What Your Agent Will Do For You!

The following is a summary of some of the many items that your agent will do for you!

Brochures:

Your agent will provide you with a beautiful brochure that includes photos of your home and enhanced details. These brochures will be available in a brochure box at your home, in the listing office, and are distributed to other agents or potential buyers. The brochure box will be attached to your "For Sale" sign in your yard. This allows potential buyers to drive by, see your sign, and obtain additional information about your home. If should have just enough information to assist them in wanting to follow up with a phone call or inform their agent they are interested in your house.

For Sale Sign:

This is an important item in your sale! It lets people know you are for sale!!! Signs generate phone calls. They identify the agent 's company, the agent, and have a phone number for prospective buyers to call. Many times a potential buyer calls from outside your home on a cell phone to get additional information!

Multiple Listing Service:

Even before the sign is up and the brochures are ready, your house will be entered in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). The MLS is a database of all the homes listed by local real estate agents who aremembers of the service, which is practically all of the local agents.

Important information about your property is listed here, from general data such as square footage and number of rooms, to such details in features. There will be multiple photos and a description of what makes your home "special".

Other agents use the MLS system to search for homes for their buyers. They pay special attention to homes that have been recently placed on the market which is one reason that you get a lot of calls when your house is first listed. Many agents will call to preview your home before they show it to their clients. The main reason to have your home in the MLS is to expose your home to the numerous members of the local MLS. You now have your specialized agent that represents you and a multitude of other agents aware of your home. Your listing agent 's job is to make sure that the other MLS member 's know about your house. This is accomplished through listing your house in the MLS, broker previews and advertising targeted toward other agents, not homebuyers.

Office Preview:

At Country Real Estate, your agent belongs to a sizable office of professionals that will introduce your house to other agents working in the same office. In effect, they get a "head start" on selling your property. Once a week, Country Real Estate agents get together and caravan all new listings. They pull up in front of your house then file quickly through your home like some bizarre "follow the leader" game. It is amazing to watch! They go through very quickly, since most of them are familiar with similar models of your house or perhaps have seen it in prior years. They are looking for anything memorable or different and to determine if your house is one that they would be proud to show their clients. Then, as quick as they arrived, they will pile back into their cars and move on to the next house. Many of them will return on another day with a buyer!

MLS Caravan:

An MLS caravan is a preview of your home to the entire MLS service agents. This is similar to the "office caravan" that you may have experienced, but it usually occurs within the first week that your home is placed in MLS. However, not all the MLS agents will preview the listings at the same time. Sometimes your agent will "entice" the others to attend and you can assist if you are so inclined. Food is a great enticement! You are likely to get more visitors if you offer a creative culinary treat! Ask your agent to help you with suggestions of exciting treats to make your stop special on the large list of homes of sale! This will bring more agents thus giving your home more exposure!

Marketing Session:

Your agent will conduct many marketing sessions to review your home and it 's advertising. Some of these may be with his fellow agents, some with the office staff, or other professionals to see how best to market your home. There are many facets of advertising that your agent works on though you may only see what appears to be a "simple brochure".

Advertising:

Every home seller likes to see their home run in featured ads, newpaper ads, classified ads, real estate magazines, and the internet. Your agent will use many or all of these methods, but not for the reasons you expect! The main job of advertising is not to sell your house directly. Advertising creates phone calls and some of those callers become buyers. They build to a pool of buyers looking for specific properties. Multiply this times the many agents of one or more offices and you now have a large pool of homebuyers in the market at any given time. The agents that represent these homebuyers know about your home because it is listed in the Multiple Listing Service, has been on an office or MLS preview or they may have received a brochure about your home. The agents match up their client with available homes such as yours. Next, they show the homes to their clients who eventually make an offer on one. That is how your house will get sold! Ads create a pool of clients, one of which will buy your home. Ads do not normally sell your home direct!

Knowing that your home will probably not be sold directly from the ad, does not mean that your home should not be advertised! You still want to be certain the real estate company selling your house runs ads in the local newspapers whether or not they feature your home. The office that runs more ads will get more exposure to potential buyers. At Country Real Estate, we advertise more than any other office in the North County! You will see your home in color weekly ads, color weekly features, multiple color magazines, various online web sites and more. Remember, advertising brings buyers to Country Real Estate. Those buyers may learn of your home just by calling about another property listed. Advertising brings potential buyers looking for homes just like yours!!!

Individual Agent Advertising:

Individual agents may also advertise. Many offices do not offer company pages. At Country Real Estate, we the office represent your property and have a commitment to advertising your property! In addition, you may see various forms of advertisements done specifically by your agent. Once again, the main goal of advertising is to accumulate homebuyers as clients and to impress you and future home sellers with how well they market their listings. It is much more productive and beneficial if your listing agent directs most of their marketing efforts toward other agents since this is the "behind the scenes" marketing that will most likely sell your home! It is a mistake to measure your agent 's effectiveness solely by counting the number of newspaper and magazine ads featuring your property!

Just Listed Cards:

When you first list your home, your agent may send a card out to neighbors letting them know that your home is for sale. This is an important part of the listing process as your neighbors may have friends or relatives that love their home and wish to live in their neighborhood! The announcements create a "word of mouth" advertising which is the best kind!

Open Houses:

An open house when your property is first placed on the market can be very important, but not for the reasons most homeowners think. Just like with print advertising, most visitors to open houses rarely buy the house they come to look at. They may not even know what your house looks like, they are just following "open house" signs to your door! An "open house" invites a lot of nosy neighbors to take advantage of the invitation. Again, the neighbors may tell their friends, creating "word of mouth" advertising. Agents also hold Open Houses to create more potential buyers for their pool. Open Houses that are held after your home has been listed for a period of time are generally unproductive. Your neighbors are already aware of your home and open house visitors rarely buy the homes they visit.