Seller's Strategies

Speaker 1: [0:09] Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Awesome in Seattle podcast. This is your host, Christian Nossum. I am the founder of the Awesome Nossum Group at Wilson Realty. We are a team of real estate agents here in the Seattle area. And I am joined by my awesome co-hosts, the one, the only Jason Saldarriaga.

Speaker 2: [0:28] Who, me?

Speaker 1: [0:31] And the dog whisperer, also known as Mr. Les Cutting.

Speaker 2: [0:36] Hello

Speaker 1: [0:38] That's it, just hello. Uh, today's episode is a very interesting one, and it is … Although it's kind of geared towards sellers, it's actually, there's a lot of information in here that is going to be fantastic for buyers. Today's episode is all about seller strategies, and we're gonna be digging into the mind of the seller and what strategies are working right now, what strategies help buyers really present their best and strongest offer, and also how you as a buyer could potentially craft your offer to make it the most desirable. Some of the things we're gonna go over today are seller pre-cured inspections, pre-inspections, the strategy behind offer review dates, and, you know, overall pricing strategies that we're seeing right now that are working. If you're a seller, you're definitely gonna wanna listen to this, and if you're a buyer, you're definitely gonna wanna pay attention to, uh, to these strategies, 'cause it's really gonna inform you on how to make a very strong offer. So let's start it off with inspections, pre-inspections, all that fun stuff.

Speaker 2: [1:41] All right. So let's talk inspections, guys. So what a home inspection is is you get your inspector, you see all the issues that there is within the house in order to move forward or not. So if there's something catastrophic in the house, you can back out, or if there's, if everything checks out and it's, everything is all good, you can move forward. Some sellers, they opt to get a seller procured inspection. So that means they get an inspection before putting the house on the market. Um, it's very common to see now, especially during COVID times, some sellers don't want people in and out of their house. If you are in a competitive area, you're gonna have lots of buyers, lots of offer on your offer review date, you can do an inspection so the buyers know of the upfront issues, and then they can waive the inspection to make their offer stronger. Some sellers opt to do no pre-inspections, um, at all, because they don't want people coming in and out of the house damaging things, and just for liability issues in general. Um, also with COVID, you know, they don't want multiple people in and out of their house. That, I mean, you have a couple, an inspector, and then let's say you multiply that by 10 other people, that's almost 30 people in and out of your house. So especially during the time of COVID, um, when people should be social distancing and limiting contact, some sellers opt to do no pre-inspections. So that sends us over to the offer review period.

Speaker 3: [2:58] Yeah. We've, uh, all heard about Seattle's competitive market. If you don't know about this by now, we have, what, 36 episodes where we discuss it? Every single previous one. Um- Yep … but basically, you know, in a competitive situation, one of the thing- one of the things you see a lot of are offer review dates. This is a date when you list your house that you publicize and say, "All right, we just came on the market." It's Thursday. Next Tuesday we're gonna review offers at noon. And what this means, it kinda sets a timeframe for buyers to get their ducks in a row to see the property, maybe do a pre-inspection like Les was just talking about, and then come Tuesday at noon, present an offer. Not always do sellers wait until offer review dates. They always have the ability to an ex- to accept offers early. So sometimes a buyer'll come in, they see a house that they love, and they see that in four days there's an offer review date, but they wanna snatch this up before then. And it is not uncommon to see this. Um, it can be frustrating for the other buyers who are waiting. But if the buyer who really wants it and presents an early offer presents an offer that just blows the, uh, sellers away to the point that it, it's in their best interest or they feel convinced to accept an offer early instead of waiting to see what offers come in come offer review date, you know, it does happen that they accept the offer early. The reason sellers have review dates, first off, it's to drum up interest, particularly right at the start when you list a house. You know, what's really hard with listings, one of the things, is when they sit on the market for a long time It kind of, you wanna use momentum to your advantage, but the opposite's also true. If you don't have momentum, it's really hard to build it. So if a house sits, you know, it's been on the market for two days, there's potentially, there's gonna be a lot more eyes on that house because there's a, a lot of people seeing it for the first time. But if it's now sitting for 30 days, people see that on their searches, they might overlook it much quicker because either they've seen it already or they just assume, you know, there's enough other options, um, that are newer. Um, if something's been sitting, it's been filtered and curated through a lot of other eyes, and I'm just not gonna waste my time. I assume they saw something wrong with the property or… It really can diminish the momentum you see the longer stuff sits. And using offer review dates really incentivizes interest out of the s- the, the starting gate.

