The ULTIMATE Guide to LISTING Your HOME | Chilliwack BC Real Estate
Maybe last year, maybe a few years ago, you bought a home. Great. Right? You're excited. It was the best thing you ever did. I hope. Now you have to think about selling it.
Whole new level of scary. Right? It doesn't have to be.
The Listing Process
Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about the listing process and what to expect. How does it work? What kind of services can you expect to receive? I'll be going over a professional marketing strategy, including the quality of service you can expect from a reputable agent, tips you can consider to get your home show worthy, and how to choose the right price for your home, which is the most important part.
Settle in, as always, grab a cup of tea, and let's get started.
Choose Your Listing Agent
So the first step in any listing process is to choose your listing agent. You want to pick someone that vibes with you. Don't pick someone just because they called you 568 times because you signed up on their website, and don't even pick someone just because they're a friend or your family. Pick someone because perhaps they've got an excellent record and you've checked into it. They have great testimonials perhaps, or perhaps you just get along really well. Maybe they have a fantastic listing presentation.
Whatever your criteria is for an excellent agent, don't put it aside for any reason or anybody. You are hiring someone to help you make one of the biggest decisions of your life. It's a big deal, so make sure you choose carefully.
What a Good Agent should be offering?
Professional Marketing Strategy
Now, a good agent should be offering you a professional marketing strategy to market the sale of your home. This could include things like generating awareness of the sale. The minimum an agent could do is put it up on the MLS and then just hope for the best. In a really busy market, to be honest with you, that might be all they need to do.
I've certainly seen homes fly off the market in a matter of days. But in a slower market or even just your everyday market, usually it takes a little bit more than that, especially when you want to make a quicker sale and get a good price. So it'll start with things like flyers, potentially. Your neighbors can be one of the best marketing tools available. They might have friends or family searching for a home, and they would love to have them live closer.
Therefore, making sure that everyone in the area is aware of a sale by delivering open house and just listed notices to the surrounding community is a great marketing tactic because you never know. In addition to that, what a lot of agents will do is engage in what's called advanced online marketing.
This is something that I do. Let's be honest. 95% of people begin their home search online these days. There's also a good chance that the future buyer of your home, especially if you're moving to the Chilliwack or Abbotsford area, is coming from the greater Vancouver area. I mean, take one look at the prices out there versus the prices in here, and it kind of speaks for itself, doesn't it?
Using advanced demographic targeting, I deliver ads through Facebook, Google, and Instagram to a wide range of buyers looking in this specific area for your home, including the greater Vancouver area. To get your home in front of those who would be the most interested in buying it. Targeted, like I said. That way, it's not just getting out in front of a bunch of random people that wouldn't be interested.
Communication
On top of all of that, communication is a really big part of what you want to look for in an agent. You want them to provide you with any and all feedback following showings, positive or negative. If something is hurting the sale of your home or as a potential turn off to buyers, you need to be able to trust that your agent is gonna be upfront about it. So you can either fix it or minimize it, whatever you can do to take care of it. Your agent should keep you up to date with local market conditions, including any nearby comparable home sales and any new listings, and they will perform a thorough follow-up on prospective buyers.
Professional Photography
Another big part of listing your home is professional photography. Some agents will come through and just take a few photos with their phone. And I personally don't think that's the best way to do it. I mean, you can tell when someone's just taken their phone and gone through and taken a few pictures. Right? When I see that on the MLS, I mean, to be honest, that kind of turns me off, because it makes me think that not a lot of effort was put into the listing. It makes me wonder if there's something going on with the home.
I say this both from a realtor perspective and from what I would pay attention to if I was buying. So professional photography can be really, really important. Photos are a buyer's first impression, and it will form a lasting opinion of the quality of the home. I outsource professional photographers who specialize in real estate photography to capture the very best aspects of your home. On top of that, research shows that buyers will revisit online listings with high quality photos, hence not cell phone photos, giving it a higher chance of potentially selling faster. A good photographer will also give you suggestions on repositioning objects and furniture to get your home looking its absolute best. A floor plan is another smart thing to consider.
