Your expectation of a listing agent is to get your property sold within your time constraints and for the most money possible in the current market. While we can’t manufacture buyers, what we can do is to increase the odds of grabbing more buyers’ eyes, achieving more showings, and hopefully receiving more and better offers. We can then professionally negotiate the best value possible, hold it together, and close the transaction. If you understand more than this, you can also judge your agent accurately and either correct your Realtor® or reward your Realtor® with a renewed listing.
Our #1 Responsibility is to Price Your Property Properly
Pricing is not about what the seller needs or wants for the property, nor is it about one’s intuition or the impression the home gives. Pricing is about hard-core research data obtained from comparable sold properties (real value), and then strategically assessing the competition to achieve the seller’s goals. There is no responsibility more important than this. An honest Realtor® will still occasionally be corrected by the marketplace (that keeps us humble) but no Realtor® can pull-one-over on the marketplace. The market is the most powerful force; no one controls it.
Market conditions are about all this and more. Conditions change in many ways with every locality. In our rural areas, the first year of “normal” sales after the great recession was in 2015; 3 years after Portland’s recovery. Carlton may be sky-rocketing because of the wine industry, but the neighboring town of Yamhill is quite a different story. Downtown McMinnville is hot and Willamina is selling now, but there is no comparison the volume or the pricing between the two.
Our job is to know the local markets, the trends, the issues, and the challenges so that we price the property appropriately and manage the listing period as well as possible. Another part of our job is helping you with your expectations and responses to market conditions. The most challenging of markets is a changing market, and sometimes the greatest challenge to sellers is the ability to adapt to new conditions, or be patient while thing adjust.
We have a saying that the listing agent begins as a hero in the eyes of the seller (great expectations!), but it goes downhill from there, sometimes way down because the end result is less than the dream. On the other hand, a buyer’s agent, begins at a disadvantage without trust from the buyers, but in the end achieves a dream for the buyers, and so ends the transaction as a hero. While it is good to interview more than one Realtor®, sometimes the competition to win the client can cause the promise of price to be overstated. Learn more about establishing value and ask your Realtor® to show you the data to support their claim.
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