Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Selling Greenville your favorite real estate podcast here in Greenville South Carolina I'm your host as always Stan McCune Realtor right here in Greenville South Carolina and you can find all of my contact information in the show notes if you need to reach out to me for any of your local real estate needs and please if you like this content if you like this show please subscribe make sure you don't miss future episodes whatever whether you're watching on YouTube or whether you're listening on Spotify Apple hit the little subscribe button and if you can like leave a rating leave a review leave a comment on YouTube all of those things help the show it's a very small way to just thank me and even if you're never gonna use me as your realtor maybe you are a realtor you can still do that and that's just a little thank you so I would appreciate it some of you guys take me offline right in a phone call or in person but I would appreciate those actual thank you to actually come in through the proper channels so if you don't mind doing that that would be wonderful last week I did a 10 point guide on buying a home in Greenville Today I'm doing a 10 point guide this week a 10 point guide on selling a home in Greenville and of course I say Greenville really it's the upstate not just Greenville if you're in Spartanburg if you're in Pickens if you're in Anderson Aiken Greenwood these principles all apply to you as well Lawrence County same thing I'm sorry I didn't mean to leave out Lawrence County there someone's gonna scream at me because of that but yeah that this applies to the entire upstate of South Carolina it's just if I don't say Greenville it's not gonna get into the algorithm as much as it should and so basically and I need to give this reminder a lot but a lot of this stuff is going to be good principles for whether you're selling a home anywhere but it's very specific to Greenville because I only know the Greenville market right and in the greater Greenville market I don't know what the market's like in Austin or Boise or San Francisco or Miami they're all a little bit different and in some cases a lot different what I know is local it's specific to this market and hopefully this home selling guide will help you specifically in this market and if it helps you outside of the market that's great too but No. 1 we're just gonna jump right in here the No. 1 thing I would say and these aren't necessarily in a any particular order but this one probably is just the No. 1 thing know your competition and this is something that's lost on a lot of home sellers so some do get it to their credit but a lot don't is that you're not competing with the cops right a lot of people are just like well the home down the street sold you know a year and a half ago for this price and home values have gone up by x amount therefore my home is worth such and so none of that really matters because people aren't looking at the home that was sold a year and a half ago they're not looking at homes that were sold six months ago now buyers will look at comps right to kind of assess okay is this home overpriced of course every buyer thinks every listing is overpriced with very few exceptions and so they're going to use the comps against you if they can they're certainly not gonna use it if it works in your favor so if a comp does work in your favor just understand that buyers are going to ignore it but what buyers are gonna be paying the most attention to is what your competition is what's your competition it's the other homes that are for sale specifically homes inside your neighborhood if you're if you're in a neighborhood or if you're you know within a certain radius within a mile a half mile maybe even a few miles out that's your competition outside the neighborhood again a few miles out particular if your home has like unique features you might have to go a few miles out to really like see what the competition is maybe your a much larger home than any of the homes in that area you know few years ago I sold my house that was in Chartwell Estates which is a production built neighborhood in Greer and we had one of only I think it was four basement homes in that neighborhood and the last basement home that had sold in that neighborhood was our home when we had bought it and so it was very difficult to price that home out I had to go outside the neighborhood to assess OK what other basement homes are in this area and there really weren't a whole lot and so that was kind of how we had to approach that but also right now and this is where my caveat about this being very specific to Greenville is very important and again I've talked about this over and over and over again so I'm sorry to beat a dead horse here but the dead horse is everywhere and that is new construction okay new construction for a lot of people selling homes particularly if you're selling a home below $500,000 you are competing with new construction that is like your No. 1 competition right now because they're cheaper than your home obviously newer cleaner like perfect at least they look perfect they might not be as well built as your home they might not have all the upgrades of your home but then they've got all of these incentives that they're offering as well and you have to consider you know what am I actually competing with the new construction that's around here and with that you even have to go out a a further radius than what you normally would when assessing what your competition is because some people are going to end up going a little bit further to get that new construction that's cheaper that's newer that has all those various closing costs and savings and what not and I mean I'm telling you guys this is a big deal if you don't factor in that you are competing with new construction it might look completely different than your home it doesn't matter it's all about affordability right now and new construction is quite frankly more affordable in a lot of ways than a lot of existing homes and if you've got new construction within just a few miles of your home you need to factor that in now