The Importance of Photos, Presentation, and Pricing
PHOTOS
“I was impressed with Maven Real Estate’s intuitiveness to effectively use social media to advertise our home, as well as displaying our home successfully by paying close attention to detail regarding the interior and exterior photos during the listing process.”
Over 90% of buyers begin their search online. When someone takes the time to schedule a showing on your home, it is really the second showing; their first showing was online. Great photos grab people’s attention. And bad photos drive them away.
Look at the difference photos make:
Which of these two houses are you more likely to set up a showing to see in person?
For more examples of before and after shots, click here.
Same house,
almost identical staging,
but the difference
the photography makes
is DRAMATIC!
The Power of Photos
Professional photos show your home in the best possible light. If your photos don’t vividly display your home, people will simply move on to view the next home and forget about yours. But if your photos are beautiful and display everything that makes your home valuable, buyers will want to come see your home in person, which brings them that much closer to buying your home!
Do your photos look like this?
Here are a few examples of the types of photos that are often used to advertise properties:
When they should look like this:
Here are some examples of our clients' actual listing photos:
Beyond the quality, there are two other points to consider about photos online:
1) PHOTO COUNT: You are able to include up to 36 photos on the listing of your home within the Oklahoma City Metro MLS. Unfortunately, some listings include as few as 1 photo to represent and depict the property online. You should take advantage of displaying as many key features of your home as possible by increasing the number of photographs included in the listing. By doing so, you will boost the confidence of prospective buyers that they are seeing a complete picture of your home. In addition, your home will be one of the first homes that will be displayed when someone performs a search on Zillow, Trulia, and realtor.com because those websites give priority to listings based upon the number of photographs included.
2) PHOTO ORDER: The order of the photos as they are presented in the listing is also a crucial way to influence how much interest buyers take in your home. Most buyers and their agents will lose interest quickly in your home online. If they don't see the best features in the first few photos, they'll assume it's a mediocre home and move on to view a different property before seeing the real value your home possesses. Think about it. If you have an incredible kitchen with a magnificent island, granite countertops throughout, a backyard with a rustic pergola, and an olympic size pool with stone waterfalls, why should people not be able to view these features until they’ve already seen 20 other photos in your listing? There is incredible value in these areas of your home that likely sets you apart from the rest of the market. But because people often see 3 normal bedrooms, an office that needs some updating, and a dark entryway before they reach the highlights, they stop scrolling through the photos and move away from even considering your property before they get to the best features!
High quality images,
displaying all the features,
and showing them off early
makes buyers take interest.
PRESENTATION
Physical Presentation: The Feeling is Everything
Nothing screams "I don't have enough room in this house!" louder than a crammed office/study/workout room in your photos.
Very few buyers will purchase a home sight-unseen. They come to see it in person because they want to feel your home and see whether they can envision themselves and their families being happy there. It is so important to do everything possible to create a pleasant feeling and experience for buyers viewing your home. Sights, sounds, smells, feeling, and even tastes should all be taken into consideration. The more attention you can give to these details, the more likely the buyers will have a great feeling about your home.
Odd paint colors on the wall only represent work and money that the buyer will have to invest in your property.
Yes, that wall you painted pink for your daughter was perfectly cute for her, but most buyers will only see that room as a project that will cost them time and money in the future. Same goes for those hedges in the front yard that need a bit of trimming. And let’s not forget the sofa that has survived the wear and tear of multiple generations. While it is a reliable, steady, dependable piece of furniture for you, it is not necessarily the most aesthetically pleasing place for a buyer to kick their feet up. Correcting all of the little particulars will be what separates your home from the multitude of other houses on the market, and will lead to you finding a qualified, interested buyer willing to offer you a fair market price.
Kitchen counters should have no more than 3 items on them in the photos. This kitchen looks like it has little to no counter space because there are 11 items. Can you count them all?
Digital Presentation: Getting them in the Door
In our digital age, before most buyers will ever drive by your home or walk through your door they will see it online. Along with having great pictures to showcase your home, your home must be discoverable online. You want prospective buyers that are using Google or other search engines to be able to locate your home easily when they are browsing for properties. Also, you want buyers who are working with agents searching the MLS to be able to find all of the criteria they are searching for that your home fits.
In order to maximize your discoverability by a search engine, you have to write a listing description that matches buyers' searches. The name of the game is buzzwords. To describe your game room, you MUST use additional buzzwords such as "bonus room," "media room," "second living room," and "theater room" as part of your description, since this matches the other terms that buyers will be searching. All of these words describe the same core thing, but buyers looking for that sort of feature are often individually searching for those terms. Employ all of the buzzwords you can to describe the important features of your home and make them searchable: room count, bathrooms, living areas, storm shelters, outbuildings, and everything else a buyer may be searching for!