Speaker 1: [5:39] Yep.

Speaker 3: [5:39] It creates that

Speaker 1: [5:39] sense of urgency,

Speaker 3: [5:40] for sure. Exactly. The other thing is, you know, we talk about competitive situations, and you hear about, you know, uh, houses that get 30 offers. Usually, that's on an offer review date. Come offer review date, there's 30 offers on the table, and they're not just an offer saying, "We'll buy it for X amount. We'll buy it for 700,000." The other offer says 725. You know, no, what they actually have are call… are escalations. And what an escalation is, is basically, uh, like a, a bidding, uh, an auction built into your offer. And what this stipulates basically is, "Here's my offer. It starts at 700,000," which is list price, let's say. "But we're willing to beat any offer up to $750,000 by $5,000." This is how you get those escalations and you sell proper- you see properties selling for significantly above list price. With offer review dates, there is just natural dynamics in the market in terms of timeframes. Generally speaking, this is not a 100% across the board because there's nothing limiting people to not, uh, adhere to this timeframe. But what you generally see is most listings come on the market On the s- the s- the back half of each work week, so Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Specifically Thursday and, and somewhat Friday. Those are, like, the two pop- most popular days for listings to pop on the market. And then if there is an offer review date, you generally see those on the following Monday, Tuesday, sometimes Wednesday. And now a- again, across the board, there's inconsistency here. Christian, for example, I want you to really quickly tell your story about buying your house that had a really- Yeah … short timeframe.

Speaker 1: [7:30] Yeah. So we got really lucky with our house. It hit the market, I think it was late on Friday, maybe it was the afternoon on Friday, and then they had an offer review date of Monday at 9:00 AM And so really, if you think about it from a buyer's perspective, if a property comes on the market on a Friday later in the day, maybe they'll see it that day, maybe they won't see it until Saturday morning. Then they're like, "Okay, well let's schedule to go-- schedule a time to go see it with our agent." You know? Sometimes you can do the same day, sometimes it's the next day. Um, sometimes it's, you know, two or three days out, depending on how busy you as a buyer, your schedule is and, uh, and how busy your agent is. So there weren't, with ours, there weren't that many people that had seen the house. There was only a handful of people that had seen it. I, as someone that had… I mean, we had extremely specific criteria, and we had a very small elementary school boundary, physical boundary or… A-and, and we were really tr- looking at everything that came on in the market that met all of our criteria. And thankfully, no one else made an offer, and this was in a extremely competitive part of the market. I think this was, what, four, five years ago now? And it was super hot. There were multiple offers on everything, similar to now. And we just got really lucky because no one else made an offer because the, the offer review date was just, it just wasn't on the market long enough. You know, came on late Friday, reviewed early Monday. We were the only offer, and we got it accepted, thankfully. So-

Speaker 3: [9:07] Yeah. So it can, you can use it to your advantage on occasion.

Speaker 1: [9:10] Mm-hmm.

Speaker 3: [9:11] Um, and like I said before, you know, sellers can accept offers before the review period, although sometimes they do explicitly say like, "We're waiting."

Speaker 1: [9:21] Yep.

