The myth in real estate is that you can only sell a home if the market is hot. The reality is that it takes a lot of knowledge, skill, and effort to sell the right home to the right buyer, no matter how hot or cold the market is. As a real estate agent, it’s your job to make sure that you have enough of all three to of these characteristics to make regular sales.
While a good salesperson has some inherent characteristics in their personality – they tend to be, but are not always, outgoing, personable, and good with reading others – there are some essential tips that you can learn to help you increase your sales.
When you’re ready to up your sales game, start implementing these ten tips for real estate agents.
10 Tips to Make More Real Estate Sales
1. Make yourself available. It’s a delicate balance when you are in sales and you have a family, too. You need to have a system set up to be available when a buyer or their agent calls. This doesn’t mean you have to answer your phone all hours of the day and night, but you do need to be more available than you aren’t.
When a buyer hears of a property they may be interested in, they want to see it right away before someone else snatches it up. If you can’t get there on their time frame, they may turn to someone who can.
2. Use technology to sell the property. Sure, a beautiful photo at just the right angle is great when you are listing real estate. But it doesn’t have to stop there!
Today’s technology lets you break out the big guns by offering 3D tours, drone footage, videos, and more! There are multiple tools available online now to help you up the interest levels of the property you are trying to sell.
3. Stage the scene. When a potential buyer walks into a home, they are imagining themselves living there. This makes it important for the seller to have a little of their own property visible as possible.
A knowledgeable realtor knows how to set the scene before a buyer walks in the door. With strategically placed artwork, furniture, and accessories, you can convince the buyer that they need that home without saying a word.
4. Work with the seller. The current homeowner needs to understand the impact that they have on whether their home sells or not. If they refuse to budge on price, neglect the upkeep of the home’s exterior, or slack on cleaning and tidying up before a walk-through with a potential buyer, they may not sell their house anytime soon.
On the flip side, they can make a sale happen by keeping a clean home and being flexible with their price.
5. Have a team on hand to help you. Like a contractor hires out professionals to subcontract under them and work together to complete a goal, you should have a set of specific businesses to help you sell the property.
Build a working relationship with a local photographer to come out take listing photos, have a cleaning company on hand to help with the tough jobs or come by before a big walk-through, and work with a landscaping company to make the property look its best on the outside, too. Often, you can split these costs with the seller.
6. Hire a virtual assistant. Yes, you need to be available as much as possible, but a lot of the phone calls you receive could be filtered through an assistant. The money you spend on an employee will more than pay for itself with the added time you now have with your family or to follow up on leads.
7. Make sure the price is right. Many sellers have the thinking process that if they price their property high, they can come down on it for the right buyer. The problem with this train of thought is that the wrong price can put the property in the wrong listing category.
A house priced too low is going to show up in listings as a great deal, but then the seller won’t get what they should have for the property. A house priced too high is going to show up in the higher priced homes and people who are looking for that kind of house probably won’t look at those listings.
When the price is just right, everyone knows what they are getting into and they are happy with the deal, making a faster, more efficient sale. To get the right price for your client’s neighborhood, you’ll need to do a bit of research. For an example of this strategy done right and more real estate tips and news, view here.
8. Talk to your clients about their availability, too. In addition to keeping the property clean and being flexible with their price, they also need to know that they are going to have to be open to showing their home at times that may be outside of their comfort zone. Many buyers want to look at houses after work and on the weekends, and the seller needs to make the home available during those times.
9. Be upfront with any issues. It may seem like backward thinking, but if you are honest with a potential buyer about the flaws in the home, they will know what they are getting into before they place a bid. If they want the home enough to make an offer, flaws and all, they are less likely to back out later.
10. You never get a second chance to make a first impression. Take the time and effort to make the front of the home look approachable. It’s the first impression a buyer will get of their potential new home, so you want to make them feel welcome and positive from the beginning.
Up Your Sales With These Easy Tips Some of them seem like they should be common sense, while others are excellent sales strategies that dig deep into the understanding of how people think. They’re all great techniques that successful real estate agents use, though, and you can start incorporating all of them today.