Focus On Your Real Goals When Selling A Home
If there is one thing a real estate agent is not fond of hearing it’s, “Sell my home fast!” Agents are matchmakers, basically, and they stand between the seller and the buyer or the buyer’s agent. Agents may have potential buyers in mind and give them a call once your home is listed, but everybody is too busy these days and most of the time we are preoccupied with what is right in front of us. What I’m saying here is this: If you are expecting your agent to be proactive, to make phone calls on your behalf, to post ads online and to network with other agents about your home for sale, just realize those things may or may not happen. And most importantly, they may not happen on your desired time frame. This is simply a fact of business life today.
So, when I need to sell a house fast, or I simply want to sell my home fast to accomplish other goals, I take on all the marketing responsibilities myself. I don’t expect my agent, if my home is listed, or my assistants, who work for me everyday, to have the same sense of urgency that I personally feel. Nobody is going to feel that urgency but me. And that’s why I have a plan of action to rely on whenever I want to sell my home fast. I pull out my trusty notebook (yes, I wrote the plan long before there were computer programs) and follow my own checklist in order to market my home and get it sold quickly.
For the most part it all boils down to finding the buyer who is already looking for my home. It’s not really about selling anyone a home, that’s an old-fashioned, out-dated idea that never worked too well anyway. I’m not saying that sales skills are not required, but what I’m saying is that finding your buyer is your most important task. Then, after you find him or her, negotiating a sale may require sales skills.
This is a big subject, too big for one article, but you get the idea here. To sell my home fast I have to focus on the first goal, finding the buyer, and then move on to the next goal, closing the buyer and getting signatures on a sales agreement. While this all might sound the job of a real estate agent, I’ve found that in my business as an investor I have to step up to the plate to conduct marketing activities in order to sell my home fast.