if it's a if it's a like a town home community and you're selling a single family detached home that that's different we're not gonna be comparing it still has to be at least somewhat comparable but generally speaking you need to be very aware of deconstruction and aware of your competition as a whole and be honest be honest about what the competition offers that you don't that is so important because I can't tell you how many times I meet with sellers and they want to sell me on their home you don't need to sell me on your home I'm not gonna buy it like my marketing for your home isn't gonna change based on what you tell me right I am going to identify what things your home has to offer that is going to be attractive to the market now that's not to say that I don't want to hear things from my seller clients as to what they love about a home and maybe some things that aren't obvious on first glance right maybe they have some kind of a French drain system that they installed in recent years that I that I wouldn't have known maybe the roof you know is brand new and I can tell it's in good shape but I don't know that it's brand new you know things like that are very helpful but at the end of the day you don't need to you don't need to sell me on your home and often times when I have those conversations I can tell the seller has already concluded whether they're trying to talk themselves into it or whether they actually believe it that their home is just better than all of the competition and they're always they're always wrong when they say that there's always something out there that's better like you have to start from that basis point start with the understanding okay my home is not the best home on the market or won't be the best home on the market at this price point and then go from there right be if you'd be better off being overly critical and then that will allow you to start thinking about your home like a buyer will be thinking about your home it's not being overly critical just for the sake of being overly critical no buyers are overly critical right now and you want to think like them and not just default to the thoughts that make you comfortable that make you feel good about your home think about it critically don't let that criticism affect you negatively let it then be like okay after you've had that moment of really being critical then alright now what now that I know what the competition is here is what they have that we don't and that could be maybe conditions of the home size of the home maybe some of the lender incentives such as what new constructions offering like assess all of those things that they have that you don't and then at that point in time we can come up with a with a strategy of like okay here's how to undercut all of those homes that are that have something that your home doesn't have to offer and of course that's something that's what I do as a real estate professional not telling you that you have to do it but I'm saying this is a good practice and if only your realtor does it if you're not open to it you're gonna resist you're gonna feel like your realtor is being very critical you're gonna feel like your realtor hates your home don't think about it that way if your realtor is being critical you're they're just trying to help make you have a realistic understanding of what your home is going to look like to buyers out there there's nothing wrong with that that's literally what you're hiring a realtor for if your realtor only tells you what you wanna hear you need to fire that realtor right now go ahead and fire them because they don't have your best interest in mind they're just trying to get a listing and they think that the best way to do that is to be agreeable with you bad idea don't go with someone like that alright number two and I've kind of already alluded to this understand that the market is very critical right now I mean it is brutal even though you know I said last week we are in a soft seller's market doesn't matter from a standpoint of buyers still being critical they have more homes you know available to them than they have for many years and they feel like they can be critical so if your home has flaws right it needs new paint it's dirty needs to be pressure washed the landscaping has not been done in quite some time listen buyers will immediately get turned off to your home pictures might be great marketing might be great they walk in and they're like ugh this just feels gross to me I I can't tell you how often I experience that on both sides right I have buyers that are like that and then I have I've had listings where buyers just critique the daylights out of it and just things that to me are things that can be fixed right if it needs a deep clean it needs a deep clean like no big deal buy it and then hire a deep cleaner whatever get it get it for the price factor in the deep cleaning into the price and move on but buyers aren't being logical right now they're being very illogical and so you have to circumvent that illogical approach that they have by getting out in front of the misconceptions and the concerns that they might have an example that I have from one of my own clients from yesterday year is they would look at every single oven they would open every single oven which by the way be prepared for that be prepared for your appliances to be to be opened for people to go snooping around in there that that's just gonna happen but they would look at every single oven and if an oven was dirty they'd kind of be like yeah we don't like this house and I like I didn't get that right cause an oven obviously you can clean it if you can't clean it you can replace it right for fairly inexpensive in comparison to the to the cost of a home and these people were capable like it wasn't like a financial problem they could have they could have bought a new oven or had an old one cleaned or whatever but they were just rolling out houses on the basis of the ovens being dirty and I as a realtor I tried to help my clients be more logical than that but at the end of the day it's their decision right it is their decision what they you know