THE INSIDER SECRETS TO GETTING YOUR HOME SOLD!

Selling a home today is NOT the same as it “USED” to be!

98% of people are searching the Internet before they even start booking appointments to see homes or view communities.  So, just putting out the “FOR SALE” sign, or sending postcards to the neighborhood, or just putting the listing in the MLS is NOT enough for selling a home today!  These marketing methods are sometimes effective, yet, so many real estate agents still try to sell homes this way as their primary method.

Mass marketing using print marketing is useful to brand the agents and the broker doing the traditional mass marketing, but as much money as is spent doing print marketing, magazine advertising, newspaper advertising, a very small percentage of homes are ever sold using print mass marketing. 

So, how do you get past the old methods that do not work and get on with the new methods that do work?

Let’s summarize this with the 4 P’s of Marketing that I learned while getting my Master’s Degree in Marketing many years ago.  No matter what product or service you are marketing, you have the 4 P ‘s:  Product, Pricing, Placing and Promotion.  These principles still apply today, yet the technology is the NEW SECRET! 

1. Product – YOUR HOME – Preparation of your home is key to getting your home sold, not just listed. When viewing your home, you have to take the OWNER’S lenses off and put on the lenses of the BUYER.  As much as we love our “things”, most buyers do not love our things.  So, staging your home to sell is crucial to getting your home sold.  The Westerfield Group are professional counselors and use professions certified stagers to ensure your home is presented in the very best condition as possible. These are stagers that do not charge an arm and a leg like many professional staging companies, but we work with stagers who are a fraction of the price of most stagers.

Here is a recent example:

A recent client had their home listed for over a year with another real estate company, heard about us, and listed with us. We advised the client to let it stay off the market for 30 days so the listing will look fresh when it goes live in 30 days.  In those 30 days, we had a professional stager go in and get the home ready to sell.  It cost the seller only $1,300 to stage the home.  The very day the stager was finished, even before it was listed, we had someone who wanted to see the home.  Two days later, we had a signed contract!

You may ask why didn’t the other real estate agent do what we did?  Good question.  But, most do not have the relationships that we do and the quality of stagers we have.

2. Pricing – Every seller wants to sell their home for the most amount of money and every buyer wants to buy for the least amount of money. What a seller is willing to sell it for and what the buyer is willing to pay is also dependent on the market conditions.  In a sellers market where there is limited supply, the buyers are more motivated to come up in their pricing expectations.  In a buyers market, the seller is more willing to come down to the dropping prices of homes in the area.  So, understanding the true market conditions, the true value of your home vs those that are in the same ballpark as yours is crucial to pricing your home to sell.

• We offer comprehensive market analysis and counsel according to true market conditions to properly educate our sellers so we can collectively price the home to sell.

3. Placing – Every real estate agent will be happy to list your home in the MLS. And, every agent will have it then uploaded to hundreds of real estate websites that promote your home. This is good, but is it enough?  Hopefully so, right?  Here is what happens when people are looking for homes on the websites.  They get overwhelmed with the volume of homes they may want to see at some point.  When they get overwhelmed, they may miss yours!  So, we call this strategy the I HOPE strategy.

That is why our marketing team (The Westerfield Marketing Group), a team of professionals with extensive marketing backgrounds created the  iFiND strategy.  This is a very sophisticated marketing strategy using the most advanced technology to actually iFiND the right prospective buyers for YOUR HOME! We will not divulge the secrets of our juice in this public format, but will be happy to share it with you in person.  I can tell you that many marketing professionals and executives who are selling their homes are touting that this is the most innovative marketing system they have EVER seen for the real estate industry!

Here is another recent example:

We interviewed for a listing with a professional couple who actually had 4 other real estate agents who lived on their same street in their community.  Once they heard about the iFiND strategy, they listed with us that evening!  We implemented the iFiND strategy, tweaked the strategy several times, received a call from the marketing we did, showed the home the next day, and negotiated a contract that very next week!  The buyers said they had been searching the MLS, had been working with another realtor to find them a home, but had never seen this home till they saw the ad!  The reason they saw the ad was because of the iFiND system, a very strategic, tactical targeted marketing system that FOUND the right buyer!

Here is a testimonial from one of the top coaches in the real estate industry

4. Promotion – In order to get the most amount of money for your home, everything has to be perfect. The staging must be completed, the photography and videography must be ultra-professional, the verbiage to posture your home with emotional appeal to just the right target audience must be perfect, the materials to present your home must be done to perfection, and then all the advertising, promotion and communication of the differential advantages your home offers must be communicated with excellence.

There are 3 primary websites buyers use for searching as they start the process of looking for a new home.  These are Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com.

1. Premiere Zillow Agent – People like to watch videos more than just look at pictures. As a Premier Zillow Agent, the videos we take of your home become one of the very first homes to appear on the right side of the screen when buyers are searching for their new home.

2. Premier Trulia Agent – We are also a premier agent with Trulia.com. So, the same is true as Zillow.  Our Seller’s homes are seen by more than 3 times as many people as homes that are not listed with a Premier Agent!

3. Realtor.com – As a premier agent with Realtor.com, we have special priviilges extended to us to enhance the listings, make them more visible, and a direct link when a buyer is interested in one of our homes we have listed.

Of course, we then implement the iFiND system!  Again, we will be happy to share more with you should we schedule a time to meet.  Please realize that not all homes qualify for the iFiND strategy! The reason we do not accept all homes to implement the I-Find strategy is that we INVEST a significant amount of money to find just the right set of buyers, create the marketing message, create the vehicle to get the message to the right prospects, and to set the stage as to the reasons WHY they should buy NOW!