Welcome to the market! Selling your home is truly a journey, and our team is here to help you along the way! We'll share some tips with you from our over 25 years of selling homes in West Michigan. Whether you decide to let us list your home, we bring you a buyer, or you sell to someone else, we hope that you find something useful on this page. Let's get your home sold!
Consider Working with a Buyer's Agent
Finding a qualified and quality buyer is hard! If you haven't run into people "just looking" yet, you most likely will. It's a waste of your time and frustrating. Choosing to work with a Buyer's Agent for a 3% commission can help minimize this frustration and open your home up to a huge network of agents and buyers. Just on our team alone, we have three Buyer's Agents with dozens of qualified buyers! Working with a Buyer's Agent is a great way to market your home to a wider audience and could result in a faster and more profitable sale for you.
How to Make Your Home Shine Online
Our #1 tip for making your home stand out...professional photography! We live in a highly visual world where homes are being judged by the pictures seen online rather than the amenities and features they have. Your home could have everything a buyer wants, but if the pictures are angled, dark cellphone photos, or only show 3 parts of your home, then you aren't giving your home the best shot on the market. Professional photography is a huge part of our listing process for good reason. These are just a few stats from Photoup.net that solidify why we use professional photography.
- Over 80% of all home buyers use the internet to search for homes.
- "83% of buyers said pictures are very important in helping them choose which homes they will visit."
- "Property listings featuring high dynamic range (HDR) photos sell 50% faster and increase online views by 118%."
- "About 32% of homes with high-quality photographs sell faster than those without visuals."
- "Homes with a single photo spend an average of 70 days on the market, while listings with at least 20 images sell within 1 month."
- "Photos help with offer prices — homes featuring professionally edited photos receive 47% higher asking prices per square foot."
We can help you find a professional photographer to make your home stand out and get your home sold faster!
The Best Buyers are Pre-Approved!
A legit buyer will almost always get pre-approved before looking at homes. Pre-approved buyers know how much house they can buy and are motivated to buy. This is another reason working with a Buyer's Agent can be extremely helpful! Most Buyer's Agents won't start showing homes to a buyer until they are pre-approved so the buyer has a budget. This helps the agent and the buyer not waste their time finding a home they like but then realizing it is out of the budget, or they don't have everything in place to write and submit an offer. Let us bring a qualified buyer to you!
Prepare for Calls and Voicemails!
As agents, we are used to our phones ringing constantly! It may not be something you've thought about, but setting up and clearing out your voicemail box is going to be very helpful to you! You'd be surprised how many people we call who don't have a voicemail box, or it is full! This will turn away potential buyers pretty quickly! You want to be accessible for answering questions, setting up showings, and more! You may even want to turn off spam-blocking and turn your ringer up so you can catch those calls as they come in!
Our Best Open House Advice!
Don't do an open house for longer than 2 hours! That may seem counterintuitive, but the shorter the open house the more you create urgency to see it. You also don't have to sit around at home for long periods of time with nobody coming through. That doesn't sound like a fun Saturday to us. We've found that the sweet spot for open house duration is 1-1.5 hours. It's long enough to get multiple people through yet short enough that it creates the pressure and urgency you want. We typically do open houses the day after we list our homes so we can capture that initial interested buyer and capitalize on the exposure of a new listing, and on the weekend too if it hasn't sold before then. It's also best to make sure your home is clean and looking great for an open house (or any showings) so that you're making a great impression! We've even included some of our showing prep tips below for you!
Is You're House Getting Max Exposure?
Exposure is key to selling your home! The more people who see your home, the more potential buyers are reached. When you first list your home, the algorithm pushes it out to many viewers but the longer it is on the market the fewer the viewers. Usually after 10-14 days, you've likely reached your maximum exposure online. Our team can help you refresh your exposure again! We have over 10,000 followers/friends on Facebook, and over 16,000 entries in our database, and can put your home on every real estate platform available. If you'd like to list with our team to get your home sold and lighten your workload, contact us to get started!
Have Questions?
We're here to help! We've seen pretty much every real estate situation you can think of and want to be a resource for you on your real estate journey. Whether it is a question about paperwork, photography, working with a Buyer's Agent, or even listing with us, we can help you with any of these! You can reach out to us at any time with any questions!