what they value in a home and if they value a clean oven it's not my job to say you shouldn't value that up to a certain point like I'll explain well you know you could do this you could do this and if they're just like no we don't wanna do it I've done my part as a realtor I've given them their options but at the end of the day they are the boss they know what they want when it comes to buying a home and it's not my job to tell them I'm sorry but you don't want that right again up to a certain point I try to do that until I realized that oh no actually this is a major major thing for them and they're not going to be happy if they buy the home with this perceived issue and so at that point then I back off and just factor in OK one of their criteria it they didn't originally tell me was that the house also has to have a perfectly clean oven and that's just it sometimes the criteria doesn't make sense but you've got to consider this when you're selling you need to try to button up as many things as you can with regard to your home in order to make it presentable to buyers and to circumvent the concerns that they may have No.3 this one's gonna surprise some people I think when interviewing realtors resist the urge to ask them what your home is worth that's often times one of the first questions that I get when I do a listing presentations well what do you think the home is worth really don't like answering that question because a what is worth today might not be worth what it's worth two months from now for a variety of reasons could go up could go down we don't know what will happen but once I tell them a number they're gonna have that number kind of in their mind for eternity right until they until they list their home but more importantly a lot of people will use that question and the response to that question as a major factor in determining which realtor they're going to use and that that's a really really bad practice because any realtor can list a home for any price but it's the marketing that a Realtor does that separates one realtor from the other so in my marketing I do Zillow Showcase which not very many agents do for every single listing I have a digital ad campaign that I do that goes out to a bunch of different websites not just real estate websites but other websites like CNN MSNBC what not where you actually you know your home gets published using artificial intelligence on other websites that people that that AI assesses that people are looking for homes in your area and then you know just pushes that out to them a bunch of social media marketing obviously I do professional photography drone photography twilight photography which sometimes I use sometimes I don't and a whole lot more than that right that's just kind of the starting point I'm not gonna do my whole spiel to you guys if you're interested we can have that conversation offline but you get the point like all right ask the realtor okay are you gonna use professional photography what multiple listing services are you gonna list this home in what sort of ad campaigns are you going to do what kind of marketing are you gonna do what kind of sign are you gonna put in my front yard you know are you going to do open houses like these are the sorts of questions that you need to be asking to assess one realtor from the other the question you shouldn't be asking is well how much are you gonna list my home for first off I don't get to decide that at the end of the day right I am the person that ultimately presses the button to list your home but I don't just arbitrarily decide well this client you know their home is worth 500,000 according to my research so that's what we're gonna list it for like no you have to agree on that too right this is a two way street this is a two way conversation and so usually the way I approach that once someone's decided to work with me we do all of the research we look at not just the comps right but the competition which we just talked about in point No. 1 and we take all of that into consideration and I do one extra step that I don't know too many other realtors that do this and so if you're a realtor I'm revealing my hand to you right now I enter all the information into the multiple listing service regarding the house and then the multiple listing service has a pricing tool that when I press the button it tells me how many buyers are matched in the Multiple Listing service with that house at that price point and then I can go up or down on the price and again it's in the Multiple Listing service but only visible to me so it's not active yet and so I can actually see in real time well if we list it at this price here's how many buyers it hits if we list it at that price here's how many buyers it hits and there is a number that I want to get to and in terms of how many buyers it hits and if we don't get there then I'm gonna warn my clients about that and that can really help to inform and I feel like more so than anything really helps to inform what a home is like actually worth because that's actually you're actually pairing it with real buyers in the Multiple Listing Service there's no tool more powerful than that and I'm sure there are other agents that do something like that but this has become standard practice for me and this is something I'm doing for all of my listings at this point and so again that's right at the end like what does it matter if I tell you what I think your home is worth months before you're gonna list it we need to figure that out at the end you need to base your interviews off of what realtors marketing strategies are No.4 remember that the market determines your home value not you okay so the art of pricing a home at the end of the day is trying to determine what the market value is not what you think it is worth based on all of the TLC all of the updates all of the all of the things that you've that you've put all of the blood sweat and tears you put into your home buyers don't care about any of that right that's your story every everyone has a story with their home and that's your story and that's great like that's valuable that's good that I like