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

In this edition of HomeGain’s Winning Agent Calls, Janelle and Eric Boyenga of Intero Real Estate in Silicon Valley, California, reveal the do’s and don’ts of building a successful real estate team.

The Boyenga Team’s accomplishments include: over 12 years experience in real estate; recipients of the Intero President’s Circle, being ranked in the top 2% of Realtors in their agency since 2004; sold over $100 million dollars in home sales; named in the top 5% of Realtors in their county by San Jose Magazine; certified home staging professionals; have closed double digits in home sales with HomeGain.

Listen to this month’s featured Winning Agent Call, hosted by Peter McCullough:

Highlights:

Continue reading this post

HomeGain recently rolled out its March/April issue of the Agent Success Newsletter.

The newsletter included:

• Feature Story, which announced results from HomeGain’s recent home values survey.
• Question of the Month — “I recently met with a seller I found through your AgentEvaluator program who told me they received 12 proposals from agents in my area but decided to go with mine. I’ve just listed their home, but am a bit concerned about my effectiveness going forward. Should I be worried?”
• News about HomeGain’s Instant Home Values and Home Sale Maximizer™ widgets that are now available for FREE download.
• An Awards section, where we congratulated the newest AgentEvaluator Platinum Club, Gold Club and Silver Club members. 
• Agent Quote of the Month from Ron Petzel — “I have been in close contact with Nick Di Tomasso and Ryan Monsanto. Your company is one of the BEST. I have offered to talk to anyone you put in front of me or by phone to tell them what HomeGain has done for me and my Team.”
• Announcement of February’s Customer Advocate of the Month, Da’Mali Ross in the Product Team. “Da’Mali is the sole point of contact for all AIMS agents, and for each of them she takes care of all operations, setup, customer service, billing and tracking issues. She sets an example for what it means to put the customer first,” commented Salvatore Giammaressi, VP of Product at HomeGain.
  

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Read past real estate newsletters

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

After writing a post on a topic, simply add a section called “Related Posts” or something similar to direct your readers to other posts on the topic. Then list the titles of all the related posts with links to those posts. This will encourage readers to click these older posts and learn more about the topic and your expertise.

BLOG TIP: While it is a common practice to add the links to related posts at the end of a post, there is nothing preventing you from doing so within the body of the post. For example, if you mention home staging in a post on preparing a home for sale, you can say “See this post on how to stage a home” and link to that older post.

BLOG TIP: Review your older posts and edit them to add links to more recent posts. This way both old and new posts are tied together. If a reader’s search brings them to either post, they can see the link to the other and click it. Visually tying your posts together also helps the reader stay on your blog.

Blogging Tip snippet courtesy of the HomeGain Blog Professor, Joseph Ferrara. To read the full article and receive the weekly real estate blogging newsletters, sign up for AgentView and the HomeGain Blogging School.

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