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• Endowment Effect: Your view of what to keep and what to get rid of before putting your house on the market could be skewed. Your taste is not everyone’s taste. Get a professional opinion about how to prepare.

Points to Remember

• You are selling a house, not your home. Get rid of personal photos and knick knacks around the house. They’re a turn off to buyers. • Consider working with a home stager. They understand what buyers are looking for and can prepare your house accordingly. • Buyers make snap decisions and first impressions rule, so your house must be sparkling clean both inside and out. Consider professional cleaning and landscaping services. • There is rarely a point to doing any remodeling in order to put your house on the market. You’ll almost never recoup your investment! • A home inspection will indicate anything that needs attention or repair. Paying for an inspection as the seller can put you in front of the train and ultimately pays off by potentially eliminating a second round of negotiations.

Chapter Nineteen:

Look at me! Look at me!

“Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.” – SH Britt

Once you’re confident about the price you’re going to ask for your house, and you’ve had it inspected, repaired, cleaned, staged and polished, you’re ready to tell the market all about your place. It’s time to promote your commodity to the world. Promotion generally falls into one of two categories: marketing and prospecting.

Key Point: Since you’re looking for the most money in the least time, you’ll need to do both marketing and prospecting. The amount you get for your house is, in a large part, determined by both the quantity of people who find your house and the quality of what they find out about your house.

Marketing Your House

The marketing aspect includes placing it on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), which in turn will have it show up on the major public-facing websites like Zillow, Redfin, and the rest of the gang.

It also includes putting up fliers, placing a sign in the yard, and online advertising on social media sites like Facebook. I recommend that you do all these things. For the reasons I explain below, I won’t be bothering with a deep dive into various marketing strategies. I will, however, point out some mental shortcuts and otherwise overlooked aspects about promoting your house.

If you’ve already hired a real estate agent to handle the sale for you – and you hired them based on their track record of selling homes for more money in less time – they’ll have their own successful marketing approach and will handle all of this for you.

How can you be sure their marketing approach and strategy are successful? You’ve already uncovered that based on their track record! If they sell homes for more money in less time, whatever they do is working. Steve Jobs used to say he hired brilliant people and then let them work. He was pretty good at that whole CEO thing. You might want to take his advice.

As mentioned earlier, one of the most useless comparisons you can attempt to make, as a way of determining if a given agent is more likely to sell your house, is to compare marketing strategies. How would you know a good plan or strategy one from a bad one? It’s pure Representativeness at play. You’re going to prefer the one that most mimics the idea you have in mind of a successful marketing campaign. Without seeing their track record of sales, compared to local averages, it’s meaningless, and after seeing their track record, it’s sort of pointless.

I don’t care how much you think their being “familiar” with your neighborhood is important, or how much you love the idea that they have a kiosk at a local mall. If they underperform, then those are things the market doesn’t care about. It’s that simple.

That said, there are a few things to know about marketing a property, especially if you are going it alone. (BTW: If you go it alone, then interviewing top agents and asking about their

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marketing strategies so you can copy them is brilliant, and since all good agents have a servant’s heart, they should be happy to share with you anything you might want to know. I’m not being facetious – good agents are in business to build relationships and are happy to share their ideas.)

The most obvious place to market your home is your local Multiple Listing Service (known as the MLS). Every major market has some version of one. It’s a collection of all available homes for sale by the real estate agents of a given geographic region. It’s from this collection of listings that Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, and the like, get the homes they show to consumers.

Do I have to explain the significance of having your home seen on these sites? Ninety-five percent of all home buyers in the country say they first saw the home they bought online. Getting your home on the MLS is not an option. Failure to do so is to guarantee you won’t get the best price in the least time.

A common complaint from people about bad real estate agents goes something like, “All my last agent did was to put a sign in my yard and put it on the MLS. Why should I give them three percent of the sale for that?” As complaints go, this one makes a strong point. If that’s all they do, they aren’t worth three percent! You could do this yourself, and in very strong seller’s markets, it’s an option worth exploring. Yet, if you can find an agent with a track record of getting more than three percent over average prices, why should you bother doing any of the work yourself?

What else can someone do besides the MLS to promote their house for sale? How about Facebook? I hear it’s going to be huge with the kids.

