EP: 0032 - Being Market Ready Day One (home selling tips) with William Elmer

When selling your home, the details matter. And there is a range of what price your home can sell for. The factors that a Realtor can help you with to help you get top dollar include, preparation, presentation, promotion and strategic pricing. William Elmer sits down with Paul Balzotti to talk about the programs and formula behind what has helped Will sell all of his listings in 2023 for well above asking price.

1:45 Market Ready Plus. The JLS  0% credit 

6:40: Being Market Ready Day One. It is all in the preparation.

12:00: Marketing to the backlog of buyers.


You can reach Wìĺĺiam at Williamelmer@johnlscott.com.

Transcript

welcome to the Real Estate podcast. I'm Paul Balzotti I'm here with Will Elmer Welcome, Will.

Thanks for having me.

Do you like to go by Will or William?

You know, and funny enough, I go by both. All right. I think I like in writing. I go by William more often than not, but casually. I go by will most of the time. But you can call me either the one I'll respond.

I'm going to stick with. I call you Will. But I wanted to. I didn't know on the podcast how you want to be referred. So we'll stick with Will.

Say Will and say Will and then just put William on. Deal, deal, deal.

And today we are talking about being market ready day one and that's a John L Scott program. Market ready one day. Market being market ready day one when selling your home and a couple of the programs that we have a affiliated with that the market ready plus program and just our listing launch program the reason why I wanted to have you on to talk about these programs is you were at another brokerage for for a year nominated Realtor rookie of the year. So congratulations on that. And you joined us earlier this year and we were having call we've been having conversations about these programs and the differences you've noticed on how it's helping having you help sellers And I thought, you know, if somebody is watching or listening to this, if you're considering selling your house in the future, whether you're using one of us or your usual are using somebody else, they're they're good programs to know about good, good things to understand if you're a realtor also just the general philosophy is is something to consider. So let's get into it, starting with market ready plus. Our 0%. That's essentially a 0% credit line that we offer home sellers when they're getting ready to sell their house so they can get the home market ready and then, you know, new roof, new paint, new carpet, whatever it is. And then they don't have to pay for the work until closing. Now, most people would think of that for a program like that and think it sounds gimmicky and or would be the same as trying to qualify for a home equity line of credit. I share with everybody this story about what you're doing right now.

Yeah. And I mean, I totally identify with the instinct to think maybe it's a gimmicky thing. I might get ready. Plus I think when I first heard about it was that same thing. It's like, yeah, but it's probably kind of a too good to be true. Yeah. Type of a program until I've met a client I'm actually currently working with right now on selling their home and when I went to meet with them, it's like I need a new roof on my house. I've owned the house outright for a year. I’m on Social Security, I don't have any active income and I haven't had a credit card as long as I can remember. I had no credit. I've tried to get a loan to get my roof replaced and I can't get a loan. I have a roofer I'd love to work with. So I said, let me let me look into this market ready plus program we have in our office and see And it was it was such an amazingly simple process for him to apply and really just based off of the equity of his house where he couldn't get a loan elsewhere, I couldn't get a HELOC he got approve for way more money than we needed to do roof repair and then miscellaneous repairs. for his house. He got approved for somewhere around $330,000 because of the amount of equity he had in this house. And we only needed 30 grand or so for the work that we needed. But it was really awesome to have that program to help him out and get more value out of his house and take away some of that extra negotiating power that buyers might have in this constantly changing market that we are in right now.

Yeah, and that, that there's two things I want to touch on there. One is part of being market ready day one is there's a couple concepts that we always talk about when you list at home or when somebody's selling their home. One of them is presentation and one of them is promotion and one of them's in the third one and that's actually a three piece is pricing. But just taking pricing out of it. Well, I guess pricing is directly related to this, but starting with presentation, it's like when you're preparing to sell your house, obviously everybody understands the better the condition, the more money you're going to get. But there's really a return on going from the biggest return is going from like below average condition to financeable in good condition. And then obviously it goes, you know, the return might change depending on whether you remodel a bathroom or kitchen. But you take a house like this, the guy is the client, I should say. The guy I happen to know it's a guy, but he's, you know, house rich. But maybe, you know, liquidity, maybe not a lot of liquidity. And you mentioned the roof and some other work. So let's say if you would have had just walked in and said, okay, let's list this house as is, what would be your approximate price versus what you guys did and then what you think it would sell for?

Yeah, I mean, I think the amount of work that we did is, you know, probably in the $30,000 range, it probably would have been a 50 to $75000 price difference because something like a roof replacement is just it's so much work for a buyer to take on somebody who is taking out a loan for the biggest purchase of their life. And then, we also have to somehow find funds to replace a roof at the same time. So taking that off the plate, you know, bare minimum, we get 100% return. But I'm projecting it to be significantly more than that.

Yeah. So, I mean, you're talking about when you do that work, it's literally if you're 50 to 75. So essentially twice, that's basically like a 200% return, essentially. So makes all the sense in the world. And also what's I didn't even realize about that program is that you could have somebody just on Social Security and I don't know why.