For your home to be searchable in the MLS, your realtor must be extremely meticulous to check the boxes for all of your home's features. This is because of how agents and their clients typically search the MLS to find a property. If someone is looking for a 3 bedroom house less than $150,000 in Moore with a storm shelter, the agent's search will look like: Bedrooms: 3+, Price: $150,000-, City: Moore, Storm Shelter: Yes. If your agent wasn't careful and didn't check the box for the storm shelter (which happens pretty frequently!), even though you have a picture of your storm shelter and mention it in the description, your home won't appear in this search result! To have the best chance to be discovered by agents with their clients, you must have ALL of your features listed properly in the system.
To be found by agents searching for their clients, all of the features of your home must be listed meticulously like this example above.
Once discovered by buzzwords
and proper listing,
give buyers the right feeling
to sell your home quickly!
PRICING
Pricing a home to sell is not rocket science. The most common question haunting a seller is, “Am I leaving money on the table?” This is just good business. Unfortunately in the current market and amongst a sea of realtors it is difficult to pinpoint someone who will give you the honest analysis of the price of your home. That’s not to say an agent who poorly prices your home is being dishonest, but it is true that many are more interested in listing your home at a price you’re comfortable with than making sure it’s priced appropriately to sell.
“The most common question haunting a seller is, “Am I leaving money on the table?””
Here at Maven, we are interested in selling your home. We look at historical data in your neighborhood and the surrounding area to determine what the market will pay for your property. You can’t pull one over on the market. The only way we know to put it is that the market is omniscient. There are hundreds of buyers examining your price and purchase history, as well as every bit of your competition, all from the comfort of their phone or computer. If your price is not right, buyers will either rule you out before they even see your house, or they will make you an offer that is in line with the market price of your home that you may receive as offensive. There are several different pricing strategies, but they are not all created equal...
"Let's Just Test the Waters"
You may think that its a good idea to start by listing your home for a premium price just to see if there are any buyers in the market that would be interested in paying top dollar. While this seems reasonable at first glance, the reality is that most traffic you will receive on your home when you list it occurs in the first 20-30 days. After that period, most sellers see a significant decline in traffic. If you start by listing your home at a premium price for a few weeks, you actually cut yourself off from most (if not all) of the buyers in the market. Buyers are paying very close attention to market prices; they will recognize if your home is priced at a premium and move on. This relegates the initial marketing of your home to trying to catch whimsical/emotional/irrational buyers that fall in love with the property and have to have it no matter the price. All of the other buyers in the market will rule your home out as overpriced and move on. Worst of all, you'll miss out on an honest look from the bulk of the buyers searching in your price range. Instead of pricing your home too high at such a critical time in your listing, you would have greater success by pricing your home competitively relative to other homes in the market. This is the most effective strategy for selling your home.
Personal Sense of Value
You might also have a personal conviction that your home should sell for more money than the market indicates. Maybe you were the first owner of the home and you made numerous updates and additions to the home and you are convinced that your home is worth more than all the homes around you. You could be right, we’d have to look at the data to confirm it. The point we want to drive home here is that pricing your home isn’t personal. It is not an attack on your home or your style. It is simply an analysis of the data to predict what a buyer in today's market will pay for your home. Personal value can never replace an honest look at the data.
Pricing In No-Man's Land
Another thing to be mindful of when pricing your home is the fact that some buyers are looking for a project to make their own while others are looking for a turn-key deal that is ready to go when they move in. It is important to decide if you want to market to turn-key buyers or to buyers looking for a project and price it accordingly. Many sellers want to avoid costly repairs but still want to fetch a high dollar for their property. You can't have the best of both worlds, and if you try to price your home this way you will likely end up in a pricing no-man's land with a house that turn-key buyers don't want at a price that's too high for buyers or investors to fix up and make a profit. This is why its crucial to weigh the costs and benefits of either updating your home to make it a turn-key property or deciding to sell your home warts and all.
The Easy Way Out?
Price is probably the most contentious subject realtors and sellers discuss. A common sentiment is that dropping the price of a home is the easy (ie. lazy) way to sell a home. In some cases this is the correct sentiment. The case in which this sentiment is correct is when the home is not presented well to the market whether it is photos, presentation, or the remarks on the home. If a realtor is not willing to exert the necessary effort to present your home well to the marketplace, you should not drop the price. However, if a realtor bends over backwards to present your home well to the marketplace, then you can know that the only variable remaining that is keeping your home from selling is the price. Presenting your home well is the only way to know for sure you are not leaving money on the table.
“Presenting your home well is the only way to know for sure you are not leaving money on the table.”
Listen to the Market
Pricing a home is not a guessing game. The market gives clear directions on what a home should be priced at most of the time. It can be an extremely emotional process that often feels like groping in the dark. We don’t want you to leave money on the table, but we also don’t want to give you wrong expectations since that only leads to frustration and the fracturing of the seller-realtor relationship. We can provide you with the data necessary to determine the proper price of your home and we will do everything in our power to present your home to the market in the best light possible. Honesty and transparency on the data is the key to pricing right and getting your home sold.
Don't fight the market,
Listen to it
and get your home sold.