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Competition is Everywhere
Yes I guess you could say I have plenty of competition out there but the point of this post is to get sellers to think about their competition. One thing I like to do is take my sellers out for some house hunting so they can see what the competition looks like. For sellers it really is about beating the competition. If the house down the street is in better condition or has a lower price it will sell first, but not fast enough. It will stay on the market for a time and get traffic while the house down the street gets no showings. Buyers are comparison shopping, and looking for a bargain and scared to death that they will spend too much, in fact some are so afraid that they would rather live in mom and dads basement for a few years just in case.
Condition is important too. If the competition has an updated kitchen and new hardwood floors then your home needs to have the same or be put on the market at a lower price.
Sellers should consider going to a few open houses before they put their home on the market, and grab some flyers and search the internet and scope out the competition. Sellers can also find out how much homes actually sold for if they were listed on the MLS and sold in the past two years.
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Hi T!
Even amongst a sea of signs, you manage to find a way to stand out.
Rudy
Rudy - my friends at the sign company were very good to me. :) Love the red in those signs too.
Walking away is becoming socially acceptable.
The tax forgiveness that has been passed for short sales and foreclosures is giving people an even greater incentive to leave.
Amazingly, no one thought of this. In this downturn, people are behaving exactly the opposite of previous downturns. They are dumping the house and paying off credit cards.
The flawed assumptions that brought us to this point are:
1) Real estate only goes up
2) People will do anything to save their house
3) Downpayments no longer matter
What the entire brilliant team of mortgage and banking idiots DIDN'T REALIZE, is that in the past, when downpayments were required, EVERYONE HAD EQUITY.
People fight to save their equity, not their house. If you are upside down on the house, you are not an owner, you are worse off than a renter. Because now you have a 30-year lease. Talk about "throwing money away".
Replace the (dot) in the url below, it will take you to a CNN money article on the topic of walk-aways.
tinyurl(dot)com/ytat24
That's a really fascinating point... If you're willing to accept ruined credit and have no appreciable equity in your home, why not walk away? It may indeed be cheaper. I wonder if the economist thought about this!?!?
Actually, on that note, I think the academic study of credit economics, particularly the psychology of consumer credit, is really underdeveloped. Credit--and perception of credit--are central to the consumer economy in new ways. Have economists taken this into account?
Your advice is excellent. I really wish we had been more serious about checking out the competition before selling our last house.
If we had been priced more realistically from the get-go, we might have sold right away, before the downturn began. Instead we made many improvements AND lowered the price, and it still took eight months to sell.
Hey Teresa... how about putting your face on your sign? Have you thought of that?
Or, maybe even a logo that represents "you" & your company within a company?
Lovely photo!
Lance - ah yes the face thing. I sell houses. I would put a picture of a house on my sign but never my face. You see it is not at all about me. I like the picture too. Those red signs do look nice. :) I need to buy more though . . :)
i really like that bold red sign you have - that's a beautiful color, and an eye catcher.
Teresa-
Your signpost appears to be throwing a shadow on the tree behind it. Looks like a cross.
Is that a subliminal message meant to imply your angelic characteristics?
;-)
PB
PB - funny. I often take pictures and find things in them that I did not notice when I took them. This is just such a case, I saw the crosses when I wrote the post. I guess you can read anything into it that you want to. Maybe it is a "sign" that they will sell. :)