Are You Waiting Until Spring to List Your Home?

While spring is a very active time to list your home, you’ll also deal with more competition from other sellers if you wait until then.

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Are you going to wait until the springtime to list your home?

If you’ve been following my video blog, you’ve seen all my latest market updates. I’ve talked about both selling during the holidays and selling during the springtime.

Spring is a very active time to sell. From now until then, home prices will probably rise a little bit, so you’ve got that on your side. One thing a lot of people don’t consider, though, is that listing inventory will dramatically rise in February and March. There are a few reasons why. One of which is a lot of people are convinced that springtime is the absolute best time to sell. No matter what anybody tells them, they’ll put their home on the market in February, March, or April.

Many sellers—contrary to my belief—think it’s a bad time to list their home because nobody is really looking for homes. In reality, a lot of homes sell during this time for amazing prices. When the new year comes, we see a huge influx of homes pop up on the market. If there’s a significant rise in inventory, the demand for your specific home will be lower. When buyers have more choices, they have more leverage.

So, while springtime is a very active time to sell a home, you’ll have a lot more competition and your home may be overshadowed by all the other homes on the market in your area. The reason I bring this up is because you’re either considering selling your home or you’ve tried to sell in the past and were unsuccessful.

If you know me, you know that I call a lot of homeowners who were unsuccessful selling their home in the past. Many of them say they’re not interested in selling their home until February, March, or April because they’ve heard that’s the best time to list.

I tell them the same thing I’m telling you today—if you’re looking to sell your home for top dollar, it’s usually best to sell when inventory is low and demand is high.

Focus on what your needs are first.

Keep in mind, though, everyone’s situation is unique, and it’s impossible to time the market perfectly. That’s why you want to focus on what your needs are first. If you can’t sell until March or April, then you can’t sell until March or April. If you have some flexibility, though, you might want to consider my advice. It could help you come away with an extra $10,000, $15,000, or even $50,000.

If you have any questions or you’re considering putting your home back on the market in the very near future or next spring and you’re wondering what it’s worth, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. Until then, happy selling!

Why It’s Important to Meet With an Agent Sooner Rather Than Later

Whether you’re buying or selling a home, meet with an agent sooner rather than later so you understand what you’re getting into.

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Why is it important that we meet sooner rather than later? The answer is different for buyers and sellers.

My team and I meet with clients on a daily basis, and we oftentimes learn that if we would’ve been able to meet with them sooner, the process would’ve been more efficient, the plan would’ve been more rock-solid, and we would’ve been able to help them achieve their goals more efficiently.

This isn’t to say that we don’t do those things when we meet with clients, but when you don’t have a lot of time to put a plan together and execute that plan, you have to compress a lot of things into a small window, and that can get stressful.

For example, I met with a buyer about four months ago who told me they weren’t interested in buying a home until December or January and that they’d rather meet then. I told them it was better to meet sooner than later and suggested we meet in October and put a plan together so that when they were ready to go, I’d be ready to go too. The buyer was adamant on meeting in December, though.

When we met in December, we were both on the same page, but because they were looking to buy a property, their first step had to be to get a pre-approval. When they pulled their credit, they discovered they had three small liens on their credit report that were very old. We now have to spend two or three months cleaning up that buyer’s credit so they can get a high enough credit score to qualify for a loan with a great interest rate. Their goal was to be in a new home by January, but now they’ll have to wait until March, April, or May.

I experience the same situation with sellers—I’ll speak to them in September or October and they’ll tell me they don’t want to sell until January. A lot of them assume that when they want to sell their home, all they have to do is meet with a Realtor, put a sign in front of the house, put a lockbox on it, and list it online.

What they don’t realize is every home sells for a different price depending on the agent selling it and what you do to prepare that property for the market—whether that’s staging, painting, decluttering, taking professional photos, etc. There’s so much that goes into the backend of preparing a home for sale that sometimes the process can take three, four, five, or even six weeks.

I went into one of these sellers’ homes last week and noticed there was a lot of furniture in there. I knew if I were to show that home as it was, I would’ve sold it for $10,000 or $15,000 less than what the market value was. If we spent some time decluttering the property, repainting it, making some minor repairs, staging it, and getting professional photos done, that would all take two, three, or four weeks. The seller, therefore, is no longer in a position to sell in January—they’ll have to sell in early-to-mid February

Reach out to a Realtor sooner rather than later so you understand what you’re getting into.

Whether you’re thinking about buying or selling—whether that’s in one month or one year—you’re better off meeting with an agent soon to understand what your options are. If your home is ready to sell or your credit is flawless, that’s great, but that’s doesn’t happen all the time. A lot of people don’t know what it takes to buy or sell a home, so reach out to a Realtor sooner rather than later so you can understand what you’re getting into.

If you have any questions about the importance of meeting with an agent sooner rather than later or you need help buying or selling a home, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. Until them happy selling!

How to Avoid Micromanaging Your Realtor

If you micromanage your own Realtor, odds are it will affect your bottom line. This is why you interview multiple agents—so you can hire one you trust. 