to know that as a realtor buyers don't care what buyers are doing is they're looking at your home and the condition it's in the updates it's in the size the location all of that and just comparing it to all the other homes that that are at a similar price point that's all they're doing and so you know so often that sellers are like well I bought the home for this price I did all of these updates to it that cost who knows what $100,000 we'll just say plus Betsy down the road also sold her house for this amount she didn't have all of these things and I know that you know that I can sell my house for more than that no it's really not that simple like first off I don't know anything about Betsy's home right now I I need to do some more digging into that oftentimes you know again people are more critical of their neighbor's homes than they should be because they're trying to sell me on how valuable their home is and I don't need to be sold on it sorry to keep beating that dead horse but at the end of the day it's the market that decides it's not even me right I don't decide how much your home is worth I project but it's the market the buyers the actual physical buyers that are out there they are the ones that determine what your home is actually worth and everything else is just hearsay and so remember that remember that you don't get to make that decision I don't get to make that decision nobody gets to make that decision except the buyers so the whole art of pricing a home is trying to figure out what do what will buyers right now right here and now in this market think your home is worth and that's exactly why I use that pricing tool because that is real time hard data in the actual multiple listing service like there's literally no better way to do it there's no better way to get that data now what I'm not gonna do is I'm not gonna share with you the number of buyers that I want to hit in that pricing tool some of you might know that some of you I might have shared that with but if you're a realtor you got to be on my on my real estate team in order for me to share that with you and to give you that little strategy so I got you to the starting line it's up to you to get to the finish line if you're a realtor listening to this with regard to that pricing tool alright No. 5 home values again to stick to pricing cause this is a big part you know this is what every when people are selling homes they're always wanting to talk about what their home is worth and I've already alluded to this but home values are ranges not precise numbers and appraisers by the way will tell you this as well we had a great conversation with Chris White an appraiser I believe it was last year and we talked a little bit about this on the podcast I've talked about it with him offline as well but home values are a range like anyone that says your home is worth exactly this number that like no nobody can determine that cause again the market decides that not research cannot tell you a precise number it can tell you a range and so that's what I try to determine here's what the range is and then I'll make a recommendation within that range on what I would say that you should list your house at and that's again based on all the research that I've done but it's also based on the seller strategy right because everyone wants to list their home at the top end of the range right for obvious reasons you want to get as much bang for your buck but that might not make sense for your strategy if you need a quick sale for instance you need to list at the lower end of the range and you know based on where the market is you might need to list at the at the lower end of the range there's a lot of considerations that's a separate conversation that I have but just understand there's no like one number that any if any realtor says your home is worth exactly this amount they don't know what they're talking about that is simply not how the market works and you'll get neighbors that tell you that too you know one thing that neighbors love to say is oh that home is underpriced they always disagree they'll even say it's overpriced normally they say it's underpriced they're always wrong like again the they don't get to set the market they don't get to tell you what the value is any more than you or I do it's literally what the market says the home is worth that's what it is worth No. 6 staging okay get questions about staging all the time here's my thought about staging it's helpful but it isn't the end all be all now almost anyone living in their home if they're selling a home that they are currently living in they have to declutter and depersonalize and that alone is usually adequate staging now some homes could use some other things and that's a that's a conversation that I have with my clients at the time that we're assessing the home and all of that but generally speaking you don't need to get professional staging for the most part in a home now the question I get most often is well what about vacant homes right do vacant homes need to be staged and I will say this it does help but buyers are used to seeing vacant homes and so is it necessary are you gonna get back the thousands of dollars that you've that you pay to stage your home I don't think so in my personal opinion I disagree specifically in this market with that strategy now you might see online that well staging adds you know x y z value to your home and that might be true in aggregate I have not seen any evidence that that's true in the Greenville market and anyone that wants to provide that data for me to prove me wrong I will admit that I'm wrong if you can prove me wrong but I've not seen any data I've not personally in my experience with selling homes seen that staging benefits or makes that big of a difference with one major exception and that is if a home has some unique things with regard to the floor plan where it's like kind of hard to like kind of determine okay well what do I do with this space if it's got a unique space that's just challenging when you're walking through to like figure out ugh what could this be used for it's just this just like empty space