How to Get Your Listing Noticed – Part 2
Here is the second part to How to Get Your Listings Noticed – Part 1 – more strategies to assist the real estate investor with setting their properties apart from the crowd and encourage a quicker sale.
3. Use Creative Financing: One of the best ways to offer the home improvements after the sale mentioned in #2 is through an FHA 203K Rehab loan or a USDA Rural Housing Rehab loan. Buyer can finance anywhere from $5,000 to $35,000 on top of the loan amount to pay for improvements. For energy improvement-type repairs, FHA offers an Energy Efficiency program for these repairs too. A good loan officer who knows the ins-and-outs of these programs can help you strategize listing offers that will appeal to buyers.
4. Sell the Payment – Not the Price: Again, your loan officer can be invaluable to you here. Buyers get intimidated by prices of homes. $150,000 sounds like a whole lot of money, whereas $1200 a month can seem much more manageable. Check out the temporary or permanent rate buy-down options available to you. “Seller will reduce your first year’s payment to only $1050 a month AND pay all your closing costs too!”
In your “call for more details” disclaimer – direct them to your loan officer with the questions and REQUIRE that the financing be done by him/her to get the special deal. As soon as you say “pay all your closing costs” and you allow ANY loan officer to do the loan – figure the costs will probably double or triple. If they want the special deal, they can use your loan officer (again, builders do this all the time) and you can retain control of the transaction.
Do These 4 Strategies Work?
It depends on what you mean by “Do they work?” If you try these strategies and the home doesn’t sell right away, does that mean the strategy failed? Not necessarily. Yes, it would be nice if the free bottle of wine or the offer to throw in a new fence was able to close the deal from the get-go, but that is not what the strategy is intended to do.
These four strategies can only help you get the home noticed by potential buyers. They cannot sell the home for you. Nobody is going to buy the home because you give them a bottle of wine or free tickets to a hot concert. But it’s possible that someone who likes wine or concerts will become interested in buying your home – and they maybe wouldn’t have ever considered your home unless you had offered the giveaway.
If you try using these strategies, the measure of its success or failure is: Did more people notice the home? If your open house was better attended because you offered free pony rides for the kids – then that was a success. Just because the home didn’t sell doesn’t make it less of a success.
Why Do People Buy?
Someone will buy your home when they believe your home offers them the best value for their money, based on their individual needs. You cannot dictate what their needs are – that is beyond your control. The only things you can control as a seller is making sure your home’s offering is competitive with other offerings in your area AND reaching out to as many potential buyers as possible.
Again, the more potential buyers you can get to consider your home, the better your chances are. And then it will be up to the buyer to determine if your home meets their needs. Your pricing and the condition of your home will play a big role in their decision, but they wouldn’t ever have that decision to make if they had never considered your home in the first place.
Get them to consider it – that’s the ONLY way to have a shot at selling them your home.
Glenn Leach is a mortgage loan officer in Puyallup, Washington. You can read more articles and ideas at www.credittothewise.com.
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Tags: home listings, how to sell a house, Investment Property, Real Estate Investment
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