart below highlights my promotion services versus the average realtor.

Each property and each seller is different. Not all sellers want or need our full marketing/promotion plan. However, the goal is to get more attention on your home to attract qualified buyers more quickly.

The philosophy behind the Ultimate Home Selling System is to prepare the home to wow buyers, price it properly to attract qualified buyers, and promote is aggressively to accelerate the enthusiasm for the home to get a high offer, quickly.

Below are a few of the services we can provide as part of the marketing of your home.