Facebook is, right now, the single most effective, targeted, advertising platform available. Have a house near a major local employer? Do you know you can target ads to employees of that company? Is your house near a golf course? How about targeting people with golf as an interest? If you’re looking to handle your

house sale yourself, learn Facebook. There are more books and courses written on how to do this than I can mention, and the tech is changing with such speed that, if I bothered to go into more detail, it would be out dated by the time you read it here. Jot yourself a note to learn about it if you are going the For Sale By Owner route, as it is a great arrow to have in your marketing quiver.

The marketing you can avoid is any sort of print media. Buyers are not looking at print when they want to buy. Consider your own habits when you’re shopping. Chances are excellent you’re not looking at the newspaper for anything other than coupons (if even that).

When you see real estate ads in print media, those are placed by real estate agencies to attract your attention as a seller, not to attract buyers! They’re playing into the Availability Heuristic and want you to think, “Wow, look at all their listings. They must be good. Let’s use them when I want to sell.” It’s one way Realtors try to stay on the “top of mind.” As far as promoting your house for sale, it’s a waste of money.

Side Note: Advertising your house online, which is mandatory, requires photographs (duh) and, if you are using Facebook, video. Again, if you’ve hired an agent with a great track record, this is not something you need worry about as they’ll be handling it. But if you are going on your own, spend the money needed on a good photographer. You can ask Realtor friends who they use, look at portfolios online, search the MLS for photos you like and call those agents to get the name of the photographer; any way you do it is fine. But don’t cut corners here. Nothing will make your house sit on the market, unsold, quite like bad photos.

If you want a good laugh, Google “bad MLS photos.” If it hasn’t been obvious before, it will be obvious after you see these; not all Realtors are created equal.

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Prospecting

Prospecting is very different from marketing. When you’re marketing, you’re sending out the message that your house is for sale and waiting for a response to come in. On the other hand, when you’re prospecting, you’re reaching out to potential buyers either by phone or in person. You are striking up a specific conversation, one on one: “Hey, this house is on the market. Are you interested in buying it or do you know anyone who might be?”

Marketing is a passive approach, and prospecting is a very active one. If you want to sell your house for the most money in the least amount of time, prospecting is a must!

I realize people generally hate prospecting. It’s seems so salesy, so pushy. For the most part, people don’t like talking to strangers; I know I don’t. But if you’re committed to selling a commodity in a crowded marketplace, you might want to suck it up and do what works.

Every person on my team spends 15 to 20 hours every week prospecting for buyers for our clients’ properties. This includes calling on the phone and knocking on the doors of the neighbors to see if they know anyone who might be interested in living in the neighborhood. We usually target about 100 neighbors to door knock and about 1,000 to call.

You’re no longer only stating that your house is on the market; you’re now asking for interest. If you don’t have the time or desire to prospect, I understand, but you aren’t going to get the most money in the least amount of time. That’s the trade-off.

Not every Realtor does a lot of active prospecting, but I’m willing to bet if you find one who sells homes for more than average, they do. This is not a real estate thing. This is a life thing – if you don’t do all the work you can possibly do, especially the work you don’t like, you don’t get to expect all the results. Find an agent who gets better results and I bet you find someone who does the work others don’t.

Key Point: If you choose to sell your house on your own, and you want to get the most money in the least time, then you’ll need to handle all the promotion yourself. Remember, you are the CEO. If you don’t want to pay a salesperson, then you need to do that job yourself. Sales is a function of what you say, how you say it, and how many of the right people you say it to. You have a commodity to sell. You need to tell people about it. The more you tell, the better.

Last thoughts on the “For Sale By Owner” (FSBO) route as they pertain to marketing. As the CEO of a company that isn’t hiring a salesperson, you need to manage the way the market perceives you.

There’s a chance the market will see you taking on the challenge without a professional as a form of boot strapping. A sort of hard nose, pioneer, gritty, maybe even inspiring type of approach. If you effectively manage the story of why you’re going it alone, you can turn it into a positive.

But most don’t manage the story because most don’t grasp that they’re the CEO of a company selling a commodity in a crowded marketplace. Most people heading into the world of selling their properties do so with all the professionalism of running a yard sale. Literally. They use the same, red and white, $3.99 sign from Lowes that, instead of announcing a “YARD SALE” happens to say, “HOME FOR SALE BY OWNER.”

This is a bad look.

Think about what this communicates: Why do people go to yard sales? Do they go to pay full retail price? Do they go for the safety of knowing that if, perchance, their purchase is not exactly what they thought, they’d have a solid legal recourse? Do they go for the extraordinary professionalism? No? But, then why do they go?

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