Ask yourself: Why should a home seller work with me?

Your answer to this question is essentially your Unique Selling Proposition, or USP—the narrative or story that defines why a client should choose you over the agent down the street.

While most of us have a ready answer to this question that we’ve developed over the years, we need to ask if it’s good enough. Is it compelling? Informative? Will a potential seller know exactly what we’ll do to sell their home faster and for more money than anyone else?

Before you answer, let’s take a quick look at some data from the National Association of Realtors.

• Out of all the first-time home sellers, only 17% worked with the agent they used previously.
• For repeat sellers, only 24% worked with an agent they worked with previously. This means that the majority of repeat sellers worked with one agent, then a different agent, then a different agent again!

As the data shows, very few sellers work with an agent they worked with previously when it comes time to sell their home. What this tells me that either:

Our USPs aren’t compelling enough to convince our clients that we’re the right person to sell their home.
We aren’t doing a good enough job of sharing our USPs with our clients.

Either way, it’s time to change the way we talk to our sellers! So what can we do to better show our value to sellers…?

Addressing Your Sellers’ Concerns

What are sellers’ concerns? What do they want from us as agents? In the same study, the National Association of Realtors put that exact question to sellers:

• 23% want their agent to “Help the seller market their home to potential buyers.”
• 14% want their agent to “Help find a buyer for the home.”
• 20% want help selling within a specific timeframe, and 19% want help pricing their homes competitively.
• More than 1/3 of all sellers said they want an agent to help them market to and find buyers from their home, and we have to address those concerns if we’re going to convince sellers to work with us.

However, today it’s not enough to give a 1000ft view of what we do to sell a home; we have to provide the specifics of how we’ll market their homes.

Consumers have a tremendous amount of transparency into the home selling process. With just a quick Google search, sellers can find the basics of what it takes to sell a home. What’s more, today’s consumers are also much more informed on the basics of marketing and aware of the latest marketing avenues and techniques, such as SEO, social media marketing, Craigslist and more.

With so much information available to sellers, we must share more detailed information on how we help sellers sell their homes quickly and for more. We must go into the details of our home sales and marketing strategy, and why our strategy will work for our sellers.

So how can we talk to sellers about the selling process while providing enough information for them to understand our unique services while not overwhelming with the boring, more technical parts? Use with the “3 P’s of the Home Selling Process.”

The 3 P’s of the Home Selling Process

The “3 P’s of the Home Selling Process” is a concept Garry Wise, Co-founder of Goodlife Realty and The Paperless Agent (and a hugely successful agent!), developed as a means to both inform potential clients about our unique home selling process and engage them in that process.

Here at GoodLife Realty, we share the 3 P’s with clients both before and during the listing presentation. We share the information via short YouTube videos beforehand to prepare the client for the listing presentation, which allows us to cover our services in more depth during the presentation and reinforce the information we’ve already shared.

This helps educate our clients and bring them in as a partner in the home selling process. That way, our sellers better understand their role and contribution to the process as well as the value we bring as agents.

Here are the 3 P’s and some tips on talking about them with clients!

1) Preparation

When selling any home, the first thing you must do is prepare the home to be sold. That means repairs, staging, and cleanliness. When discussing preparation with your client, let them know you’ll be doing a walkthrough of the home to see what repairs may need to be done before listing the home.

You should also discuss staging and cleanliness. Emphasize the importance of professional staging. You know the saying “a picture is worth 1000 words,” so find examples of before and after staging a property you’ve listed. You can also share statistics on the link between staging and home selling price, which you can find in the NAR Home Staging Profile. You can also refer your sellers to a professional cleaning company to ensure the home stays flawless while it’s listed.

By informing potential clients before the listing presentation, it becomes easier to convince sellers they need to prepare and stage their home. Check out an example of the video we share with sellers to inform them of the importance of preparation.

2) Price

After you’ve discussed what it takes to prepare their home, you can talk about pricing. Of course, you have your CMA, but you should also share some more general information such as the dangers of overpricing the home.
We use the slide below to illustrate how getting the best price is a combination of preparation and correct pricing. Here “Limbo” represents homes that are ill prepared and slightly overpriced.

We talk about this before we officially get to the CMA and the pricing of their home to prepare sellers for the pricing conversation. By showing sellers how important it is to get pricing right, our case for price of a home carries more weight.

Here’s where we get into the details of our marketing strategy. You want to share exactly what you will do to sell their home.

As an example, at our associated brokerage GoodLife Realty, we have a multi-phase campaign that’s broken into two parts: pre-MLS marketing and pos-listing marketing.

For pre-MLS campaign, we tell our potential clients how we will optimize SEO so their home will show up on the first page of Google, the blog posts we write to promote coming listings, Facebook Ad campaigns we run to generate buzz before the listing hits, and more!

For post-listing marketing, we describe the various channels we’ll use to put their homes in front of buyers. This means Facebook marketing and advertising, Craigslist, how our website coverts interest into leads and more!