This is an article from the series “The most common mistakes when selling real estate“
Do you think that you can sell a property well simply with a couple of adverts on real estate websites and a For Sale sign?
Typically, this is just not enough for a good sale. Instead, the more active you are in selling, the more potential buyers you will reach and your chances of a more successful sale will increase.
While it is possible to sell a property with minimum effort, doing so will not achieve anywhere near the highest possible price. It also means waiting much longer to find a buyer. As I wrote in previous articles, advertisements on the Internet quickly become lost among the thousands of other adverts, while a For Sale sign is soon overlooked and people no longer notice it. To avoid the dust settling on your property selling project you must constantly strive to keep your offer in the eyes of potential buyers.
Mistake No. 6 – Passively selling a property often leads to a lower sales price
The secret to selling real estate successfully lies in a proactive approach from the moment a property first enters the market until the contract is signed. But this proactive method requires time, energy, and money, which many self-sellers soon lose. They stop enjoying the process and the efforts for finding a buyer quickly fade. While this is understandable, it is also a big mistake.
Creditworthy clients are creditworthy precisely because they are often professionally successful people. They have busy working lives, businesses to run, and active careers. They do not have much time to spend searching for real estate, which means that they can easily miss your property. Due to their lack of time, they often approach the property market by placing advertisements offering to buy, or they employ real estate brokers to search on their behalf.
If you are a passive seller and at the same time a buyer is also passive, meaning that you have both placed advertisements and are waiting for reactions, what do you think is the most likely outcome?
To achieve good sales results, you must be proactive. This is the approach of the most successful real estate agents. They spend all day making phone calls, searching the web, matching inquiries to buy with offers to sell, and doing all sorts of other activities so that their ads are constantly visible. Unfortunately, a large number of real estate agents are also too passive.
To avoid being like them, from time to time, highlight or boost your ad so that it does not end up in the abyss. You can also read the adverts of people looking to buy, to see if your property is a good match. However, most self-sellers doing this will soon find out that 18 out of 20 adverts from ‘people looking to buy’ are in fact from independent real estate agents who are pretending to be potential buyers to hide their “hunt” for a new client. It may seem a pointless approach, I know I think it is, but that is just the way the real estate market operates, and there is nothing that a self-seller can do to avoid it. That said, using real estate websites to find people who are looking to buy can still be worthwhile. If you have the time and energy to contact 100 potential buyers, you may find the one who seriously wants to buy your property. This is the reward for being proactive. In the same way, you can reach out to people in the relevant area by letter or leaflet campaigns, or by actively promoting your property on social media. We’ll discuss how to approach these and other sales channels in a later article.
I know being proactive in sales can be laborious, but the best brokers do it every day. That is why they often achieve such surprisingly high prices for their clients – it is their proactive approach that is the reason for their success. Unfortunately, most real estate agents and self-selling property owners are passive in their approach to selling, this clouds the market and makes it harder for everyone. The best sales prices are achieved quickly, the longer a property remains on the market the lower prices begin to fall.
You will learn more tips on selling a property successfully in other articles in this series.
Article prepared by: Petr Podlešák
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