5 Things That Will NOT Sell Your Atlanta Georgia Home
5 Things That Will NOT Sell Your Atlanta Georgia Home
Advertise in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution Newspaper. You already knew this and just did not want to verbalize it. In the past decade the newspaper has transitioned from a dominant advertising outlet to a mere second thought. Newspapers could have captured the online market but Craigslist (free listings), Realtor.com (National Association of Realtors supported) and Zillow (hybrid listing of homes – Realtor supported but also free listings from other less dependable sources) filled the online void. I have not looked at AJC.com in a couple of years. I do not ever hear buyers ask about homes they saw on ajc.com much less the actual printed media.
- Sunday Open Houses. I have plenty of sellers who still think this is a marketing task that ought to work. I have zero buyers who think this is the best way to see houses. I do occasionally hold Sunday Open Houses. I usually do it to appease a buyer who just lowered the price of their home to something closer to the market value. Home sellers who are frustrated with the lack of offers on their home (often because they started out at a list price higher than I recommended) want to see some kind of concrete marketing activity. They just don’t understand that buyers no longer shop for homes this way.
Buyers shop on the INTERNET from the comfort of their lazy boy chair. Serious buyers pick out a couple of homes they want to go see. Then they call their real estate agent or the listing agent and set up an appointment at a convenient time for them, and go see the house. Sunday open houses attract a couple of nosy neighbors and not much else. The odds of me meeting a qualified AND motivated buyer at a Sunday Open House are about the same as my winning the Mega Millions lottery.
- Color print Flyers in the house on your coffee table. If a buyer reaches the point where they are actually touring the inside of your home, they have seen gobs of photos online and know more about your home than you do. Most buyers know the age of the home, taxes, bedrooms, baths, how much the seller owes on their mortgage etc. Color flyers on a dining room table look nice and remind the seller, every time they walk by, that their home is being marketed by a pro. Disclaimer: I still use color flyers but I also use QR codes which buyers can scan with their smart phones and go direct to the house listing on my web page. They can store this address to come back to later and review the home. Oh, and they can look at the 25 professional photos I have posted of the home and not worry about juggling a camera of their own, or clogging up their phone memory with a bunch of house photos.
- Directional Signage. Serious home buyers, the kind that pay full price when they find a home they like, have seen your home on the INTERNET and then plotted the location on Google maps. They don’t need a bunch of directional signs to find your house.
- What your cousin did to sell her house 5 years ago. Real estate professionals constantly monitor the market and stay ahead of the technology curve. The market changes daily. Find a successful Realtor and trust them to do the marketing tasks that will result in a motivated home buyer finding your home and making a realistic offer to purchase it. Realtors work on commission and they do not get paid until a home sales and closes. If they thought something would result in the sale of your home, they would do it. After all – you have mutual goals. Realtors do not get paid for anything other than results. If you have something you want to try – go for it. If you want to sell your home in the shortest amount of time for the most money-trust your Realtor. If your cousin has a better way to sell the home, then we are all ears….just don’t expect us to go back to horse and buggy days of marketing.