Speaker 3: [9:21] But even with that, if somebody comes in and throws money o-on the table, I mean, sellers are going to consider it. That would be, you know… If it's, if it's an outrageous offer, th- even if they say, "We'll wait," you know, they might not. And you do see this on occasion. So it's, that's where a good agent comes in that's representing you and really builds that relationship with the listing agent to make it clear, "I have a interested buyer. Keep us posted if anything changes." And a good listing agent from a seller's perspective should build those relationships as well because they might be able to bid up other offers that they receive. If they get an offer early, it's in the best interest of the sellers that everybody who said they're interested in buying the property gets reached out to and has a chance to beat that offer, right? Um- Yep … so there are pros and cons to accepting an offer early. You know, as a seller Uh, first off, it's nice not having to wait. You get an offer accepted, y- the house is off the market. You're moving forward with selling your house. You also, you know, most likely it's a pretty good offer if you're entertaining it early. As a buyer, you risk potentially overpaying or putting on more risk than you might need to otherwise. It's not- Mm-hmm … it's not entirely uncommon for offer review dates to lapse. In other words, you set an offer review date for Tuesday, and then you look on Wednesday and the house is still on the market. And if you really present a crazy offer as a buyer to a seller before the review date, you don't know for sure how much interest there'll be. A lot of times you have an idea, though, let's be honest. You do have an idea. Um- Yep … and then of course, as a buyer, it can be pretty stressful playing this game, presenting an offer really early and most likely just going as crazy as you can with an offer to entice the seller to take it off the market early. So- Keep in mind, if you do see houses sit on the market or, uh, past offer review date, which is not uncommon, it happens in Seattle, a lot of times they'll remove the offer review date and then just say, "All right. Now we'll just review offers that come in, so come see the house. If you like it, present an offer." And then if it sits for a lengthy amount of time, which we'll discuss in a, in a bit, you might do a price drop, and there'll be more about that in a second. But before we go over that, Christian, if you wanna talk about multiple offers.

Speaker 1: [11:52] Yeah. Piggybacking off of the offer review date. So let's say the house came on, uh, for an example, let's just say it came on the market on Thursday, and let's say we're the seller and we're gonna

review offers on Tuesday at 2: [12:03] 00 PM. Okay?

So Tuesday at 2: [12:07] 00 PM comes, we have received, let's just say five offers. Great. Now what do we do? So now what we do on our team is we have a spreadsheet that essentially tries to compare every offer in an apples to apples way, in a very clear and concise manner, just to make it easy for you as a seller to pick which offer you like the best. So we have a ton of different categories, and we list out every potential contingency or difference between the offers, just one on top of the other. So you can just look at it really quick and go, "Okay. Well, these guys, you know, all five of them have escalation clauses. This person's escalation clause goes up to, let's just say, seven fifty. This person stops at seven forty. This one stops at seven thirty, this one stops at seven twenty-five, w- and so forth." So now you go, "Okay. Well, price-wise, these are the best offers, but let's look at the other contingencies. Have they included an inspection contingency? Have they taken the seller procured inspection that we provided? What's their closing date? What kind of financing do they have? How much is their down payment?" There's a ton of different contingencies that we're going to be looking at, but this is, this is the whole purpose of it. Our job is to make this easy for you as a seller to choose which offer is the strongest, and that's where we then go over the pros and cons of each offer and each contingency within each offer, so that you really do understand how much risk you're, you're accepting or, or not taking on by accepting one offer over another. It's not always price that is the winner. Everyone kind of assumes price is the number one factor, but sometimes it's not. And there's definitely been times where someone with the highest price didn't have the strongest offer, and our sellers went with another offer even though it wasn't the highest. But the… maybe they didn't, uh, waive their financing contingency, or maybe they Had a very small down payment with a lender that isn't very desirable to work with based on their reputation, and they had an inspection contingency in there, and they just had every contingency in play, whereas, you know, a less or a lower-priced offer maybe has no contingencies, and maybe they're all cash. That's where a seller needs to decide, "Well, how much risk am I willing to take on with this offer?" And there's sometimes, you know, a second round of negotiation that goes on as well. Let's say there's two offers that are very, very similar that are kinda far and away the two best offers. Generally, when you're representing a buyer, you're going to ask the listing agent, "Hey, can you let me know if there's anything we can do to make our offer better? When you review all the offers, if we're close, please let me know so that we can tweak our offer to improve it." And so when agents say that, that's what, as our, as the listing agent, that's what we should do, go back to those two people and say, "Hey, you guys are the top two offers. You're almost identical. I'm gonna give you guys one last chance to increase or change your offer any way that you, you think you, you would like to do." And sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. Just recently, for us on our listings, there's been a few cases where the price increased an additional 15 or $25,000 just because of this kind of second round of negotiation, if you wanna look at it that way. So yeah,

Speaker 3: [15:46] it just- Yeah, if you think of a… If, if you think about it like at eBay, you know, you bid up to $100 for this painting, and then if they went and said, "All right, you're in the…" Y- y- all… They sent an email to the top three people who bid it up the most and said, "All right-" You're up at, uh, you're all the top three. If you wanna bid up the highest, here's your chance. That's kind of what some situations afford with real estate with, with these, uh, multiple offer situations.

