experience, you really feel like you’ve walked the videos that I have shot shoot the entire home, usually starting from the outside, going in the front door, the main rooms, upper level rooms and then lower and then maybe the main yard. With a video you can’t Photoshop; the light is coming in, the way the rooms are attached, the scale of the rooms and the size of the rooms I feel is much more evident when you’re watching a video. And so the emotional response I’ve gotten from them has been astounding, I will be at an open house with a brand new listing and repeatedly people come in, single people/couples, saying, “Oh we saw the video of this home online and we really wanted to see it. I said, “Oh great, well how long have you been looking? How long have you been in the market?” And some of them will say, “We’re not even looking, we’re not going to be in the market for another two years but we wanted to come see it.”
I quickly realized that people who aren’t even in the market are coming to see because of the video, the people that are in the market are flooding to my listings because they want to see them as well so it’s working extremely well for the marketing aspects of getting of getting traffic through my listings – really, really well.
JULIE: Wow. And I love that statistic that you shared; it’s 85% more traffic if the video is attached to the listing, wow.
MICHAEL: Yes they will linger on it longer and you get more traffic.
JULIE: So there must be a lot of preparation to get the house ready for all this photography that you’re doing, so do you want to back up for a minute and talk about how you counsel your sellers to get ready?
MICHAEL: Yes you know I do a two-step listing presentation when I first go to meet the people and see the home; the first meeting I go to meet them I have them take me around the home and educate me on the home – any upgrades they’ve done, things love about the home – and I take notes and then I present them with my strategy for how I market homes. I talk about the professional photos, the video and the website that I build. I do something else that is also really, really cool; I have my sellers email me a list of the ten things they are going to miss most about the home. Five of them I like to be about the home itself; the light that comes through the southern floor window or a great backyard, and the other five are about the neighborhood or the area they live in – maybe they’re close to a coffee shop or a shopping center or a community center. I type it up, frame it and put it up in the home as a flyer so when people walk in they come in and they can read about the experience of living in the home because people aren’t just living in the walls and the roof, they are buying the experience of ‘what is my life going to feel like if I buy this home, on this street, in this neighborhood. So I tell the seller’s we’re going to do that, this is all about emotional marketing, everything we do is to evoke a positive emotional response from the buyers.
The second bit is to go back and do the market analysis, if they end up choosing me as a team member to help them market their home, I come back to them and I tell them on the first visit, “If you choose me I will come back and we will walk through the home together and we will make a list of the things that I feel need to be done to the home to make it market ready.” And we’ll go through the house room by rooms and we’ll both take copious notes and have the same list. I usually take it on my iPad in Evernote and then I will email it to them so that we’ll have a list. That list really depends on how much money the seller has to put into their home, there are some people that have a sufficient number of funds to cover the entire list, there are other people that don’t have as much money and so we tailor the list to ‘must do’, ‘would be nice to do’ and ‘don’t really have to do but it would be great if you could’. And for some people we tailor it down to just the things that…like painting I think is the number one way to make a home look fresh.
And the word that is use with all my sellers is when you’re preparing your home for market it doesn’t have to look brand new but it needs to look fresh. I think fresh is the most important work in any listing whether your home is two years old or a hundred years old, if it looks fresh when people walk in the emotional response is going to be really, really good. So if they do hire me then we walk through the home, and I’ve already set to them at the beginning of this walk-through that none of what we’ve talked about is at all any sort of judgment on the way that you live or your furnishings, I am coming from strictly from a marketing standpoint on ‘this home is going to be a product on the market, how do we engage enough buyers emotionally so that you get one, two, three, four, five, ten or twenty offers on this home?’ – That’s what went want to do. And I says the house will either work for the buyer or it won’t but I want everybody to leave that home saying that was a really good listing. That’s the goal, to make sure that everybody is emotionally enamored with the home.
And so some of the things that…you know it depends on the home, some need a lot less work than others. I’ve walked into homes before where literally it was like I could put a sign in the front yard and we’re good to go – those are rare. Usually decluttering or editing is something that everybody needs to do including myself when I sold my home. And that means removing things that aren’t going to add to the emotional appeal. So we all have a lot of photographs of ourselves or things on the refrigerator. I always says let’s take down 90% of the photographs in the home, we want the items in the home to add to the emotional appeal but we want people looking at the home and not your stuff, the stuff should just support the emotional appeal of the home. So anything that’s of value or anything that’s really personal I have them take away, rooms really need to look roomy, airy and not cluttered so that people can actually see the home. Decluttering or editing is great, painting I think is the least expensive and best way to freshen up your home. Refurbishing hardwood floors, having the moss removed from the roof – there are a lot of unfinished basements in Seattle, what I usually suggest – and we just did this on a home that I enlisted in Ballard – we usually actually have the basement spray painted either white or light gray if it’s unfinished. It all of a sudden makes it look like this really sexy space that people will want to be in rather than an old, dingy dark basement so that’s a great tip.
And basically getting rid of a lot of the stuff that they’re going to want to get rid of before beginning to move anyway; having a yard sale, giving some items away to charities as far as donations – really declutter the home and get ready for your move is a great way to prepare your home for market. But each home has its own individual story and so my suggestions completely depend on how many funds the seller has to complete these items the house actually needs.
JULIE: Wow those are all great tips. Very often I am coming into homes that need to be painted and they need those hardwood floors refinished. And also, sometimes we do suggest remodeling such as bathroom and kitchen remodeling if it’s too dated.
MICHAEL: Yes exactly, you just want to make it relevant to today’s buyer.
JULIE: And paint is the most effective change you can make for the least amount of money.
MICHAEL: Absolutely. Almost all of the homes I list we paint some rooms if not the entire home. And the sellers make their money back on that ten, twenty, thirty fold easily.
JULIE: So I know that you work with some home stagers and I know you have a little anecdote you want to tell us about a house that you recently listed that used staging.
MICHAEL: Yes so this is a great story. There’s a neighborhood called Ballard in Seattle which is a great neighborhood. It’s got a lot of hip restaurants and shops and it attracts every kind of age group; single people, families etc. – it’s a really great neighborhood. There was a three bedroom, two bathroom bungalow; it was 2100 square feet, on the market that sellers wanted to sell. They put it on the market last year for $479,000 and unfortunately it didn’t sell. And they were living in the home, their furnishings worked really well for them, they weren’t as emotionally appealing universally to the public. Their home didn’t end up selling and they ended up frustrated and so they took it off the market and then in
