So you’re thinking about selling your home and you don’t want to waste time and money dealing with realtors. Totally understand. Totally get it. I actually got my license because I wanted to invest in real estate and not have to go through a broker. However, after 15 years in the business, there are some things that I wish I would have known back then. So let’s talk a little bit about the advantages and process of working with experienced brokers versus doing a for sale by owner, and it starts now. I’m Jonathan. This is my lovely wife, Rachel Beasley. We’ve been brokers here for 15 years and sold over 1000 homes to happy clients and our goal is to get you top dollar with the best terms in the shortest amount of time possible. We even wrote a book about it. Hit us up and we’ll give you a copy. So here are the top five advantages to listing with us rather than going it alone and trying to sell your home for sale by owner.
Price Your Home Correctly
So let’s get into it. Yes, I mean, Jonathan, there’s so many things that go into effectively marketing your home for sale. Meanwhile, your life is getting turned upside down, getting yourself and your loved one. Getting yourself and your loved ones ready to pack up and move can be a lot to handle. And I know this for sure, because we just did this and we’re in the business, and it was already stressful enough. So yeah, great way to get some empathy for our active clients, though, just going through this super stressful. So number one, the first advantage of working with us as brokers is pricing perfectly at the top of the market, getting the most you can, but not too high or not too low. So think of it this way. Real estate Just like any other tangible investment trades on market pricing, your home is worth what someone’s willing to pay or how much you can get and procure from a buyer. So the main components that determine somethings value in a free market are supply demand and buyers willingness to pay.
So this all boils down to marketing and a funnel of people that you want competing to purchase your home. If you don’t have real time access to the MLS, it’s almost impossible to aggregate the correct data and pull true comparable sales to put together a pricing analysis for your property. True with for sale by owners. Oftentimes they’re going to Zillow, or worse, they’re going to their neighbors that sold their homes, maybe even like months ago to find out what they sold it for. If you’re able to get around the number that you wanted to sell your home for, it might not be the right number. So as a real estate professional, we dig into the details as we go through all the listings sold in your subdivision, maybe even a quarter or a half mile radius around your home. What they sold for, what the contract terms were. Were there seller concessions were their buyer concessions. We take all these things into consideration when pricing your home. The goal is top dollar with great terms in the least amount of time possible. Yes. The problem with an overpriced home, as always, is you don’t get as many eyes on the property as you should.
You want buyers competing to drive your price up. You want to start so high that it sits around and you have to reduce it. If you have to start dropping your price and you’re not getting showings for weeks or worse months at the time, buyer start to ask questions that you don’t want them to ask. Like, What’s wrong with this home? What do I not know? Why are they dropping the price are they hiding something? Yeah, for sure. And so they start to think there’s something going on with the home that they don’t know. And it it’s very distracting to buyers. So it’s actually what we call a stale listing. So proper pricing is essential to properly market and create competition for your listing.
Selling Your Home By Yourself
The next challenge number two, when you’re selling by yourself and this is just maybe some truth in love, is that you may be emotionally attached and not as objective, and that’s not ideal when you’re trying to market and sell your largest asset. In reality, this is a business transaction, and you stand generally speaking to make a lot of money. So you want to have a clear head and you want to have objectivity involved with the transaction.
And look, it makes total sense. Like one of one house that we owned a few years back, both of our kids learn to ride their bikes in one single day like I can remember it. Our daughter had like a tire swing that she would swing on in the front yard, and I remember we actually, in our minds, started to put price tags on those experiences and on those memories. And it really wasn’t serving us well. We actually ended up having to call a friend of ours to have him double check our numbers because there was just so much emotional attachment on the home. And so that can be a really difficult place to be because you have so much time, energy and love shared in that place that you don’t see it objectively when you go to list and market the home. Our job is to ensure that the home is priced perfectly and that the marketing strategy, not just the list price, is what ensures that you get maximum dollars at closing.
Market Your Home Properly
Yes. So that takes us to number three marketing. It’s a good time to talk about marketing right now because our markets are so hot and homes are selling so quickly, you might think that you can just put a sign in the front yard and maybe put it up on Zillow and be done, maybe tell your neighbors and put a couple of fliers up the local coffee shop. But in this day and age, especially, Hey guys, we’re in 2022, that’s just not enough to sell your home and get it in front of the masses of buyers that are out there right now.
Yeah, you could put it on Zillow, maybe even Redfin by yourself. But here’s the issue 80% of buyers out there, the first home they physically tour is a home they virtually toured online. Think about that 80% start there. So if they go on Zillow and they see your house, maybe you took some iPhone photos and no home tours or anything like that. There is a high likelihood they’re just going to skip it and go to the next one, which probably has professional photos.
Maybe even a professional presentation, a live video tour, 3D tour, professional descriptions with a lot of keywords. This is actually really important to you guys because SEO, also known as search engine optimization, is becoming more and more critical in the home search process. In other words, the search engines and websites connect your home to the right buyers that are looking for exactly the features that your home has to offer. That’s why digital marketing is so important because SEO is becoming very prevalent when marketing so. Yeah, and this is actually our area of specialty. We’re professionals in the arena of digital marketing, and we’re miles ahead of almost all of our competitors in this locale. Well over 90% of the agents in our Hampton Roads market are not putting money into Facebook ads, which is insane. It’s the biggest platform for real estate in the world. They don’t have a YouTube channel, let alone doing YouTube ads.
And their only way to promote your listing online is generally by making a personal post, which is only seen by five friends and their grandmother. So it’s not effective marketing. We also have a full time videography team that puts together a digital story of the home and its amenities in video form, which is again crucial for social media as well as SEO. So in other words, we don’t just throw up ads. We create specific targeted content to appeal to and connect sellers and buyers, Brokerage its what we do. As a matter of fact, that’s probably why you’re watching this video right now, because we’re targeted in our marketing and we found you.
Selling Your Home Can Be Too Stressful
So we will most definitely find the right buyer for your home. Or if you happen to be a buyer, find you the right home. Now, beyond digital marketing, the content, the videography, the social media targeting, we deal with the buyers ourselves. Your time is valuable. You don’t have to get your hands messy. And on the ground level, moving is already super stressful, right? So dealing with the other side of the transaction on a personal level, while they are equally as stressed out as you are, can add a lot of unnecessary headaches for sure.
Knowing how to talk to buyers, knowing which buyers are actually serious, which ones aren’t, who’s wasting your time, who is coming in and out of your home can become overwhelming very quickly. There are also issues on how do you entertain an offer? Do I even have the right paperwork and contract paperwork? Do you know what the legal language actually means? Remember, we will sell your home for top dollar with great terms in the shortest amount of time possible. Yes, and lastly, and probably foremost, this could have been number one. The biggest reason people do FSBO is they think that they’re going to save money, and I totally get the logic. You’re thinking there’s an extra 6% in the transaction If you use a broker. You think you’ll pocket more money by not paying that commission. Here’s the reality you’re jumping over dollars to get to pennies when you think like this. The reality is that there’s a reason that we’ve been so successful for the past 15 years, and it’s because we know how to market and drive prices as high as possible.
Bringing the biggest buyer pool is bar none. The best way to make sure that you sell for top dollar and great terms in the shortest amount of time possible. What’s more is that according to the National Association of Realtors, homes sold on the MLS and marketed properly on average sell for 11% more than homes sold for sale by owner. So there’s some things to think about. As always, we’re Jonathan and Rachel Beasley, professionals in real estate and passionate about people. Hope to get to work with you soon. Four Wheler accident.