COMING SOONS This happens to me quite frequently. I’ll meet with a potential seller, we come to an agreement that we’ll work together to sell their house, do the paperwork, and set a date to go on the market. Then just as I’m leaving they’ll say, “...and you’ll put up a ‘Coming Soon’ sign, right?” They are surprised when I tell them I don’t recommend that strategy, and here is why. Let’s say we’ve decided to list their home at $450,000, and I put up a coming soon sign, but we aren’t going to go on the open market until next week. Someone drives by, sees the sign, calls me up, sees the inside of the home and has me write up an offer for $450,000. “What’s so bad about that?” you say. Shouldn’t I be happy? I make more commission, seller gets the price they wanted, everyone is happy, right? Wrong. The house didn’t go on the MLS, it didn’t get on my website, didn’t get on the other real estate websites, etc. We don’t know if someone else would have offered more money and/or better terms because it wasn’t EXPOSED. I’m much rather we had waited, exposed it to the market, and odds are, this buyer would have still been there and they still would have offered their $450,000. Then after we know it’s been fully exposed, if that offer is the “best” one, great, they can accept it and we know we did the best we could. But too many times I’ve seen homes sell quickly before they get exposed to the market, and you hear of some buyer who says, “I would have written an offer on that home if I had known about it!” I bring this up now because the number of sales like this (called “pocket listings”) is soaring, and some of the major real estate web portals are coming out with a way to search for these. As for me, I vote for MORE exposure, not less! I’d prefer everyone that lists their home with an agent instruct their agent to list the home on the MLS so ALL the buyers can see it!
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 21:41:11 +0000
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