As we head into the spring one of the big things to start to think about is how you can substantially increase the number of listings that you’re holding. To do this, it is important to know what brings people to the market place and the sort of knowledge and information they need to make that decision.
It takes about 42 days to sell a home, and about 90 days from the day the signboard goes up to when the vendor moves out. So if people want to be out by December, it means they need to have their property on the market no later than the first week of September.
The number one lead source of most real estate agents we coach is their OFI list. Here you can work with people within the market place that are looking to bring a trade-in home to the market. The challenge for most agents is that they do too many opens in the lower price range where the people who purchase generally have no trade-in or their opening properties that have already been on the market for longer then 30 days.
There’s an old school rule that is sort of known in the real estate industry and it’s called the 7/2/2 rule. If a property has had seven inspections, or two open houses, or two weeks in the marketplace and it doesn’t have an offer, then we should actually have a price reduction. And the reason why that’s critically important is that if the property has a price reduction then it’s more likely to attract buyers.
If you actually want to really boom your numbers, what I’m going to suggest that you do is that we come into the month August spend a lot of time in getting on the phones and get as many people to your open for inspections as possible. If a potential seller walks into an open home and sees a large number of buyers about they then make judgments about what they perceive is actually happening in the market place. It also helps from a buying perspective because the buyer feels a greater level of competition, also known as compression selling, thinking that therefore they may be need to make an offer in order to be able to buy the property and do the transaction.
What I’m going to suggest that you do is that you really start to think of your business as a business. If you do the activities, you should get the results. If you’re not doing the activities you won’t get the results. What I know is that in creating an attraction-based business you want people coming to you.