and if you can give that space utility whereas right now it just kind of looks like useless empty space like a loft for instance a lot of lofts you know you go through them and it's just like well what am I gonna do with this it's just open air and you know if you can find a way to make give that loft utility you have added value to the home and so staging can be helpful in that regard but again those are somewhat few and far in between you also have the option for virtual staging which is obviously substantially cheaper where you're just you know having someone put furniture virtual furniture in the photos of a listing which were we are allowed to do that could be an option there are mixed opinions on that for me personally I think again if it's a space that's just like this big space that just doesn't show well on the photos it could make sense but for the most part I don't think it's that helpful number seven open houses okay this is also a conversation that comes up a lot and here's what I want you to understand homes don't often sell at open houses right that but even though homes don't usually sell at open houses that doesn't mean that they aren't useful in certain situations okay now there's all sorts of you hear all sorts of different debates and strategies over how to do open houses and when to do them some people are just like you need to list every house on Thursday or Friday and do a Saturday or Sunday open house for every single listing the every time I've heard someone say that it is an agent saying that for their own benefit okay they do the open house because they want to get meet more buyers that might be unrepresented and so they do the open house strategy not because they think it's going to sell the home but because they think it's going to get them more clients you listen I'm sorry I'm being I'm being brutally honest here that is the truth because homes almost never ever sell at open houses now couple exceptions right I'm not saying never use an open house here's when I use them a I use them for generating buzz if I had a listing that had to take a price reduction and we have had a few of these the past few years most homes are having price reductions right now the vast majority have to reduce a price at least once before you know before they go under contract and so what's nice is if you can do a price reduction and here's by the way one other thing I do that's a bit the extra mile that others don't I completely when I'm doing a price reduction for my clients I completely delist the home take it off the market and relist it at the new price now is that gimmicky yeah does that eliminate the days on market on the MLS no they people can still see how many days it's been on the market but it does look like a new listing and it does work okay I've got multiple clients I can tell you story after story after story where I've done this and right away after relisting the home we get under contract now is that would that have had the same effect had we just lowered the price I don't know I tend to not think that I tend to think that a big part of that was that I took it off the market and relisted it and it reappeared in people's feeds and look like a new listing and what I also frequently do is I'll change the first photo so that way perhaps they had gotten used to seeing that front photo of the house well now they're looking at a slightly different photo and it's like oh it gets it gets their attention they might be like oh this looks like a new one and then they click on it and then they realize well it's not a new one it's the same one but oh they relisted it and maybe there's some other subtle little changes in there sometimes I'll rearrange the photos internally as well to kind of prioritize some things and deprioritize other things so anyway long story short that's something that's something that that I do and often times not all the time but often times in conjunction with that I will also do an open house in order to generate buzz right that's a new marketing thing that's something else that I can throw out there that that kind of gets people thinking about it's like oh wow okay and they're also doing an open house maybe I should go just pop in just kind of see what's going on with this house and that strategy has worked many many times for me over the years I'll also do an open house if I have a listing that I just need feedback on right you know it's a it's a listing that that I've had a lot of traffic or maybe haven't had any traffic on and I need to figure out why isn't anyone moving on this house like what's going on and sometimes I can get some really really valuable feed that feedback that way from just having random people maybe people with even within the neighborhood just looky loos coming through I can hear different opinions and then I can bring that feedback back to my clients and say hey here's what I I got direct feedback from the market here's what the market is telling us I've seen situations where people even chose their listing agent this is absurd to me but I've seen situations where people chose their listing agent strictly on the basis of whether they would do an open house or not I think that that's a really bad single issue to get parked on again open houses typically don't sell homes so why are you so obsessed with an open house but I've heard of this before and I even got a listing a few years ago because I was willing to do an open house when the you know other agent that was in the mix wasn't willing to do it and I again I don't normally do an open house on the opening weekend but I did for them because that was important to that client so I did it and if you want an open house on your opening weekend I will make that happen in order to get your house listed and fulfill your wishes but just understand it's rare that that actually benefits the house in terms of selling with one exception right there is one major major exception with regard to me not doing the you know the initial open house for the opening weekend I will do it frequently if I have a client that's really really they need to move their house quick and maybe they have