Why a seller should always use a real estate agent to sell their home

The graph above is pretty cool. It is a perfect display to tell many stories about selling a home. One of the biggest questions real estate agents get (other than how much is my home worth) is how long will it take to sell their home. The best real estate agents wouldn’t give them an answer tight off the bat. No good real estate agent would even promise them a time frame after the home is listed. The time frame is dependent on a lot of things.

What determines the amount of time it takes to sell a home?

The above chart is put out by a company that handles showing appointments for the Denver MLS and the agents. It tells how many showings (people come through the home and look) before the home goes under contract. Meaning how many people walk through the home before an offer is made and accepted. The last 3 years it has been between 20 and 15 or so. Why is that number important? Well the job of the listing agent is to get bodies (qualified buyers not just nosy neighbors) through the door to look at the listing. Yes real estate, like just about everything else in the world, is a numbers game. The agent listing the home needs to make sure the seller has realistic pricing goals. The home is hottest the first 2 weeks of the listing. That is when a seller will get most of the traffic through their home. Unless of course they do a major price adjustment later in the listing period but that will still not get the same amount of excitement as a new listing priced right in the first two weeks. If the home starts out too high because the seller decides to “see what happens at  a high price” and then decides to adjust later. That is always a bad idea. As the idea is to get 15 to 20 people through the home. Remember that is on average so some may take even more people through the home.

Marketing the listing 

It is amazing to some of the best agents out there with digital and online marketing to see other agents that still just put a listing a print ad or have an open house. Since according to NAR over 90% of buyers find their new home online it seems to be a no brainer that your real estate agent should advertise and showcase your listing all over the internet. As we have mentioned multiple times, to sell the home the idea is to get as many bodies through the door as possible. A seller might feel that an open house will do that. Those sellers are wrong. An open house will sell a home less than 2% of the time. As mentioned above the people come through need to be qualified. People coming to open homes are usually not ready to buy. They are just starting the process and usually haven’t even hired an agent. That is why your listing agent will want to have an open house. That is how they collect new clients before they commit to another agent. It is also just people driving around on Saturday that have nothing else to do. 

The moral of the story is the more qualified buyer through the door your home will sell. To do this a trained professional real estate agent is needed.Â