If you are considering selling your house or condo this year, now is the time to start planning. The MLS is getting new listings every day, and that number will only grow as we move toward the beginning of spring. In a seller’s market like Austin, it may seem that very little prep is necessary to get a house sold. While that is the case for some properties, there are many things to consider when you are getting ready to list and each is important to ensure a smooth listing and selling process. Our goal is to make our clients’ lives easier, and we go the extra mile with consultations, marketing tools, and the latest technology.
The first step in deciding if or when to sell your house is getting an idea of the market value. We provide every seller a complimentary in-home CMA, or comparative market analysis, which shows past sales and current trends. Seeing the property gives us an even better grasp on value because we can take into account any recent upgrades or potentially negative issues, and factor those into the estimation of worth. Once a house is listed, we continue to watch the area every day for any changes, and keep our clients updated with real-time information.
Presentation is extremely important! The in-home consult includes a staging analysis and plan of action. We all have hectic lives with work, kids, and pets, which means that we all have stuff. If the home is occupied by sellers or tenants, there are ways to make the space more inviting for potential buyers. Vacant houses face their own set of challenges. Some properties are going to need to be staged, and that can range from one room to the entire house. For vacant homes we provide staging materials at no extra cost to our clients. That includes moving the furnishings in prior to professional photos, and out prior to closing. We have a variety of items we choose from to make each space look unique and feel inviting. Unlike working with an outside company that will charge by the week or month for use of their materials, all staging costs are included in our listing fee!
Professional photos are an integral part of a solid listing. More than ever, buyers are turning to the internet to seek out homes that they want to see in person, so the listing photos are going to be what puts your house on a buyer’s ‘must see’ list. In the last year or so, technology has gone one step further with 3D tours (check some of them out here!). Virtual tour technology is more than simply a slideshow of the professional photos in the listing; now you can see the entire floor plan of a house from a bird’s eye view and virtually walk through every room before ever seeing it in person. Buyers love this, and so do we! This makes it very likely that when a buyer schedules an appointment to view the property, we are already on their short list. Not many brokerages are using this technology yet, but we see it as an important tool in marketing listings. That’s why we include the cost of photography and the virtual tour in our listing fee.
We harness the power of the internet in every way we can. Each listing gets a dedicated blog post, which we then share across multiple social media platforms. On sites like Facebook and Instagram, we use the post in ads for even further reach. While online marketing is the best way to advertise, even in a saturated market it doesn’t hurt to go a step further. So to cover all our bases we go a little old school and snail-mail postcards to the target area of your property to announce that the listing has hit the market.
There are enough difficult and tedious things in the world, and we think that selling your house shouldn’t be one of them. Fill out this form with basic information about your property, and we'll schedule your no-obligation, complimentary CMA and consult today!