We're all holding our breath on that one. Like, is he going to get approved for $30,000 and then to have him be approved for so much more because it didn't really matter the income. It's the fact that we knew his house was going to sell. We know what the market value of the house is and we know how much equity he has in the house. So, yeah. It's a no brainer to be able to have that repaired. And the other thing that just a side note is that he was also able to work with his own people too. Yeah. So it wasn't getting contracted out to people we didn't know it didn't work with. It was a, you know, a two step process where the contractor just needed to upload, you know, a insurance and a W-4 and they were approved and ready to go to work and submit their bid on on the on the House to do the work. So he was able to use his own room for his own handyman to get the work done.

Sweet so okay, so now the work's getting done. Now we talk about our listing launch. Let's talk about our listing launch. So one of the programs that John L Scott has is Market Ready day one and our listing launch, which essentially is that presentation part, getting the house completely ready to be presented the right way and then obviously having quality pictures, professional pictures, video, Matterport, things like that and having all of that ready to go so that no day went on the market. All the promotions ready to go, the presentations dialed in, everything is 100% launching all at the same time for that opening weekend. We call that our listing launch. We have a language behind that. We have a checklist of things we go through, explain, you know, when you were working and this isn't really about our firm versus another firm. This is more about like as a realtor or as a home seller understanding this process and how important it is. So explain kind of like with our process, how like how that changed even you who was already doing real estate, how it changed your thought process on it?

Yeah, I mean, it's obvious that the first week in our market for any realtor to know how important that first week on the market but there was a certain there's a sort of philosophical and strategic approach that just really helped me realize some areas where I can push it up one more level for my my listings. And some of it was just as simple as like understanding idea of what a backlog of buyers is, right? Where there's at any given time, there's a whole bunch of buyers in any market, whether it's a buyer's market or a seller's market, that there might be 100 buyers just sitting and every week there might only be 5 to 10 new buyers entering the market. So as soon as you hit the market, you're instantly being exposed to 100 plus people who have been waiting for the right house to pop up. But as weeks go by, you're only going to be exposed to five or ten new buyers. So that's just how important that first weekend on market is to be, to have the repairs made that needs to be made, to have the pictures, to stage it properly, to have your marketing remarks dialed in to create a sense of demand and urgency with open houses to activate that backlog of buyers to take action to do something about it and not hope that you get it under under contract, you know, three or four weeks and you want to create that sense of urgency and demand to really bring people in and get that listing in their contract. And since I've since I've come to John L Scott, every single one of my listings has been under contract within that first week because I've really adapted all these ideas and philosophical approaches to the way in getting a listing ready and on the market.

That's awesome. And a couple of statistics that people should consider is right now 40% of homes, this is just today is what's the date today, October 31st and this can change seasonally and different times of year. Different times of year you can have different weeks. You are different. But right now we have 25% of homes selling in the first week. Right? When a new listing comes on, 25% of them sell in the first week and about 40 to 45% are selling in the first 30 days. So if you think about those statistics, it's like 25%. We'll sell that first week, then it drops to like 10% or like maybe 8%. The next week it goes to maybe 4% and then a week, four, maybe 3%. And then from there you're talking 2%. After 30 days, unless you do a price change or a significant shift in how you know you're doing marketing, but probably a price change potentially. So that's and the reason why it's only 40%, the rest of them that sell, some of them will slowly sell, but a lot of them it's because then they readjust the price. So it's like you're by far your best opportunity to get a strong offer is that first week. And then, of course, we all know that that's where 95% of the multiple offer situations occur is in the opening weekend. And certainly that's when John L Scott has another term. I'm sure you've heard Lenox talked about it before on is Lennox Scott, our CEO is getting premium pricing versus market price, which I love that term too, because it's like, what's a market price? Market price is about what you'd expect the house to get based on what the neighbors are getting and stuff like that. Premium pricing is when the house is dialed. You do all that extra work to dial it in and you do all that extra promotion and then two or three people or four people, five people, all one all agree that they want to write it off at the same time, don't agree, but they just do. And that creates those escalation clauses. And then that and then the over asking price offers which you've had several times.

Yes. Yeah. And I mean, that can even happen even if even if you can only do so much to get the house dialed in, if you still follow the steps of our listing launch program to create that sense of urgency by, you know, advertising it and open houses and everything, you can still find yourself in that spot as as I've had with a couple of my estate listings, for example, where they just, they, they can only get so far and how much you can dial the property. And while we can still follow the rest of the steps and possibly expect the same results to come from it.

Yeah, I mean I, I think that, and this is the reason why this is an important conversation also. And it's not just this cliche or not cliche. I don't know what the right term would be, but just this kind of thing that we're putting a fancy term on that everybody's doing the same thing is I am surprised how many realtors I'll see where you'll see them. List a house in the for sale sign is up until two or three days later, or they'll take some pictures, but then they're still finishing up some things and they'll be like, Let's just get it on the market. And then a few days later we'll redo the pictures, we'll update things. So the the reason this is a big deal is because there is a lot of listings that come on that do half a-- their approach.