It will help people visualize living in the home and plan how they would like to arrange it with their own furniture or even plan potential renovations if they're necessary. It's an especially effective way to intrigue the out of town home buyers who might not be able to make a long drive out to view the property in person.
Finding The Right Price
Now to get a little more technical, technical, finding the right price for your home could be a touch of a challenge. It's kind of a balancing act, and it also depends a lot on what the market itself is doing. Pricing your home too high above the competitive market value runs the risk of having listings go stale, which, while we all know that sellers want to get as much for their home as they can, it's also something to consider that you really need to pay attention to what the rest of the market is doing. As tempting as it is to list as high as possible, if it goes stale, it can create a stigma against that home, and it's not ideal for that to happen. Even if it's been delisted and then relisted and the price dropped and everything, it just doesn't look good.
An agent who knows what they're doing can go back and look through the history of the home to see how many times that has happened. And to any educated agent or their buyer, they're going to wonder, well, why has the price been dropped so many times? What's wrong with the home? How come it hasn't sold in all this time? That will ultimately hurt the sale of your home and the price that you can ultimately get. Conversely, when the price is too low, you might get a quick sale, but you may not be receiving the best value for your home either. Research shows that buyer activity peaks in the 3rd week on the MLS, yet most sellers will not reduce the price until week 4 or more, which effectively misses the the peak of the buyer activity.
So therefore, pricing the property properly the first time enables you to get maximum exposure that increases your chances of attracting the highest offer that is closest to your original list price. This is why your agent will be invaluable here because they will be able to use comparable sales in the area, which means similar listing to yours, and what they've sold for along with market values and statistics on average to give your home the best price estimate that they can. Overpricing is a critical mistake that costs homeowners precious time and money. You want to avoid it as much as possible.
Preparing Your Home To Sell
Finally, truly this time, when you're preparing your home to sell, there are some small things that you can do to make it more show worthy. So after all those other things are done, you've priced it right, you've gotten all the photos ready to go, you've picked your agent, hopefully wisely, these are things that you can do to get your home in peak selling condition. They're not complicated. They're affordable.
Nobody's asking you to spend an arm and a leg trying to fix it up, but you can do simple things like:
- Tidy the bathroom
- Declutter and Clear the basement
- Tidy up your living room
- Do some paint touch ups around the house
A little bit of bright paint can both brighten your room and make it look bigger. Tidy up your closet and storage areas. Buyers are nosy. Trust me.
They'll be looking inside. You're not going to get away with it if you just try to stuff everything under your bed. I can promise you that. Maintain your backyard as much as you can, depending on the season. I mean, it might look a little scraggly in the winter no matter what you do, and that's okay. But in the summer, make sure the lawn is mowed and the flowers and everything else, whatever you've got is nice and tidy. Sweep and knock your floors.
Get your carpets clean. Clean your windows, both inside and outside. Make sure your home smells good within reason. Nothing too overpowering, but something that is just pleasant for buyers to experience as they walk in the door. If they smell something gross like a litter box or cat pee around the house, you can bet that that will be a turnoff. Lastly, make sure that you make an extra set of keys. You don't wanna be there when the buyer is looking through your home.
It makes them feel uncomfortable. It probably also makes you feel uncomfortable, and that too can hurt the sale of your home. At the end of the day, find an agent who takes pride in the services they offer and who hopes to stay in touch with you over the years. For any realtor that wants to do a really good job and build an effective career, their business thrives on referrals, and they'll be the ones to give you the utmost care and consideration and do everything in their power to help you get the best price for your home. I hope that you found these tips and updates helpful. Take care in choosing your agent. Choose wisely when it comes to pricing, and keep yourself organized by making a point by point to do list to make your home show worthy.
If you enjoyed this video, please check out my other video on the cost of living in Chilliwack, BC. It's current as of fall 2023, and, yes, I will be making a new one shortly, so you can look forward to that as well. But in the meantime, feel free to take a peek at that. Prices have increased some since then, but for now, you can use it as your baseline. Have a great day. Bye bye.
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