Effective marketing that reaches and engages with your listing's best prospects is crucial to selling at the highest price.
In this strong sellers market, even poorly marketed listings are selling quickly. Just because a listing sells quickly doesn't necessarily mean it sold for the highest possible price. To do that, still requires effective marketing that reaches the best prospects and gets them excited about scheduling a showing. Well conceived and carefully executed marketing strategies offer the best opportunity to yield multiple offers. And when buyers compete for your listing, you are much more likely to get the sales price you rightfully deserve.
The following are the four basic steps the father and son team of Mike and Hayden follow to ensure the successful marketing of their listings.
The first step is preparation. Mike and Hayden have learned through the years that there are cost effective ways to prepare their listings for maximum market appeal. They offer their clients the services of a stager/designer. She schedules a time with clients to come to their house for a staging walk-through. Afterwards, she prepares a report with detailed advice on how to stage each room, including furniture placement, decluttering, and possibly some painting and repairs. She has worked exclusively with their clients for years helping them prepare their homes in order to attract as many potential buyers as possible. Her insights have proven to be invaluable to their marketing efforts.
The next step is to have each room in the house professionally photographed. In the digital world we live in today, if buyers don't make an emotional connection with a listing online, they're not as likely to schedule a showing. That's why Hayden and Mike put so much effort into preparing every listing for the photo shoot. That's also why the use only the best professional photographers. In addition, they go to the extra effort of having each listing's exterior photographed at sunset. They track the number of views each house photo receives on their website and the stats demonstrate that potential buyers find the evening photos (see below) to be very compelling.
Next, one of the most important aspects of a successful marketing strategy is making sure to list at the appropriate price. Buyers today, get almost all of their initial exposure to new listings by searching online. They create searches and their criteria, including price range, is very precise. So, if your house is listed at a dollar over the prospective buyer's upper search limit, they won't know your listing is on the market. In the early years of Mike's career, it was common practice to build in a 10% cushion in the list price for room to negotiate. Now it's essential to list a house close to its actual value so that all the best prospects see your listing in their search results. Getting interest from multiple buyers is key to selling at the highest possible price. Hayden and Mike invest significant time researching the pricing of their listings in order to make sure they give their clients the best possible advice.
The fourth step in the marketing process before listings go active is the "Coming Soon" campaign. This phase of the marketing effort utilizes paid online advertising and posts on various social media outlets. Typically, the Wald Group's "Coming Soon" campaigns attract thousands of prospects to their website www.FindThePerfectHouse.com to view photos of each new listing! In addition, there are currently 3,049 registered buyer prospects using their website for their home searches.
It's not uncommon for the Wald Groups' new listings to have dozens of showings the first weekend they hit the market! Almost all of their listings in 2021 received multiple offers. The strongest indication that their marketing strategies are effective: the average sales price for Mike and Hayden's listings last year was $18,000 higher than list price! That average is four times more than the average for all over-the-mountain listings!
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