Speaker 1: [16:14] Yep. Do you wanna talk more about pricing, Jason?

Speaker 3: [16:17] There's so much to discuss here. But to begin, why do sellers underprice properties? Um,

Speaker 1: [16:23] you know- Yeah, that's, that's one strategy that people are taking right now, for sure.

Speaker 3: [16:26] Yep. And you do see this, it makes sense if you think of the dynamics here, because you wanna entice people to see the property. The more buyers that see the property, the more chances you get to have offers, and the more offers you get, the higher the ending price might be when it escalates, potentially. Like I said before, you want momentum. You want in- inertia building up, and you wanna, as a seller, take advantage of that. I will say also, sometimes underpricing properties is just by accident. Um, you know, there's a lot of zeros when you think of $700,000, and the people inputting listings sometimes forget how many zeros are included. So instead of it, instead of it being $700,000, you might see a property listed for $700. And then- Two hours later, all of a sudden zeros appear and it's 700,000. You do see this. I always chuckle. I always think, "Should I just present an offer for myself?" Like just- Yes … here, because I can write one up really quick. Like, "Here, I'll buy it for $700." " Speaker: Here, all cash. I'll close tomorrow." Yeah. In fact, in fact, I'll go- No contingencies … I'll go 100% over that. I'll, I'll buy it for 1,400 bucks. And then there's also strategy, and you see this with just retail in general, with anything. There's strategy around the exact number that you price stuff at. So instead of pricing something, a property at 750,000, you'll often see it priced at $749,950, for example. And a lot of this has to do with just the dynamics, uh, of how buyers search for properties. You always put a limit, a price limit. And so, you know, if you go at 750 versus 751, anybody looking at properties up to 750 are not gonna see that other property that's only $1,000 over that. So it's in your best interest potentially to list it right below those big step changes that a lot of the platforms use to delineate price ranges.

Speaker 1: [18:32] Can I add in a, a recent example of this?

Speaker 3: [18:35] Yeah.

Speaker 1: [18:35] So one of our list- listings recently, um, there was a almost identical house, uh, in the same, on the same street that had… It was really actually the same house. A developer came in and built the exact same house. The house across the street added, really in the upstairs, took part of the rec room and made it into a fifth bedroom. Ours didn't have a fifth bedroom. We only had four. Uh, but the square footage and everything else is exactly the same. That house, a month prior to us coming on the market, sold for $10,000 more. I think it was 510. And we came on the market at 500. Now, the reason that we came on at 500 was, one, we had one fewer bedroom, but also it was somewhat strategic because we knew that if we came on at 510, we would lose some buyers that set their price criteria up to 500. And in fact, I actually received a phone call from an agent saying, "Hey, can you explain to me the pricing that you guys did on this house?" And I explained what I just said here, and she goes, "Yeah, you're actually 100% correct. That's how we're even seeing it. Because if it was priced at 510, we wouldn't have seen it." Because we know, and the buyer's assuming That in this market, with it being so competitive, there's gonna be multiple offers and the price is going to escalate. So they were anticipating a 20 to $25,000 price increase on top of whatever they set their search range at. So that's another thing to consider as well, is some buyers are… It's neighborhood and property type specific, but some buyers are setting their searches w- you know, about 25,000, sometimes 50,000 below what their budget is, because they're assuming prices are going to increase. So if you set it at, you know, a higher price, you're probably gonna miss all those buyers.

Speaker 2: [20:34] Exactly.

