Why didn’t my house sell? The top 13 reasons explained and How we fix them!
#1: The photos were low quality or didn’t show the home at its full potential.
Photos are the #1 factor that the public utilizes when deciding which homes to see in person. Top Real Estate agents understand the importance of utilizing extremely high-quality photography. However, far too many inexperienced or “budget” agents still think that a few cellphone snapshots are an acceptable option. While cellular phone cameras have greatly improved, even the best “phone pics” are still vastly inferior to the shots taken by a professional real estate photographer. If your last agent used poor quality photos, then your listing traffic suffered tremendously. With poor photos posted, most online shoppers didn’t ever bother to read the description, much less request a showing.
*We always utilize photos taken with latest “High Dynamic Range” technology that eliminates shadows, improves focus, enhances contrast, and heightens color saturation. Additionally, our photos are always taken with a wide-angle lens to make your home appear more spacious. We also include additional shots of desirable neighborhood amenities like pools, parks, and community centers, while making sure to exclude any photos of negative features that might discourage people from requesting the showing. We only work with the absolute best photographers, who understand how to properly stage the room and compose the shots.
#2: The right buyers never saw the home, due to an improperly completed MLS listing
We often get called to take over where an unsuccessful agent left-off. One of the first things we analyze, is whether all the MLS fields were completely and properly filled out. Quite often, they were not. The Denver MLS is an extremely complex system, with literally several thousand searchable criteria fields. Quite often many less experienced (or careless) agents fail to properly list all the unique features of a home, in the appropriate MLS fields. Each omission like this could mean that a perfectly matched house-hunter failed to find your home online, in their online search. To make matters worse, there are two competing MLS systems in the Denver Market (IRES and REColorado) that DO NOT share listings with one another. Most agents can only afford to join one of the two… which means that their listings are completely missed by every agent who is using the other MLS system.
*As a top producing Colorado Team, we subscribe to both MLS systems used in Denver & Boulder. We make sure that every one of our listings is placed in both MLS Systems. We also follow a very detailed protocol, to ensure that we don’t miss a single field when entering our listings into both systems.
#3: The home wasn’t featured prominently enough on Zillow and Trulia. Whether or not you personally prefer Zillow’s search interface over its competitor’s, the fact remains most serious home shoppers are using it. In fact, Zillow and Trulia (Trulia is owned by Zillow), have more traffic between them than the next 11 competing sites combined! To put this in perspective, Redfin gets less than 1/10th the traffic that Zillow and Trulia receive. Make no mistake about it, Zillow is a “For Profit” business, who earns its revenue by charging top-producing real estate agents to advertise there. Therefore, the listings of the agents who spend the most money with Zillow and Trulia, enjoy much more prominent placement on their site. Of course, there are other factors that Zillow considers, when determining which listings to rank higher, which only the agents well vested in the Zillow system are privy to.
*In addition to being one of Denver’s top advertisers with Zillow, we are well versed on all of the criteria Zillow requires to ensure that our listings are ranked at the top and remain there for the maximum period of time possible! Give us a call, we’ll be glad to demonstrate for you how Zillow consistently places our listings on the top of its rankings!
#4: Cutting-edge Real Estate marketing techniques weren’t used.
Modern technologies to showcase homes online have been evolving at a blistering pace in the last few years, and the major real estate websites have adapted to favor the listings that feature those cutting- edge visuals. Furthermore, Millennials (who are rapidly becoming the largest buying segment), expect them! As you might suspect, far too many agents are either out of touch with the most relevant marketing techniques, or they’re simply don’t have the budget or knowledge to implement them. As a top-producing team, we have a full-time team of marketing experts who ensure that our listings are presented with every cutting-edge technology available. We utilize the latest techniques like:
· Aerial Drone Videography
· 360 Virtual Walk-Through Tours
· Matterport Cross Section Modeling of the Home
· Floorplan Mapping
· High Dynamic Range Photography
· Reflective Yard Signs with solar-charged night lighting
· Boosted Social Media posts targeted to active buyers
*We also offer multiple listing packages to fit every budget, and property type. We’ll implement a customized marketing strategy to ensure that your home is seen by as many perspective buyers as possible, in every format available! To see examples of just a few of our cutting-edge marketing techniques in action, go to… http://prop.tours/davidhakimi
#5: The home description wasn’t well written or detailed enough. Effective home descriptions should paint a picture that allows potential buyers to see themselves in the home, while also providing important information about the home’s important features and desirable upgrades. A well-written description also highlights things like desirable school districts, local amenities, distance to local restaurants and shops, and other sought-after features of the area. If the description leaves out important details about the home, buyers aren't going to jump through hoops to find out what they want to know about it.
