Creative Real Estate when Selling Your Home

In a hot market, where pretty much everything sells immediately with multiple offers, real estate agents may become complacent when marketing and negotiating your home sale.

Seems easy enough - throw a few photos up on the internet, write up a quick description of the property and call it a day. Right? 

Wrong!

Realtors have their “marketing systems” and rarely take the opportunity to think outside the box. But what if there was a better way? A better way that leads to a higher selling price with the best terms for you, the seller.

Marketing a home may seem simple, but it’s not necessarily easy to get the best price, and it’s hard to prove that your Realtor has found the highest price. The simple part: create an emotional response with potential buyers by decluttering, staging, taking great photos and videos, and providing a floor plan with an online virtual tour. 

But what else can be done to really create value? The part that isn’t so “easy” to see?

This is where experience, a realtor's background and creative marketing make a difference. Older homes can sometimes be a challenge to sell at the highest price because that value may not be what is visible, but rather, what is possible. 

Over the last 15 years as a real estate agent and a previous real estate developer, I have had the privilege of helping many of my clients sell older homes. In one scenario, I was selling an older home on a pie-shaped building lot hemmed in by telephone pole supports. Most potential buyers had no idea how to build a new home here. It required many trips to the city’s planning department and close coordination with an architect to show prospective buyers what was possible. I literally had renderings drawn up! The exciting part was to sell the property and years later come back and see that the buyer had built the home that was conceptually the same as the one that I marketed! I felt like I really added value to both the seller and the new home buyer.

So what else can be done to get the highest price and best terms for your home? This is a tough one to quantify, but a realtor's negotiation style has a huge impact on the outcome of the sale of your home. Does your agent look for creative solutions when negotiating? To be creative means your agent is curious about what you AND the buyer truly wants. This involves knowing the right questions to ask you, the seller, as well as working closely with the buyer’s agent. A win / win negotiation style in my mind always supersedes a win / lose. 

The above are examples of the kind of creative marketing and negotiation techniques that not only sells a home, but sells it for more than if the property had been sold with traditional marketing and average communication.