Speaker 3: [20:34] Yep. And then tying in with that is price drops. In Seattle, you're seeing a little more of this with certain types of properties, like condos, than single family homes, but even across the board you do see price drops on occasion. You might be wondering how long do you wait until dropping the price, and there's so much to the, the strategy here. I will say, in the good old days, in the good old days- … um, when things were a little less competitive, and Christian has a lot of experience with this. You, you… Because he's so much older than everyone else here. He's, you know- Hey, ancient … a good three years older than us. But yeah, in the good old days, you would see properties kind of play to a pretty set schedule, where after 30 days, for example, you would, almost like clockwork, would see properties decrease, uh, pri- uh, drop their price if they sat on the market. And then after another few weeks they would drop it again. And today you see that on occasion, but it's a little more ambiguous, a little more uncertain. A lot of times there's so much at play here. When you go and list a house, the sellers might have a very set price in their head that they want to list the house for. But the listing agent might have a very strong opinion about what it should sell for, and it might be less than what- The seller thinks. And part of the listing agreement might include a schedule in terms of, "All right. We'll list it your price, seller, um, what you wanna list it for, even though I think that's a little high. But after three weeks, we will lower the price, and this is the plan." And you get it in writing. You do see that on occasion. Yep. Um, depending on the situation.

Speaker 1: [22:22] And we used to see that a lot more, you know, when the… when it wasn't a seller's market, but when it was, when it was a buyer's market. When the buyers were the ones in charge. There were probably seven or eight or nine months worth of inventory, as opposed to the two weeks, three weeks of inventory that we have now. I mean, when there was just, the market was just flooded with homes for sale, sometimes agent would, agents would have these pre-written out schedules of price drops, and it was almost like clockwork, like you just said, Jason. It was, it was pretty common. It was, uh, you could almost, as a buyer, you could actually anticipate the price drop. And you could sometimes get a deal, because you would assume that they're gonna drop the price after 30 days, after sometimes 45 days Almost always after 60 days on the market. And you could come in on day 29 and say, "All right, well," um, and often, depending on the price range and stuff like that, like it would be a pretty obvious price drop that they would do. You know, 25,000 was pretty common because they're trying to get into that next price search tier. Um, sometimes it's less. But you could come in with what you anticipate the price drop being and, uh, get the offer accepted prior to them dropping the price, and then you don't have any competition. And then you're able to go in there with your inspection contingency and actually be able to negotiate, versus waiting for them to drop the price and now there's competition for that house potentially, because now it's finally priced correctly and now you're competing and you don't have any room to negotiate with the inspection and yeah.

Speaker 3: [23:59] Yeah, exactly. But now, in the current market, it's, like I said, a little more variable.

Speaker 1: [24:06] Very much

Speaker 3: [24:06] so. And, a- a- and every situation's different. You know, there's the seller's desires, there's the local market dynamics. What you see right now, for example, in certain neighborhoods with like condos, the, a lot of condos are sitting for a good amount of time. Some of them are seeing, seeing price drops. Others are just sitting, and I think that might have to do with the dynamics at play. Condos are suppressed right now because of COVID. COVID's not gonna be with us, COVID-19 hope- uh, hopefully won't be with us forever. Maybe COVID-20. Hopefully, oh, God, knock on wood. But, um, but you know, uh, there's temporary things, and a seller might be more interested in just, "Okay, I have a set price and I'm willing to wait it out," instead of, you know, "I need to sell this tomorrow." So there, every situation's a little different. And that really ties in with why a seller would do a price drop in first place. So, you know, if no offers come in by offer review date, you might wait a little bit after that, and if interest begins to wane, you might wanna have that conversation with your agent. "Okay, how do we build back the momentum?" Yep. You might get feedback from a lot of buyer's agents about the price.

Speaker 1: [25:17] Yep.

Speaker 3: [25:17] You know? Ring, ring, uh, ding, dong, the lights are on, right? Like- Wake up. You, it's overpriced-

Speaker 1: [25:24] Yep … Speaker 3: um, if that happens. You know, the seller, again, might insist on a certain price, and like I said before, you might have that discussion with your listing agent that, "All right, well, we'll try for that price, and we'll see how it goes, and if not, we can try it more on what the market says it's worth." Yep, and it's not- Um- … always price drop that's the first… I mean, it's definitely not the first line of defense when you're trying to drum interest up again on the property, but it's definitely one of the things. And as a buyer, that's something that you need to pay attention to, and as a seller, you know, hiring a good agent that knows how to market a home, that's gonna help you hopefully not have to drop your price. But if you do, there'll be a, you know, a toolbox of things that they can do before it's just time to drop the price. There's some other marketing tactics that we employ, so.