*We work together with each of our clients to craft a detailed home description that accurately portrays the best aspects of your home and gets every possible buyer into the home.
#6: The home was hard to show! (Usually for one or more of these four reasons…)
a) The Agent didn’t Use a Professional Showing Service, choosing instead to personally schedule their own showings to save money.
Some listing agents (or brokerages) make homes considerably harder to show by refusing to utilize a professional, 3rd party showing service to facilitate the easy scheduling of showing requests.
Professional showing services allow showings to be easily requested 24 hours a day, through their online scheduling systems. Many buyer’s agents often find themselves scheduling and requesting showings late at night, or very early in the morning, during the busy season. Nothing is more frustrating to a buyer’s agent, than requesting a showing from another agent who insists on scheduling their own showings (because Murphy’s Law says those are always the same agents who don’t answer their phone or quickly return calls). Even some of the major brokerages (Re/Max and Sotheby’s) still insist on scheduling their own showings without using a 3rd party scheduling service, which massively complicates the process of routing the next day’s showings (if a buyer’s agent is attempting to schedule them before or after normal business hours. This is the worst, when a buyer’s agent is scheduling showings for a relocation client. Relocation clients are often only in town for a day or two, and unable to reschedule later. If their agent can’t easily confirm a showing appointment, then they often just skip that house! This is unfortunate, because most relocation buyers are very serious, and ready to write an offer on one of the homes they see during their brief house-hunting trip!
b) The Seller required too much advanced notice or had too many restrictions on showings.
Making the home easily accessible for showings is crucial. Families with pets, small children, and those who work at home are often the most challenged, and sometimes there isn’t much a family can do to avoid putting some restrictions on showings. However, it can’t be stressed enough that sellers need to make their home as easy to access as possible, even if that is a little bit uncomfortable to accommodate. No one ever said that selling a home is easy, and sometimes sellers simply need to push a bit harder to accommodate showings at the buyer’s requested time. Refusing to accommodate buyers requested times, just makes it more likely that they will buy a competing home!
c) The Seller insisted on personally attending the showings
Last, are sellers who insist on staying in the home for showings, or worse yet insist on giving every buyer a “guided tour” of the home. This is an ABSOLUTE NO-NO! This makes buyers EXTREMELY uncomfortable and renders them unable to comfortably experience the home. Buyers like to explore and envision themselves living there, and comment freely about each home’s pros and cons. When the seller is present, doing this becomes extremely awkward for buyers. Furthermore, most buyers know within a minute or two of entering the home, if they like it or not. When the seller is insisting on “giving a guided tour” some buyers will politely tour an entire home, that they otherwise would have left almost immediately after entering. Attending the showings is a great way to turn-off a buyer, who otherwise might have actually considered the home.
d) Renters Refused to leave or tidy-up for showings
Rental properties are often very difficult to schedule, because the Tenants won’t cooperate (for fear of losing their rental). Renters often employ stalling tactics like insisting on exercising their rights to a full 24 hours before each showing. Then, they leave the house in a messy state and refuse to clean or prepare the home to be properly shown. Its always best to list a home after the renter’s lease is up, when the unit can be shown vacant and properly staged.
#7: The home had too many “Rough-Edges” or didn’t show well.