another home under contract that they're buying and it's contingent on the sale of this house and we just need to do a full court press get it out there for that opening weekend and you know immediately see okay what kind of what kind of activity level what kind of buzz are we getting I had to do that for a listing I had towards the end of last year and it worked out perfectly we got the most incredible weather of the entire winter that weekend it was the second busiest open house I've ever had and that open house actually did directly result in multiple offers very rare situation right almost never ever happens but it did in that specific instance and part of that was that you know the client agreed to price the home kind of more towards the lower end of the range as we talked about in order to make sure that they didn't overprice it and then find themselves kind of scrambling to sell their home when they were trying to buy the next one and so that's a lot of stuff with regard to open houses but that's kind of my open book and what I think about those things No. 8 you've got to know if you're a seller in in the Greenville market that the average listing takes roughly two months to sell and if you wanna sell faster than that again you need to have a home that is better than average right think about this the average listing takes two months to sell if you wanna sell faster than that it's really simple your home has to be better than average in some ways like wow my math teacher never taught me this sort of math right and I for some of you might just be like yeah that that that's common sense I get that a lot right people are always just like oh yeah I know that yeah they know that until they want to sell their house right and again actually be honest that's so important you've got to think about it in my area is my house above average or is it merely average or maybe even below nobody thinks their house is below average so is it is it just merely average or is it actually above average what can I how in what way is my house better than all these other homes that are taking 60+ days to sell and so if your home if you do a a a logical and honest assessment and find that your home is merely average then you have to price it aggressively below maybe even below average in order to beat that two month average of going under contract right you got to think about this if you if your home is average and you just price it right you know at the average price point for what your home would get it's gonna take two months to sell on average these are all just averages could you beat that yeah would that be because you had a good process a a good plan in place no you that like just happening to sell your average home at an above average rate right at a quicker rate than everyone else like you locked into that and so these are the sorts of things that that you need to think through and again being critical about your house will benefit you a lot more than being overly optimistic when it comes to selling No. 9 be prepared to pay for buyer's closing costs guess what happens when a bunch of builders start throwing around 15,000 20,000 in closing cost assistance etcetera flex cash all this stuff all the builders are doing it and so buyers just get used to it they basically and you know if they're not used to it once they start assessing their options they say you know I don't really want to have to wait for a new build which is what I hear over and over again but the next thing they say is I'd be an idiot to pass this up this is better a better use of my money that I can find anywhere on the resale market and you know I can't tell you how many times my own buyers have come to this conclusion so I end up helping them with new construction happy to do that more than happy to do that the builders you know they don't always play nice with realtors in a major major seller's market builders tend to tend to get you know to not play nice with realtors but in a market like this they wanna work with us they're sending us emails all the time offering us all these bonuses going crazy trying to get realtors to sell their homes and so and so at the end of the day you need to realize again these builders are a big part of your competition and so how do you undercut them right you have to play the game that they're playing you can't think well I'm gonna do everything different than them and have the same success as them no you've got to play their game and their game is affordability they figured it out builders are very efficient home sellers and so they figured out well people can't afford things so what we're gonna do is we're going to price very competitively and then offer to pay for a bunch of closing costs and or upgrades and or all these other things and you've got one major advantage on your side you know what that is that is that you can sell your home right now and that's actually a huge advantage but you have to get over the other hurdles cause people don't want to wait for a builder to build their home in for to take four to five months they don't they wanna buy their house right now right when they're looking they're ready to buy they're ready to move right now and so but you've got to leverage that advantage by undercutting the builders on all these other things and you've got to be prepared to pay for closing costs and you know at the at the end of the day my opinion is you should probably just get out in front of that on the front end and just basically be willing to offer that on the front end again if you want to sell your home quickly now maybe you're not as motivated of a seller maybe you're just like no we can we can wait and see you know if we get offers at full price not ask for closing costs but be open to you know if I give me permission at least if I have an agent come along and say hey are they willing to help with closing costs at all to for that I'm able to say yeah they're willing to do that with a reasonable offer I just had a a listing fairly recently like we had some of the most showings I've ever had on a listing without it going under contract and it just kept getting 2nd