So in the process of trying to sell our home by owner we were contacted by phone and by email probably by three dozen different real estate agents who had seen our ad. In fact I thought it was only agents who were seeing our ads because we weren’t being contacted by any potential buyers, not even one time.
When I was originally contacted by Joel I was suspicious because it wasn’t the first call I had gotten from agents who had saw my ad on Craigslist that I had placed for sale by owner, and when he told me that I could get more for my money I was initially skeptical, but he sent me a list of comparables, and I reviewed those on my own and felt that, you know, he knew what he was talking about, and the home was actually worth over $20,000 more than I had initially had it listed for and possibly could sell it for.
We made $7,000 more after all expenses were paid to both agents, and that was something that was very surprising to me because I had always anticipated that we would net much less, including an agent that we were trying to sell it by owner. So initially we were very adamant about not using an agent, you know, Joel was bold enough to contact us despite that and not once, but twice, three times, come by the home, really showed me how hard he works and how persistent he is with, and how professional he is with his business that, you know, he doesn’t take “no” for an answer and that’s somebody that you want on your team if you’re trying to sell your home, and he told me that his average turnaround time was 14 days, and that kind of raised my eyebrows because I had listed this home before, and it had gone for months without getting an offer and it hadn’t sold.
When he told me that I either thought, one, it couldn’t be true, or two, he really has something special like he has selling homes down to a science, and after listing my home I had my home under contract within 10 days. Some of the parts of the 52 marketing plan that wowed me the most or stood out the most that I wasn’t expecting was the quality of the photographs that they had taken of our home of both the interior and the exterior of the home. My wife and I had taken many pictures of this home over the last eight or nine years that we have lived in it, but we have never seen pictures like the ones they have taken before of our home. They were so crisp. The lighting was perfect. The home looked very large, and the exterior photos of the home were taken with an aerial helicopter which really made an impression on both us and the final product, and we really think that helped contribute to getting our home sold within 10 days.
How quickly they were able to Google search, optimize our listings amongst the thousands of others that were listed with a few simple searching keywords in Google for characteristics of the home. For the people might want to buy in our area, our home came to the top of the list of the Google search and we were very impressed with that, and getting out of starters we were leery about listing the home with an agent who we didn’t have face-to-face contact with, but because their communication was so clear and crisp whether it was on the phone or email, or you’re leveraging technology to get documents signed is as if we were right across, you know, the real estate agent table with them doing business.
On the very first Saturday that the home was listed, Ann and Joel had an open house. They came, parked the car at the house, started distributing flyers themselves, and didn’t return for hours after that, and that was just an old school, in the trench, grassroots approach to how to get a home sold very quickly.