Speaker 3: [26:11] Yeah. And one of those tactics, a little tip is, especially if you're doing a price drop, you might wanna reshuffle the photos- Mm-hmm especially the main photo for the property. Because a lot of apps, a lot of searches, you know, the price drops pop up first on the search, and then if you change the first photo, people who have been looking at your listing, they've, for the last month, because it's been sitting on their search for four weeks, it's now a new, uh, picture. They might give it more attention because they don't recognize it, and it, it helps the marketing there. So a little tip. You'll see that on occasion. Good agents generally do stuff like that. Yep. I will say one last thing just to end with pricing. Every MLS, I assume, has different rules here, but in Western Washington with the Northwest MLS, price drops, price changes have to be significant. There's no set amount on what this means, but you can't just drop a pr- uh, the pri- the price of your house by $1. And the reason for that is the MLS views that as gaming the system, because again, when you make a price change, it'll pop up Number one on their, everyone's search because there's a change to the listing, and that's, uh, uh, that didn't really make a material or a significant change to the overall price. And so the MLS doesn't want you to do that. So just a, you can't be too ridiculous with this. You can't drop a dollar every day.

Speaker 1: [27:34] Yep.

Speaker 3: [27:34] Um, so just keep that in mind.

Speaker 1: [27:36] Yep.

Speaker 3: [27:36] If we wanna shoot it over to Les now to, uh, discuss how you can present a home well.

Speaker 2: [27:44] All right. So let's talk about packaging your home, marketing your home, presenting your home well. So one thing that sellers can do, you can stage your house. Um, some homes need to play to the buyer's imaginations because some buyers cannot create with a blank canvas. So staging your home could be beneficial. Um, certain areas definitely need staging just to appeal to a certain type of buyer, so staging definitely benefits you. Um, it definitely makes for better pictures. Some people prefer not to put staging in their house, but … 'Cause staging can be costly. Let's talk about that. Yeah. The cost for staging can be very costly for a seller, and sometimes some agents pay for it, but it just really depends, um, on what area you're in, um, the type of home you have because, you know, staging could benefit that property. There's options if you don't wanna pay for staging, 'cause it is a pretty penny. You could do virtual staging. So what that means is you can take photos, you send them over to a company, and what they do is they ver- they digitally add, uh, furniture to those blank photos. And then once the buyer gets there, the place is actually vacant, and then they can see how it would look like, uh, through an image with furniture, and they can see in person what it looks like as a blank canvas. So that's always a good strategy. Um- Just

Speaker 1: [28:57] be aware that there are some horrible looking virtual staging companies out there.

Speaker 2: [29:02] Very true. Like, it's just, ugh. Where you can see, where you can tell exactly.

Speaker 1: [29:05] It's just so bad. You're

Speaker 2: [29:06] like, "That's

Speaker 1: [29:07] not real." They're … I'd say that more often than not, they are really bad. There's a couple out there that are really good. Right. But the majority of them out there are just, geez, it's, it's so, so bad.

Speaker 2: [29:17] Right.

Speaker 3: [29:17] Well, y- there's also the middle ground where it's not virtually staged in terms of furniture, but then there's, like, this huge fire in the fireplace- Yeah … that looks like it's gonna damage the whole room. And it's, and they put, like, a fake fire in the fireplace, and it's, it really looks crazy. Right.

Speaker 1: [29:35] Or they have a photo of the house on the TV, and you're like, "Wait, that's like Matrix style. That's the photo that I'm looking at, but it's on the TV in the photo that I'm looking at."

Speaker 3: [29:47] That is … Well, that's just meta. That is so meta.

Speaker 2: [29:51] Um, so what you also can do when you're, um, putting your house on the market, you can remove personal item- well, you should remove personal items and, and photos. One, for safety reasons. Um, you know, just take them out because when your house is on the market, you are gonna have strangers walking in and out of your house. So definitely remove, like, personal photos or anything you don't want stolen, um, that I'm sure that's happened before in the past. I've heard stories. Mm-hmm.