place 2nd place 2nd place and it had some great buyer agents that showed the house and submitted some great feedback to me that told me over and over again you're getting second place to new construction because of their offering closing cost assistance so finally you know after we'd had enough showings without any offers that it was like okay this is gonna continue to be a problem I went back to my clients and just explained to them okay here's why your home's not selling despite all of these showings it was crazy actually I've never had a listing quite like that in terms of just not going under contract despite tons and tons of showings there was one thing that that people didn't like about the house itself but the biggest thing was it was just it just kept losing out to new construction and so what we did was we relisted it again took it off the market relisted it changed some photos around what not and then started offering closing cost concessions according to my client's wishes and then I blasted that out to every single person that had shown that home as well I blasted it out to my entire company I blasted it out to as many people as possible and we got it under contract a week later and it was within range of what my clients were hoping to get for the home so everything worked out so you need to consider that as a as a major strategy No.10 last on our list for today remember that even though it is a soft sellers market as I said last week that doesn't mean that you get to make demands on the market right you're thinking well hey you said it's a sellers market I'm the boss here I've got all the leverage in a sellers market no not a soft sellers market you do have some leverage I've already spoken a little bit to that but if you start making demands and think you can just throw your weight around like people were doing in between 2020 and 2022 you're gonna have problems right well I wanna sell as is market this home as an as is sale yeah sure you wanna sell as is and I'd like to win the lottery as well I'd like to win the Powerball wouldn't we all listen buyers are already really cynical and if a seller appears to be demanding and is like we're gonna sell this as is and we're not including appliances and you're gonna have to do this and that and the other thing that almost always turns off buyers and it just it hurts the marketability of your home don't do that don't tell your listing agent to say this is an as is sale unless the home is in really bad condition and you're pricing it accordingly right cause as soon as you put those words as is in the listing you've just told the entire market whether it's true or not that your home has problems yep you've just told the entire market that your home has problems and additionally you've told them that you're an unreasonable seller that might not be true but you've communicated that you know you might have a spouse a lot of us do that are just like well it's not what you said it was the way you said it it's the same thing right think about it think about it from that perspective like you can say well listen we really don't want to do a ton of repairs okay that's fine but don't put the words as is in there the way you said that just told the market something that you didn't mean to communicate to them you told them this house is in bad condition and if that's not true then then you you're hurting the marketability of your house now if you tell me to put that those words in there I will put them in there right I'll push back I'll tell you why I don't recommend that but if you're just like no we want those words in there I have to obey you as my client that's one of the six things that we have to do in the old car abbreviation obedience is No. 1 in there if you're a realtor you know exactly what I'm talking about there's some other professions out there that use that old car acronym we have to show obedience towards our clients that's an example so don't do it don't do it don't make your don't make your realtor obey you in a way that's going to hurt the marketability of your house that's a bad idea and that's why you hire a realtor that you that you trust that you believe in that you like and that you think has your best interest in mind because they will do that and anything you do that hurts the marketability of your home it's just crushing in a market like this because again you know it's a soft seller's market but there are some pockets around here that are that feel like a buyer's market right for a variety of reasons home values haven't gone up in in certain areas and you know new construction is hurting home values in certain areas so again every even within this market there are little pockets that are even different than some of the things that I'm saying I'm talking like big picture here but long story short you've got to be careful making demands on the market there's not a lot of demands that sellers can make right now that don't turn off buyers so just be careful like yeah the time to get demanding is when you actually get that offer you wanna get an offer first and then you can be demanding in your negotiation that's a much better way as you still have to be careful there that's much better than being demanding or appearing demanding in the listing itself cause you're probably going to limit the number of offers that you get that way so I hope those 10 points were helpful for you guys thank you so much for listening tomorrow I'm going to Columbia South Carolina for another little realtor conference and if you're a realtor listening to this and you're gonna be there well actually this is going by the time this is released I will have already returned from the conference so it's just a little like a one and a half day conference but I'm looking forward to that I'm gonna see some people there that that I know and have good good relationship with so that should be fun I don't know if I'll have anything to tell you guys from that next week but I might we'll see so thank you so much for listening please like rate review subscribe if you need a realtor my contact information is in the show notes we will talk again next time!