Sometimes once you go on the market that first time, if you only got a couple of exterior pictures because you're waiting for the house to be cleaned on the inside or something to be fixed, that backlog of buyers has already seen the house, right? They've looked at it, they've passed on and it's yeah, you're now waiting more weeks because you're only going to have five, ten, 15 new people every week looking at the house, people who saw it last week and saw the first two pictures and weren't impressed then never come back, do it.

Right unless you do a substantial price reduction.

Unless you do a substantial.

You know, be like, Wait, what was that? House Yeah.

Which I would just, you know, if a house, if one of my listings, if we're not quite dialed in already, I want to recommend we wait another week. I think that is the correct day of week to launch on with the correct marketing and the correct number of open houses. And if we don't have all of those things fall into line timing wise, I would say we should just wait another week before we go on the market rather than just get it on market now.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It also makes me think about how buyers, you know, even though it's the biggest decision of their life right. It's so emotional and kind of wearing to look at home after home after home and be disappointed or whatever. And you have other things going on in your life. There is those people that, of course, that go on Zillow every day and scan every listing and love looking at homes. But there are a lot of people that are doing what you said. They're there. Just get just getting the new listing alerts or just getting on once a day seen on Zillow, Redfin or hopefully JohnLScott.com checking on what's new and then maybe whats reduced and then they're back off. And so it's like you have this very small window to make an impression on people and then if it's not selling and then your sellers being like, why don't you do something? What else are you going to do? It's like, Well, we have to change the front picture. We have to do something else. We have to like the reason why price comes up so much is not just because we're trying to obviously make it more competitive, but if it doesn't sell that opening weekend, it's also just to find new ways to get attention because we can you know, of course, we run social media ads, we do different things, but they're not ever as effective as that first couple of weeks.

No, not at all.

Yeah. And so when you when you said there's a couple of things you tuned up is that pretty much is just kind of like everything from it's just essentially the process of delaying if needed and just going a little bit further, would you say mostly with the presentation? More than anything.

I think the presentation I think that, you know, there was there's a lot of different opinions on something like staging, for example. And I think I've never felt that staging is more important than it is right now. And again, to show the property in the best light possible. But yeah, it's all those little things. It's going through the house and looking for the little objections that we can we can fix or correct or have somebody do something about. And if we can do something about it, but we can't do it in the right time, then let's make sure we're listing at the correct time to have the property as dialed in as possible. Because like we've already said this, we don't want to we don't want to miss those buyers. Yeah, I'll have them just go right past this.

Yeah. And I would I appreciate about how you work is when you're preparing a listing. Not only are you utilizing the market ready plus right now and totally all in on the market on the listing launch. But you're doing what every good realtor should be doing, which is you're really analyzing the situation and you know, we'll have conversely I've had conversations with you like be like hey this property this home has the or this a vacant land property has a street over here street over here. How do we want to do signage? How do we want to do how do we want to approach the marketing on this? Because it's zone this way. So there's these possibilities for it and and again, just so important and it can be I think the last comment I'll make on all this is people don't realize, they just think, what do you charge? What are you, 2%, 3%, 4%, 5%, 6%, 7%, whatever the percentage of that people do right now, there's such a range of what a property could sell for. There's a total range of what it could sell for, and that's not a 1% difference. It's a dramatic difference. And it's sometimes it's not even just the steps that we take as far as doing it. All right, with presentation promotion, but it's also analyzing and understanding where the buyer's going to come from and how to who to market it to.

Yeah, sometimes I have to stop myself or I have to come to you and say, hey, my, you know, my digging a little too deep and making sure I get every little piece of this listing detail? Is this the style code that I should be using? Whether it's a split level, I split level with the basement. But to me, every piece of that detail is important because I don't I don't ever want a buyer to be disappointed because the information was misrepresented. But I also want to get as much of the information out there available so that we can catch all the people who might be looking for a split level with the basement or maybe looking with a detached or detached ADU or what the zoning is on that vacant land. So they can have that right up front so that we can get it under contract and not have somebody, you know, get further into the process and then be disappointed or it's not what they thought it was going to be. So then they back out and then what does that do to our listing if it brings the value down. Yeah. So get it right away.

Yeah. So I love the way that you're analyzing it. I love the way you're doing it. And thank you for your testimony of the programs that we're offering and your good work, my friend. If you want to talk to somebody about those programs. And selling your house, Will is your guy or William, either way, He’ll respond either one and.

Respond to both of those and probably a few others.

And yeah, so thanks for coming on. Thank you for listening and watching. And if you're on iTunes, please, five star review would mean the world to us. Or if you're on YouTube, if you could subscribe to John L Scott Bellingham, we'd appreciate it. And thanks, guys. Cheers.