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Are you getting in the way of your Realtor?

What I mean is, do you trust the person you hired? If you trust somebody you hired—and you should trust the Realtor you hire—you’ll stand back and let them do the work, right? At the end of the day, if you’re going to do all the work, you should’ve just listed your home on your own. But because you know you’ll get a better price by listing with a Realtor or you know you don’t have the time to do all the work, you’ll hire a professional to get the job done.

In my experience, when my clients stand back and let me do what I know I should do, they always win. When I work with clients to try and micromanage me and stand over my shoulder, I tend to do not as well as I would like to, and ultimately that affects them.

A lot of our business (about 68%) comes by way of past client referrals, so many people we work with already know somebody who’s worked with us. There’s already a certain level of trust built in there because their mom, son, coworker, etc., referred us.

We also get many clients via the internet, and when we meet these people for the first time, we’re absolute strangers. How can you trust someone you’ve never even met?

If you get referred to a Realtor and you’re considering working with them, make sure you interview them. A lot of people just meet one Realtor and say, “Hey, you seem like a nice person—let’s do this” without having any expectations or strategies set in place. When clients feel like their expectations aren’t being met, they tend to micromanage the process.

Interview multiple agents before hiring one.

The reason it’s valuable to interview different agents is so you can understand what different agents can do for you. Every agent is different—they each have a different personality, experience level, track record, and network. Meeting with multiple agents and understanding what your options are will help you find someone you can trust.

Let’s say you had a handyman come into your house and you told them to do 10 or 15 different things and you’re standing over their shoulder saying, “What about this? What about that?” In my experience, you always get what you expect. If you expect the handyman to miss something, they’ll probably miss something. If you’re over their shoulder micromanaging them, it will probably distract them and make them more likely to miss something.

It’s the same relationship dynamic with your Realtor; it’s a very high-trust position. I work with a lot of different clients—some of them let me do my thing, and others tend to micromanage because they haven’t let themselves be vulnerable to my advice.

If I work with someone who says, “Robert, we hired you for a reason. You go and do what you have to do to get us what we need,” those clients will win. The clients who micromanage me and tend to get in my way will affect their own bottom line.

If you have any questions about interviewing Realtors so you can hire someone you trust or you’d like my help in buying or selling a home, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. Until then, happy selling!

Strategies for Moving Forward in December

For buyers and sellers, the strategy for moving forward in December needs to make sense in your particular situation.

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Before we start on today’s topic, I want to emphasize something that I talk about with my own clients: It’s very hard to time the market perfectly. The best strategy is to do what works for you in your specific situation. If you need to sell your home by early next year, then that’s what you need to do, instead of trying to perfectly time that decision with the market.

For those who have some flexibility or want to know what’s going on, I want to shed some light on the market.

It’s still a very strong seller’s market, the inventory of homes is still very low, and homes are still selling pretty quickly. In fact, I put a home on the market in November, and within six days, we got 12 offers, and the home sold for $25,000 above asking price. The interesting fact is that it sold for $21,000 higher than the most recent sale in that neighborhood. Some of that may have been timing, our marketing strategy, our pricing strategy, and other factors that we put a lot time and effort into, but the bottom line is that the activity we saw was unusual, and that’s a theme we’re seeing.

For sellers, it’s important to know that inventory is usually very low during the holidays, so if you’re listing your home, you’ll have a lot less competition. The buyers during this time are also more motivated, so you may see buyers submitting higher offers on your particular property.

However, you don’t want to list your home too close to the holidays, when many people, regardless of motivation, are going to be exiting the market. Listing your home anytime after the weekend of December 9 or 10 is probably the latest you want to go unless you have a serious need to sell. It’s also important to know that if you’re planning on listing your home in the new year, generally inventory will rise starting in mid-February, so you’ve still got some time to take advantage of that low inventory market.

I sometimes get a little bit of pushback from sellers who want to list in mid to late January so they can enjoy their holidays. The reason why I’d rather meet with someone sooner than later is that sometimes it takes time to prepare a home for sale. The best-case scenario is one or two weeks, and the worst is four, five, or six weeks, depending on what needs to be done. If you’re thinking of selling during that time period, it's a good idea to meet with a Realtor earlier so you have time to prepare your home for maximum sale price. In my experience, we actually spend more time preparing the home than the home is on the market.

There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy.

For buyers, again, your plan needs to make sense for your situation. Figure out why it is you're moving and what makes the most sense to achieve that end. There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy.

I can say this: inventory will grow in the new year. However, prices will probably rise by then as well. It’s kind of a give-and-take situation—you’ll have more options as a buyer, but prices and interest rates may go up.

If you or anyone you know is looking to buy or sell a property in the Orange County area or if you’re just looking to pick our brains about what makes the most sense moving forward, always feel free to reach out to me or my team. Also, if you have any video ideas you’d like to see me talk about in the future, please send them my way.

Until then, happy selling!