When selling a home in a competitive market, first impressions are everything! In fact, most buyers will “rule out” a home they don’t like within the first 2-3 minutes of entering it. Often, the buyer can’t tell you exactly what it was they didn’t like, but they simply knew it. Typically, the home didn’t have any major issues, but rather several minor issues that compounded to make the home feel run-down and neglected in general. Being a “fixer-upper” is fine if the seller is willing to offer the home at a bargain price. However, problems arise when the home is somewhat rough, but the seller still expects to sell it for top dollar. Obviously, no buyer is going to pay top-money for a home that appears to need lots of small items addressed! The following are all easily fixed items that an experienced listing agent will advise you to correct, prior to allowing potential buyers through the home:
· Cracks, holes or poorly textured repairs in drywall
· Poorly chosen paint colors (too bright or polarizing, rather than neutral and generally appealing)
· Dirty walls, doorjambs, or baseboards
· Pet odors, pet damage, litter boxes either visible or smelly
· Cracks in garage/basement floor, or settling on the Front Porch/Driveways/Sidewalks
· Unfinished home-improvement projects, or half-completed basement finishing
· Stained, worn, or damaged carpet
· Hardwood floors that are past-due for re-finishing
· Loose, cracked, or missing tiles on floors or walls
· Missing or damaged shingles or flashing on the roof
· Poorly maintained landscaping, dead lawns, or pet damaged lawns
*We conduct a 13 Point Pre-listing Checklist with every seller, to identify all issues that could turn-off buyers. We have an on-staff handy-man, as well as a vetted list of reasonable tradesmen, carpet cleaners, landscapers, and maid services, to help you correct these issues and prepare your home to show at the top of its potential.
#8: There was no sign on the property.
It might sound crazy, but some homes are listed with no sign on the property, because the sellers don’t want the neighbors in their business. Even though the home might be posted online, it misses out on potential drive-by traffic. Motivated buyers often drive through a neighborhood that they know they want to buy in. Many times, buyers first see and fall in love with a home when they're driving around, then come home later, look it up, and schedule an appointment to see it.
At the same time, hand-drawn, dated, faded or beat-up signs can give the impression that the home is also unkempt, or that the seller is a real estate novice, thereby encouraging buyers to make lowball offers.
How I Can Help: I provide the highest quality, modern reflective signs and place them in a highly visible place on the property. I also use full color corrugated vinyl signs at the entrances of the neighborhood to alert people of a home for sale in the neighborhood.
#9: The home wasn’t properly staged.
If your home is vacant, has somewhat dated décor, or too many basic builder-grade finishes, then it should definitely be staged. Upscale art, trendy rugs, and modern furniture can instantly make a mediocre home feel far more appealing. However, most agents don’t offer this because proper staging is very costly. Most professional staging companies want an upfront fee of $1,500-$2,000 to stage a home, and then a monthly fee of $500-$1000 per room to keep the staging items in place.
The National Association of Realtors has conducted several major studies, and nationwide surveys of Realtors, that have repeatedly confirmed that staged homes sell considerably faster, and for upwards of 10% more money than un-staged homes! This is also why home builders spend a small fortune on interior decorators, to stage their model homes. Staged homes simply sell faster and for more money! Here’s a study from NAR, that breaks down many of the details: https://www.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/2019-profile-of-home-staging-03-14-2019.pdf
*The Hakimi Team owns enough high-end staging materials to stage several large homes simultaneously! We’re often able to offer both physical and virtual staging to our sellers at no additional up-charge, over our regular listing package!
#10: The home was poorly lit, so it felt somewhat dim and/or depressing to buyers.
The most appealing homes often have several large windows that flood the home with natural light. Most top listing agents understand that buyers perceive brightly lit homes as cheerier and more appealing. However, many older homes, condos, or starter homes, simply weren’t built with enough windows to benefit from an ample amount of natural light. Its also possible that the home was built with plenty of windows, but the sellers have too many heavy drapes or shades in place because they personally prefer a somewhat dimmer living environment. This dimness often gets compounded by the fact that the home doesn’t have enough light fixtures, or the fixtures it does have are loaded with low-wattage, soft-white bulbs. This dimness often casts an overall depressing feel over the home, which can quickly turn away potential buyers.
*In these situations, we will always recommend replacing existing “soft-white” bulbs with “daylight” bulbs and opting for higher wattage bulbs as well. We have had great success selling several previously expired listings, simply by improving the lighting levels in a home with new bulbs. This simple correction is often less than $100 but can make a massive impact on a home’s appeal.
#11: The home was passively marketed, rather than Pro-actively marketed to precisely targeted buyers.
Unfortunately, most agents follow a fairly “passive” marketing strategy that consists of loading photos and a description onto the MLS, printing some flyers, planting a yard sign, and possibly holding a few open houses. This “passive” strategy places the home out on the internet in a manner that does nothing to make it stand out from the thousands of other listings in the marketplace. Furthermore, this method relies on hoping that a qualified buyer will stumble across the home on their own, while searching through the hundreds of similar available homes that may also fit their general search criteria. Its basically like casting a line into a giant lake, then hoping a fish swims by and takes the bait. You might catch a buyer, but you could also end up sitting on the market for a long time, without so much as “a nibble”.
