When I was preparing to get my real estate licence, I have to admit that I was pretty sceptical about what a real estate agent does to deserve their service fee. That is until I went through more than 120 hours of training, role plays and real life experience of managing properties for sale.
Here is everything a good real estate agent has to do when selling a property.
- Market price: Determine the market price of your property. This is a key step because if the price is too low, people will get suspicious, and if it is too high, it will not gather any interest from buyers.
- Prepare the Property: Make sure the property is clean, tidy and ready to shoot.
- Professional photography: Take professional pictures and videos. These include shooting the house inside out, taking aerial footage of the property using a drone and even preparing a virtual tour of the property. You might think this is an overkill and that you don’t need to do all this to sell your property, but if your aim is to sell at an optimal price and in a short time, it is ımportant to stand out from the competition and show your property in the best most accurate way possible.
- Prepare and distribute the footage: Edit the footage you took and distribute it to all the necessary plateforms. Nowadays it is not enough to post a listing on one real estate website then sit back and wait. You have to use all the listing websites available, but also use social media. This will make your property stand out from the competition and get more visibility.
- Networking: Talking about visibility, it is best if you could reach out to as many real estate agents as possible. I know you don’t want an agent to sell your house, but most buyers go through an agent to find a house to buy. So reaching as many agents as possible can boost your chances of finding the right buyer to your property.
- Posters: Design, print and hang a poster about the sale of your house. You might think this is outdated, but experience has showed that the calls coming from people who walk buy have more chance of ending in a sale than all other means of marketing.
- Flyers: Design, print and distribute flyers about your property. Even in cases you cannot hang a poster, this method is highly efficient. You have a higher chance of selling your property to someone who lives in the neighborhood and knows it well.
- Answer all enquieries that you get, possibly within 15 minutes from getting the message or the phone call (the 15 minutes rule is sacred in the industry, we have to be always on call!!)
- Poker face: Prepare your poker face for all the comments and criticism you might hear when buyers are touring your property. Buying a home is one of the biggest financial decisions a person has to make in their lifetime. It is naturally a highly emotional process, so a buyer will be looking to match the house they see with the image they have in their mind. Equally, as a seller, the house holds emotional value, and seeing a foreign person tour it, comment on it and plan to paint a wall here and a build a shelf there might not be easy to hear and see. That is why it is important to hold back your emotions when showing your home.
- Repeat the steps 4 to 9 as many times as possible during the weeks or months that lead to the sale of your house.
- Adminstrative procedures: Finally, prepare the contract and review and negociate its conditions with the buyer. Then go through the administrative steps to finalize the deed transfer.
Do you have to do absolutely all of the above to sell your house? Maybe you will get lucky and sell your property to a relative who happened to hear about it from you. No Money or time spent. And I am not sure how much you would want to rely on luck.
From my experience, agents who applyed all the methods above are certain to make a sale in a short time (shorter than the industry average at any given season).
As you can see, the process is not something a regular person cannot manage. If it were, there wouldn’t be so many real estate agents out there, me included!
But it is definitly a long process that needs a serious investment in money, time and energy upfront, as well as a whole lot of patience. And these are all things a good real estate agent will know how to use to your best advantage.