Speaker 1: [30:15] To piggyback on that, I was just gonna say, make sure, like, prescription drugs and, you know- Firearms … passports, social security, yep, firearms, any sort of weapons, all that stuff is either locked up or out of the house.

Speaker 2: [30:26] Right. Also, a reason to remove personal items, you wanna kind of be neutral. Your personal taste may not appeal to everybody, and sometimes some certain buyers just have a hard t- even though it's something that doesn't really matter, some buyers just have a hard time looking past that. So you wanna make a f- a good first impression on buyers. So just be neutral. Um, just remove, you know, things that are too personal, that may be too out there that somebody else, uh, wouldn't wanna see. Just take it out there and just be neutral, just so you can appeal to everybody. And let's talk about, you know, your photos, uh, your virtual tours. Especially now with COVID, virtual tours are imperative because not a lot of people wanna, uh, just, you know, go into a house. You wanna make sure your pictures are on point because if you take bad photos, a buyer will use this as an opportunity to undercut your price as a seller. Right. So you do not want that. We've done that, where we've seen bad pictures and we've known, we know that the house may be good, but the pictures are terrible, and, um- We've gotten several properties like that for our clients in the past, so, um, just 'cause we pinpointed bad pictures and the actual property is nicer. That's pretty much it. So make sure- I would

Speaker 1: [31:33] like to piggyback off of virtual tours though, because there is a wide range out there of what a virtual tour is. It can range from being a bunch of photos that are stitched together in a slideshow-like video where it's just the same listing photos, but they're somewhat being zoomed in and zoomed out, and moving left or right on the screen with some cheesy music. That's one end of the spectrum. To the other end, which is on a higher end home, sometimes there's, like, full-on production videos where you have actors in the home presenting an entire scene of how it is to live in that house. And then there's also the Matterport, uh, the 3D kinda Google Street View-esque tour where you can walk through the house virtually looking th- around 360 degrees in every corner of the room.

Speaker 2: [32:24] Yeah, and that, and right during this time right now, uh, the Matterport one I think is the most beneficial one to market your property just because we can't hold open houses, uh, at this moment until further notice. And l- a lot of people, like I had mentioned before, they don't wanna see too many homes in person or they don't wanna keep going in and out of a house. So, um, a Matterport is a great way to, uh, give a buyer a view. Maybe you have a complicated layout, so a Matterport can definitely benefit that 'cause the buyer could d- uh, then see every corner of the house through the Matterport. So yeah.

Speaker 1: [32:57] Yep. So that is it for us. If you are a seller and you want more info on how to prep yourself for what selling feels like, looks like, and really the emotions that go along with it, you should definitely check out episode 31 that we have, which was titled Home Selling and Emotions. We also have a Home Buying and Emotions, uh, podcast which I believe is episode 30. And that's really gonna teach you The emotional side

Speaker 2: [33:23] Hell, we cover all the emotions.

Speaker 1: [33:26] There's a lot of them, and it really helps, you know, walk you through that. Today, we really hope that this helped you as a seller and also as a buyer understand what a seller's going through, what some of the strategies are to selling your home. If you are a seller or a buyer and you are interested in talking to us more, we are no pressure. There's no commitment to chat with us. It's totally free, and it's super easy to do. All you have to do is just either give us a call or go to our website and schedule a time to chat. Our website is awesomeandawesome.com. You can go to /schedule to schedule a time. But that's it. Thank you very much for listening. If you are interested in, uh, attending one of our home buyer classes, which are very popular, you can always check those out. That is at beersandhomebuying.com. Those are all online right now. They're totally free. They only last an hour, and there's a ton of good info in there that, uh, I mean, 1,000 people have attended this class. We've helped over 100 buyers, uh, purchase a home from this class alone, and it works really well to really educate you on that process. So that's it for today. Thank you very much, Jason and Les, for joining me on this. Of course. And we'll see you next time.

Speaker 2: [34:36] Bye, guys. Bye.