Top agents employ all of these passive methods, but they have also mastered methods of actively identifying active buyers online using the advanced targeting features of sites like Facebook, Instagram and Google. These social media and search platforms allow advanced marketers to identify likely buyers, based on the past searches they have conducted, major sites they have visited, or even particular neighborhoods they have driven through. Oh yes, Facebook and Google can even tell where you’ve physically been by geofencing the location of your mobile device and then allow marketers to target you with ads based on specific neighborhoods you’ve visited. The most talented agents know how to place videos, photos, and 360 Walkthrough tours of your home, directly into the social media feed of those people most likely to be in the market for a home like yours. This type of pro-active advertising has now become cost effective enough that our team routinely implements it into our marketing. However, it’s definitely still an advanced marketing technique that very few other agents understand how to implement. The Hakimi Team utilizes these advanced targeting techniques routinely, on each and every one of our listings!
# 12: The agent wasn’t in-tune with market conditions and/or seasonal market timing.
For five straight years, from 2013 to 2018, the Denver real estate market climbed very steadily with only minute variations for seasonality. However, in 2018 the Denver market made an abrupt return to seasonality (demonstrated by the blue line on the graph). Many newer agents were caught off guard by this sudden seasonal shift in the market and failed to take it into account when pricing their off-season listings. Homes listed after July 4th, typically fail to sell for as much as an identical home would have brought just a few months earlier during the “Peak Season” of Spring and Early Summer.
When the market is steadily rising, you can get away with slightly overpricing your home, because the market will eventually catch-up with your price. Therefore, the Spring and Early Summer market tends to be far more forgiving when a home is slightly overpriced.
However, when the market begins its seasonal decline in late Summer, FAR more care must be taken when pricing a home. A home that is overpriced even slightly, will sit unsold as home values continue to drop even further below its set price. Care must be taken to price slightly below the falling market, to guard against “missing the mark” and allowing the market to fall even further “out from under” the home. This is why understanding the Colorado market cycles and pricing a home correctly based on the time of year, is crucial to getting a home sold and preserving your hard-earned equity.
*I will help you strategically price your home given the current market conditions of the area. We constantly study market data, to help ensure that we are fully in-tune with the market. We will advise you on the best pricing strategy to get your home sold.
#13: Sellers failed to act on constructive feedback from buyers.
Listening to buyer feedback and taking quick action to remedy the items that are easy to fix, is crucial to ensuring that your home is appealing enough to land a buyer. Understanding what buyers think about your home allows you to make necessary changes and capitalize on features buyers love most. Many agents either fail to promptly pass along useful feedback to their sellers, or they do not heed the advice and urge the sellers to quickly act on it. Buyer feedback with generally spell out the corrections needed to increase a home’s appeal. Unfortunately, some agents simply don’t pass it along and/or some sellers disregard the helpful advice and fail to promptly act on it.
How I Can Help: I will stay in touch with all of the agents who tour your home and ask for both positive and negative feedback. I will quickly relay all feedback and help you make any changes based on similar recurring feedback we receive from multiple buyers. I will never sugar coat any issues, and I’ll have the sometimes-tough conversations that sellers need to hear.
#14: SOMETHING WENT WRONG IN THE NEGOTIATION PROCESS.
A big mistake many sellers make is outright rejecting lowball offers, because they view them as unreasonable or insulting. The seller doesn’t bother to counter the offer, assuming that another buyer will soon come along and submit a higher offer (that may never come). Buyers who make these lowball offers are just testing the waters to see how low a seller will go, but they may have been willing to pay a much higher price if a counteroffer had been made. In fact, the offers received early in the listing are often the most interested, and solid offers the home will receive. Early offers tend to come from buyers who have had their automated search filters set to notify them of a house with the exact features, price, or location that yours has. The earliest offers tend to come from people who are looking for a home exactly like yours.
*We understand a delicate balance to the art of negotiation. We have the experience to know how to negotiate without alienating a buyer, while simultaneously not leaving money on the table either. We will always urge our sellers to counter any offer that comes in.
