Read the blog below:
Anthony Lamacchia – July 10, 2018
Hey, everybody. Do you have some grumpy home sellers on your hands? After three, four, five months of homes going on the market and selling immediately one day, two days, the realtor is the hero, everyone loves the realtor. “Oh my God, you’re the greatest realtor ever. Let me write a review.” All of a sudden, inventory is up a bit, homes aren’t selling in five minutes and there are some grumpy, grumpy home sellers out there.
They don’t understand why their neighbor’s house across the street, the house two streets over sold back in the winter in two days and closed last week for 500,000. Their home is on the market for 500,000 and isn’t even getting any showings.
Home sellers don’t know why. Now, I’m going to give you realtor friends a tip on how to deal with this. Works like a charm. We teach our agents how to do this in our company all the time. It is the on Market Snapshot on MLS. What I recommend to you is when you have a seller that says, “But why does that sell for more? Why didn’t my house sell for as much?” I want you to pull that house off the MLS look at the market history, look at the day.
Obviously, it shows the date of listed, the date of pending. The date it went pending. Go into the MLS and go to the on market snapshot from today to the day that house went pending.
Let’s take, for example, Watertown. I just did one example it’s my hometown. I said, “All right, today there’s 11 single families on the market in Watertown. January 10th, there were two.”
Show that to the sellers. Point out to them, “Mr. seller, Mrs. seller, look at the difference. Right now, there’s 11 single families for buyers to choose from. Back on January 10th, there were two. I’ll bet you if I ran this to February 10th, it wouldn’t be much different than two. If it were March 10th, it might be three.” The point is and the point you’re trying to articulate to your sellers by using this data not just verbally, is the difference in the inventory.
Remember, right now, homes are selling in June and July– and when I say selling I mean closing. The closings that are happening are from deals that were negotiated in February and March, or even April, maybe even May, but for the most part, February, March and April. When inventory was substantially lower, the supply of buyers– not supply, the demand of buyers was higher, the supply of homes for sale was lower.
Hence why all of a sudden, why there were a lot of bidding wars. That’s why it’s not happening now, you have to show sellers these reports. If you just verbally tell them, they may not believe it. It is the on Market Snapshot in the MLS. For our national friends, it might not be the exact same name, but I’m willing to bet your MLS has some type of report like this as well.
Use it, use the data, educate your sellers so that they don’t get angry with you, so they understand why a price adjustment might be needed. Why they might need to lower the price or reset their expectations on what they’re going to get. Do that and you will see a big difference in your success at getting through in educating your sellers. Thanks, everybody have a great week.