Can Facebook Help You Sell Your Home?

If used correctly, Facebook can be an amazing marketing tool for today’s home sellers.

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In the age of the internet, there are many online resources that can help people sell their homes—but what about Facebook? Can Facebook help you sell? Actually, yes. Using a targeted approach, Facebook can allow sellers to double their exposure online. Here’s how it works: First, ask yourself who the ideal buyer for your property is. Defining the profile of your ideal buyer will help you determine what your “avatar” is and how you can market to them. In this case, the term “avatar” means your target buyer.

Once you have this avatar in mind, it’s time to film and post video footage of your home. Videos get the highest level of engagement on Facebook, and are also the most highly prioritized in terms of where they appear on the site.

Using a targeted approach, Facebook can allow sellers to double their exposure online.

The third step in leveraging this platform to gain exposure for your listing is to pay for Facebook ads. Using Facebook advertising to reach your specific, ideal buyer can vastly increase the amount of attention your listing receives.

Facebook is such an effective real estate marketing tool that our team was recently interviewed by The Wall Street Journal regarding this tactic. You can see the full article here, but to summarize what we revealed during the interview, our team was once able to sell a client’s home for $125,000 more than the next-highest offer by using Facebook in our marketing. The bottom line is this: Using Facebook as a tool to help sell your home can be massively effective. If you have any other questions or would like more information, feel free to give me a call or send me an email. I look forward to hearing from you soon.

How to Sell Your Home for 18% More Money Part 5: Negotiations

In today’s fifth and final installment into our latest series, we’ll be discussing the last component of earning more money for your home: Negotiations.

Considering Buying? Click here for gateway access to MLS

 Considering Selling? Click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation
Click here to access off-site properties

Welcome back to our series on how to sell your home for 18% more money. Today’s episode is the last in this series, so be sure to check out our previous episodes: Episode One: How to Prepare a Home for Sale Episode Two: How to Present a Home on the Market Episode Three: How to Strategically Price a Home Episode Four: How to Promote a Home Now let’s move on to our fifth and final topic: Negotiation.

Having a skilled negotiator who can think outside the box will be very helpful for you in any real estate scenario.

There are four strategies that I recommend all sellers employ when it comes time to negotiate a deal for their home sale. These strategies are the last piece of the puzzle in earning 18% more for your property when it comes time to sell. 1. Encourage preemptive offers. This strategy entails capturing interested buyers before your home technically hits the multiple listing service by marketing it as “coming soon.” Typically, it’s advisable to put a list price that’s higher than your expectation at this point in the process. I can tell you from experience that because of our low inventory, buyers are tired of getting beaten out and will be willing submit a preemptive offer that is at or above your price expectation when you follow this strategy. 2. Price for multiple offers. If you didn’t earn the price you’d hoped for during the “coming soon” phase of your listing process, it’s time to price your home in a way that represents a great value and encourages multiple offers. When buyers see your listing as an exceptional deal, they will be more likely to compete over it. This will ultimately drive up the price and help you net more for your home. 3. Determine your best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA). More simply put, this strategy essentially serves as the “Plan B” you should fall onto in the event that your original negotiated agreement is somehow compromised. This will ensure that if anything unexpected happens during the course of the deal, you will still have an idea of how you’d like to proceed. 4. Be creative. If you’re close to getting the results you want but just aren’t there yet, you should consult with your agent about possible solutions. As an example, we had a seller recently whose minimum bottom line for their home was $1 million, but whose buyer had a loan approval that was maxed out at $990,000. To compensate for this $10,000 disparity, we advised the seller to credit the buyer with $5,000, with the understanding that the credit was to be explicitly dedicated toward lowering the buyer’s interest rate on their loan. The buyer was able to lower their interest rate from 4.25% to 4%, which raised their mortgage approval up to just over $1 million. As a result, the buyer was able to secure the home and the seller was able to net their desired price. Having a skilled negotiator who can think outside the box will be very helpful for you in any real estate scenario. Ultimately, the bottom line is that doing many little things right throughout a transaction can make a big difference in your success. If you have any other questions or would like more information, feel free to give us a call or send us an email. We look forward to hearing from you soon.

How a Pre-Appraisal Can Net You Up To 8% More When Selling

We can sell your home for up to 18% more money. We’ll prove it to you. To watch the FULL VERSION of my presentation, CLICK HERE.

Considering Buying? Click here for gateway access to MLS

 Considering Selling? Click here for a FREE Home Price Evaluation

How can you sell your home for up to 18% more money? It sounds like a bold claim, but I’ll prove to you that we can do it for you by walking you through the third part of our five-part process.

Last time, we talked about presenting your home to market and how we showcase your home using photo, video, and other cool technologies like Matterport. Once the home has been prepared and we’ve presented it to market, it’s now all about pricing.

Pricing is as much of an art as it is a science, and its extremely critical when it comes to getting the most money when selling your home. One of the strategies we like to use here at Brett Jennings Real Estate Experts is getting an appraisal done on the property. We find that if we use a professional appraiser, we can give that appraiser quote guidance to get us the most favorable value for your home. We can also use that appraisal to influence buyers to pay top dollar for your home. Here’s how that works.

For example, take the home we sold at Mountain View (pictured at 1:24 in the video). We first asked the local experts in the neighborhood who’d sold more homes in that particular zip code what they thought the value of this property would sell for when we brought it to market.

The agent said that it was worth about $1.35 million. We then got our appraiser to give us a generous appraisal on the property, which came in at about $1.42 million. After that, we priced the property at around $1.299 million less than the agent’s survey. 

Pricing is as much of an art as it is a science.

Then, we included a copy of the appraisal in the disclosure package and on the agent comments on the MLS. We set a deadline of 10 days, because one weekend might not be enough to maximize the exposure for buyers. Also, by setting a deadline, we effectively forced buyers to compete. We ended up with seven offers, ranging from about $1.35 million up to $1.43 million, which was $10,000 over our appraised value.

We negotiated the top two offers against one another, eventually getting them up to $1.465 million. We actually got $115,000, or 8% more, in the sale of this home by using an appraisal strategically.

The reason that this works is that when buyers are faced with competition in a low-inventory market like ours, they’ll ask their agents what they need to offer in order to get the house. The agent, in most instances, has a printout from the MLS showing home values in that neighborhood; it could be a $150,000 swing in our favor. It really becomes a conversation about what the buyers are comfortable offering.

We found by having a pre-appraisal in our disclosure package, the agent is also going to reference the appraisal when consulting the buyers, advising them to offer at least the appraised value. Doing just that, we’ve gotten as much as 8% more than the average market value.

If you have any questions about pricing, using an appraisal strategically, or selling your home, feel free to reach out to me. I’d love to tell you more about our winning strategy.