As a REALTOR®, communicating on a regular basis with the seller is a crucial component of the listing’s success. And, as I have so often found from experience, sellers who have mentally made the transition from “homeowner to home seller” have a much easier time accepting advice and feedback from their real estate agent realizing it as a means to an end: the sale of their home.

Such was the case for one of my listings (before and after pictures, below), a truly beautiful single family home that I sold back in early February, recently featured in the May, 2009 edition of REALTOR.org “Best Room Makeovers”.

Painted in a South-West Adobe orange color motif, many buyers just found the family room too loud for their tastes.

The seller originally gave me resistance about changing the color, but after reading the feedback I was sending him from buyers, he finally realized the family room needed to be re-painted. Continue reading this post

HomeGain, the first website to offer free instant home valuations, just released instant home values and home sale maximizer widgets for free download.

There are three different versions of each of the Instant Home Valuation and Home Sale Maximizer widgets. (pictured below)

These widgets work best for HomeGain AgentView members. If you have a HomeGain AgentView membership and place one of these widgets on your site, when your visitors request a home valuation or to use the Home Sale Maximizer tool in the zip codes where you are featured, they will be sent to your AgentView module where they can review their home valuation or access the Home Sale Maximizer tool.

These widgets are a great way to attract visitors and to get them to come back. Used in conjunction with AgentView it allows AgentView members to keep their visitors engaged on their sites and on their AgentView sites.

The widgets are also a great addition to any website in need of quality home valuation or home improvement content.

If you are interested in getting these consumer-pleasing widgets for your website, click here.

Try HomeGain’s free instant Home Valuation Tool here

Although, in Shakespeare’s words, “All the world’s a stage,” in the world of theater, a play is rather hard to enact without a stage. It’s been tried over the years, but traditional theatergoers prefer a conventional stage.

And so do homebuyers.

GREAT. Yet another blog on staging, you say. One more appeal to get sellers to pay money they don’t have to sell their home in a market that’s upside down like the Poseidon. Why bother? Haven’t we heard it all?

In the immortal words of Bullwinkle the Moose, “BUT WAIT! There’s more!”

The three pillars of a successful sale are: Preparation, Promotion and Price. Of the three legs, price is without question the most important of the three. Using the Pareto Principle, price actually accounts for 80% of a successful sale. Currently, discount pricing reigns supreme as REOs are flooding into the market like water through the cracked levees of New Orleans. How can a normal seller HOPE to float a normal sale against the incoming surge of lower priced homes?

Believe it or not, there are buyers out there who don’t want an REO.

They aren’t “handi” types. They don’t have the will or desire to “make the house their own.” They can’t “see the potential” and quite frankly, aren’t interested. And not everyone has the Martha Stewart gene for using a twisted fork as a curtain tieback. Many of these buyers are actually willing to pay more to buy a nice house that’s ready to move into.

Scratch most REOs off your list.

This is where an understanding of buyer psychology is critical. Sellers need to realize that

Continue reading this post

We launched a new “what if” feature to our instant home valuation tool earlier this evening. The new feature allows users to receive an instant home value estimate. Once the user gets their estimate they can play “what if” and hypothetically add an extra bedroom, bathroom and/or some extra square footage. After entering the “what if” data the user gets a new home value estimate.

HomeGain’s home valuation tool is part of our AgentView offering that features real estate agent profiles, blogs and listings in an advertising free environment. Continue reading this post

Popular tool becomes part of AgentView

It seems every other day a newspaper reporter or blogger takes note of Home Sale Maximizer.

After getting the value of his home on HomeGain.com, Max finds out which home improvements to make before his home goes on the market, and contacts the featured Realtor to ask questions about his market.

Home Sale Maximizer is an online home improvement tool home on a HomeGain survey of over 2,000 real estate agents.

Home Sale Maximizer helps consumers calculate which home improvements will increase the resale values of their homes.

Last night we integrated Home Sale Maximizer into our popular AgentView product that features Realtor listings, blogs, profiles and other real estate content in an advertising-free environment. Continue reading this post

Karen Breen Elia of RE/MAX Exclusive Properties in Chicago is the special guest in this month’s “Winning Agent Call” on HomeGain Radio, hosted by Peter McCullough. The topic is home staging.

In Karen’s opinion, home staging is on the rise. “The more successful agents are finding that home staging is the key to moving properties, especially for agents in the more competitive markets,” said Karen.

Listen to Karen Breen Elia’s advice to real estate agents on home staging:

On this call, Karen shares how she provides value to her clients, overcomes objections (like personal tastes), and why it’s important to get “commitment” from clients before she begins working with them. Continue reading this post