Selling Your Home – What You Need to Do

The average seller will do the minimum to prepare their home for market: clean and declutter, fix anything that’s broken, and mow the lawn. While those tasks are essential, today’s buyers want more than just a clean house and tidy yard. When they dream of buying a new home, they envision a designer house with modern finishes. Help them see your property’s full potential by staging it to appeal to today’s buyer rather than your own personal taste and style. This is the reason The Lifestyle Collection has a staging and styling team.

Staging and Styling works when you are selling your home. According to the Real Estate Staging Association, homes that are professionally staged spend 73% less time on the market.

What is staging and styling?
So, what exactly is staging and styling? In a broad sense, staging is the act of preparing your home for market. The goal is to highlight your home’s strengths, minimize any deficiencies, and help buyers envision the lifestyle they will experience in the home. When staging a home, you might rearrange the furniture to make a room feel larger. Or remove heavy draperies and furnishings to make it appear lighter and brighter.

When you work with The Lifestyle Collection to sell your home, our design team has the experience to maximize the appeal of your home to the largest number of potential buyers.

We can help you determine what is required to push your home ahead of the competition in your neighborhood.

You only have one chance to make a first impression with potential buyers when selling your home. Many buyers view photos of a listing before they decide whether or not to visit in person. In fact, 87% of buyers find photos “very useful” in their home search. Poor-quality or amateur-looking listing photos could keep buyers from ever stepping through your door.

Since good photography plays such an important role in selling your home, The Lifestyle Collection uses only architectural-quality photos shot by leading photographers to showcase your home. We go the extra mile to ensure your listing photos showcase the true essence of your home. We don’t just rely on their photography skills when it comes to showcasing your home. We’re always on-site during the photoshoot to help the photographer capture the best angles and the unique or compelling selling features that we want to capture. This extra effort pays off in the end. In fact, listings with high-quality photography sell 32% faster than the competition… and often for more money.

What’s the difference?
We also hire a professional videographer to record the home to go one level beyond a still photo. Some agents create what in the industry is called a “virtual tour”. They basically take the still images that they use on MLS and add music and movement. Very few buyers watch these tours because it is simply a replay of the photos they have already seen. When selling your home, a true video with thoughtfully selected music that fits the lifestyle of the home, makes it come alive.

As everyone knows, social media loves videos. We use the videos of our listings strategically on different social media platforms. This ensures we get exposure to potential buyers.

Sometimes homes sit on the market for years and people wonder, why are those houses still on the market? It’s because they are often priced too high. Every buyer has a budget, and most will view listings within a particular price range. If your property is overpriced, it can’t properly compete with the other houses they’re viewing that are priced correctly. Which means it will sit on the market until you’re eventually forced to drop the price.

Alternatively, if you price your home aggressively, it may be among the nicest homes that buyers have seen within their budget. This can lead to emotionally-attached buyers, who are often willing to pay a premium or settle for fewer seller concessions. In certain markets, this can lead to multiple-offers or a bidding war. The end result, more money in your pocket.

How is home value determined?
Current market conditions truly determine the price of your home. Just because you feel your home is worth a certain amount, does not mean the current market will agree with you. We help you determine the ideal listing price, knowing that pricing it properly, in the beginning, is the best way to ensure a profitable sale.

There are too many agents anxious to take listings at any price. These agents know it is overpriced, and we can guarantee that soon after the ink is dry on the listing contract they will begin the process of beating you down to lower the price.

Once buyers are interested enough to schedule a visit, it’s crucial that you put on a good show at each showing when selling your home.

The first step is to make your home readily available—and often on short notice—for buyers to see it. A missed showing is a missed opportunity to sell your home. If you set too many restrictions on when it’s available to view, busy buyers will simply skip over your listing and move on to the next one.

Part of making your home available means keeping it show-ready as long as it’s on the market. Most of us don’t live picture-perfect lives, and our homes reflect the day-to-day reality of our busy (and sometimes messy) families. A little extra effort spent keeping your home clean, fresh-smelling, and ready for buyers will help it sell faster, which means you can get back to your regular routine as quickly as possible.

Most agents still market their listings the same way they did 20 years ago. Put a sign in the yard, place the listing in the MLS, and pray that it sells. Yet, we know that 93% of buyers search for real estate listings online. So when selling your home, you need a promotion plan that gets attention. This is why we invest heavily in Zillow to get our listings showcased and displayed to as many buyers as possible.

We are one of only approximately one thousand agents nationwide that invest in the Zillow Premier Agent Direct program. This is Zillow’s program designed to promote listings. Many agents participate in Zillow’s standard Premier Agent program, which is designed for agents to connect with buyer clients, not to sell their listed homes. If an agent tells you they use Zillow, ask them to show you a report from Zillow indicating traffic to their listings for the past month. It should look similar to the one below. If they are unable to produce the report, they are not in the Premier Agent Direct program.

Zillow Premier Agent Direct Report used when selling your home
To ensure your listing appears in the places where buyers are most likely to look, our dual-level promotion strategy includes both pre-launch activities designed to seed the marketplace and post-listing activities to ensure your home stays top-of-mind with potential buyers.

By utilizing online and social marketing platforms to connect with consumers and offline channels to connect with local agents, your property gets maximum exposure to prospective buyers.

These are just a few of the tips that will help you sell your home for the highest price in a hot market. For more information or if you have any questions, please feel free to contact us to discuss the market and your home. We can guide you through every step of the process so that you are confident and informed.