I'm looking for an agent in Staten Island, NY to sell my home.
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You’re ready to sell your home in Staten Island, NY and you’re wondering where to start?
First you’ll want to interview multiple agents to see who you feel comfortable with. Choosing the right agent isn’t easy. Many agents will sound repetitive since all agents have access to the same tools. So how do you choose the right agent to help you sell your home? It can be a daunting task but ultimately you’ll want to choose an agent that you feel most comfortable with since you will be working closely with them until your home is sold. The days of putting a sign in the ground and listing a house on the MLS are over. Agents need to do much more than that to get homes sold in today’s real estate market. This article walks you through a transaction from when a home is listed for sale all the way up to the closing.
The Listing Appointment
Job interviews can be a stressful experience for many people. The listing appointment is essentially a job interview where you, the homeowner, will employ the services of an agent to sell your home. You start by showing me around your home while I give my input on what needs to be done to get your home ready for sale. The idea here is not to point out what’s wrong with your home but to point out what should be done in order for you to get the highest possible offer. I do this by looking at your ROI (Return On Investment). In other words, we’ll look at the possible gains you’ll make from doing work to your home. Work can vary from nothing at all, to complete room makeovers, to the holy grails of home renovations – kitchens and bathrooms. Most suggestions will be minimal. Maybe touching up some paint, removing some personal pictures, or moving some furniture around to optimize a room’s square footage.
Once your home is ready we’ll talk about price. I will come prepared with a CMA (Comparative Market Analysis) of your home that looks at homes similar to yours in your area that are active, under contract, and sold, all in the last 12 months. We’ll also look at expired listings and discuss why they didn’t sell. After some discussion about the current Staten Island real estate market, we’ll agree on a price to list your home and sign all of the listing paperwork digitally on an iPad. It’s actually pretty painless with a few disclosure statements and a listing agreement that looks like this :
Marketing Your Staten Island Home For Sale
Once the listing paperwork is signed, I take around 50 quality photos of your home that you and I will sort through and ultimately choose 25 photos for your marketing plan. Why 25 photos? Because statistics show listings with more than 5 photos (the average on Staten Island), are 300 times more likely to get views online. And 25 photos is the maximum allowed on most of our web partners where your home will be advertised. More on that later. After we choose the 25 photos, I will edit and process those photos with photoshop to optimize each one. Next I’ll order a “for sale” sign that suits your property. The “for sale” sign in front of your house is just as important as the online marketing. Staten Island residents are constantly down sizing and up sizing. And guess what? They will probably buy a home right around the corner from where they live now. I’ve seen it happen several times. That’s why the “for sale” sign out front is important.
Once the sign is in the ground and the photos have been processed, I enter your home on the Staten Island MLS exposing you to several hundred active real estate agents…and all of their buyers who’s search criteria fit your home. In today’s tech savvy world, the internet is the main source of information for buyers. Statistics show that 9 out of 10 real estate transactions start on the internet. To enhance the search ability of your home, I include social media and blogging into my internet marketing campaign as well as a single property website domain dedicated solely to your home.
“Just Listed” color postcards will be sent out to area residents.
Communication
I can’t stress enough how important I think communication is throughout a real estate transaction. According to statistics from the National Association of REALTORS, sellers fire their agents because of a lack of communication. Think about that for a second. They don’t fire their agents for doing a bad job, they fire them because they don’t know what kind of job they’re doing since they don’t talk to them! Selling a house can be a pretty stressful experience. I can’t change that, it’s in the nature of the game. What I can do is to be on top of my game and make sure I do everything possible to minimize the stress for you.
I start by following up for feedback after every showing and letting you know not only when I get it, but also when I don’t. A lack of feedback means no interest from the potential buyers and you really don’t need to know more than that.
If you don’t get any offers, you’ll get regular updates on the market to let you know whether your house is still positioned well on the market or if we need to adjust the strategy and the price.
Offer & Closing
So you have an offer on your property. Now what? Now all of the work I have done up to now takes shape and we begin negotiating. I will work closely with you and offer negotiating advice to obtain the best possible outcome to meet your goals. Once we negotiate an acceptable offer to both you and the buyer of your home, I coordinate with the attorneys, inspector, appraiser, buyer’s agent, and the bank or mortgage broker to ensure that you get into a favorable contract in a timely fashion, usually about two weeks from the accepted offer date. The buyer will then apply for his mortgage and closing of escrow usually takes anywhere from 4 to 8 weeks from the executed contract date (signed by both buyer and seller). If there’s no mortgage involved then escrow can be closed as soon as title is clear, usually 2 to 3 weeks.
It’s easy to sit here and type about what happens when you list your home for sale. But every deal is different. And every client (buyer or seller) is going to react differently to unique situations that may or may not arise. That’s where hiring the right agent comes into play.
Remember…interview several agents and choose wisely.