The agent has your number. The most meaningful feedback is HOW MANY showings and offers you are getting.
In DFW, Houston, San Antonio, Central Texas and McAllen, feedback can easily be obtained with the automated email system set up through Centralized Showing Service (CSS). As sellers soon realize, the value of the information gained from the feedback responses is limited.
The most meaningful feedback is the amount of showings and offers you are getting.”
In non-CSS areas, calling to obtain feedback from agents who have shown your home is another thing that many listing agents do that is a waste of your time. Sellers whose homes are overpriced are the most likely to obsess over getting feedback. They are typically looking for answers about why their home isn’t selling (which is the price).
Why 6% listing agents like to call showing agents for feedback:
– The listing agent hopes their client will get the impression something is being done to help justify the 6% commission.
– Early in their career, the agent was taught that’s what listing agents are supposed to do.
– It gives lonely agents someone to talk to.
– It gives bored agents something to do.
What sellers are hoping a call for feedback will accomplish, but never actually happens:
– It gives them an opportunity to point out things the showing agent and buyer have missed, which causes the buyers to become more interested.
– Some misunderstanding comes to light and the buyer does an about face and makes an offer.
***Deciding factors don’t get “missed” by buyers. If they DO get missed, it’s because those buyers weren’t that interested anyway. If the listing and description are done properly, nothing that makes a difference will get missed.***
The actual result of sellers calling buyers’ agents for feedback:
– Occasionally, it simply satisfies the curiosity of the seller.
– Most often, it just confuses the seller and yields no new information.
– The agent doesn’t remember the property, so they just say something nice.
– The agent overly compliments the property and avoids mentioning any negatives to hide their actual intent.
– The agent gets annoyed and calls us to find out why the seller is calling for feedback.
– They happen to be one of those agents who doesn’t want to deal directly with sellers and avoids showing the property in the future.
Why buyer’s agents will say the house is beautiful and priced well–even if it isn’t:
The logic is that any seller may be in the market for a new agent at some point. If the seller believes the home is priced right, then it must be their agent’s fault that the property isn’t selling.
If that was true, the simple solution would be to get a new agent like one who apparently shares the seller’s views about the quality and price of their house.
Unfortunately, if it’s the same property in the same MLS at the same price, the property doesn’t sell with the new agent either. The new agent then has to talk to the seller about reducing the price.
Feedback doesn’t help sell an overpriced property
In our pricing guide, we discuss the realities of pricing your home. Very simply, if your home isn’t selling, it’s not priced correctly. Often times, sellers seek an agent’s confirmation that the home is priced appropriately. No matter what an agent might tell you, if you’re not seeing showings and offers, the home is overpriced.
No amount of buyer agent feedback will sell an overpriced house.”
Other real estate “marketing” that rarely works:
Newspaper ads (including online classifieds)
Newspaper ads can get expensive and sellers who are not interested in owner financing will have to weed out unqualified buyers. The majority of homes sold with newspaper ads are by professional investors. Newspaper classified ad columns tend to be filled with investor ads with headings like “$0 down“, “Owner financing“, “Lease Option“, “Bad credit ok“, “$3000 down, $900/mo.“, etc.
Investors typically inflate the home prices and give the buyer/tenant (who can’t qualify for a loan) a lease option. Credit challenged buyers gravitate towards newspapers because they can’t qualify for a typical loan that would be required for MLS listed homes. Other time wasters that will respond to newspaper ads are investors looking for bargains, and real estate agents prospecting for listings.
Open house
The value of holding an open house is vastly over-rated. The first people to go to an open house are the neighbors who are thinking about listing their house, and the real estate agents want to meet them in the hope of getting another listing. Buyers who go to open houses have typically just started looking. Serious buyers would have seen the yard sign and called the phone number anyway.
Real estate agents like to meet prospective buyers who may be in the market to buy at some point in the future. Holding an open house is also a great way for real estate agents to give their clients the impression that they are actively marketing the home when they are actually just promoting their own business.
***If you are convinced that holding an open house will make a difference, you can do it yourself. It can’t hurt, and it doesn’t require any special knowledge.***
Free Real Estate Magazines
Commonly found on racks in supermarkets and convenience stores, these publications exist to either promote a real estate company or sell advertising. They contain very little useful information for buyers and due to the time lag between printing to actually being picked up and read (minimum 6 weeks), properly priced listings are usually off of the market before they are even seen in one of these “publications.”
FSBO Websites
For-Sale-By-Owner websites get an insignificant amount of traffic from buyers. Buyers who do take a look get discouraged quickly by the limited selection and from the lack of a response from sellers when they try to make contact. Many of the ads are outdated and the homes are off the market, so sellers often don’t respond.
Spam
A very unproductive method some agents like to tell their clients about (as though it had value) is mass emails to agents informing them of a house for sale. Agents have access to MLS, and don’t need to be spammed with such information–it’s just an annoyance.
The first thing the typical agent does when checking emails is delete the “House for sale” spam emails from other agents. Many agents mark the sender as a spammer in their email program, causing any legitimate future emails from the spamming agent to go directly into their trash.
Miscellaneous
There are various things real estate agents will tell potential listing clients to sell them on a listing. Some of these things sound good, but accomplish nothing more than promote the real estate company.
Example: “We’ll send out 300 mail pieces to all the homes in your neighborhood!”
This is a way for the real estate company to advertise their company and generate listings. Neighbors are more likely to become sellers than buyers, and if a neighbor were interested in buying your home, the yard sign would be enough to let them know about it.
A Virtual Tour is available at a slight additional charge. We create a link in the Realtor.com listing that looks like a little red house that takes the buyer to the Virtual Tour. If your home is less than 4,000 square feet, the still photos are sufficient and we wouldn’t recommend a Virtual Tour.
