Sell Your Home

Pre-Inspection

Before your property ever reaches the market, we will have a licensed home inspector come out and conduct a detailed inspection, which will result in a detailed inspection report. The purpose of this inspection is multifold:

• We want to identify any potential problems that may scare off a prospective buyer.
• We want to save you a lot of money by resolving any problems with licensed contractors before the buyer discovers them through their own detailed inspection, and then tries to re-negotiate the sales price based on problems which have not been remedied.
• We want to command top dollar by positioning your property as one that is meticulously maintained by an owner who demonstrates pride of ownership, as opposed to a property that is suffering from serious neglect by an owner that has let their property go.

By identifying and resolving problems before your property reaches the market, we make sure that your property will be able to command top dollar and buyers will be confident knowing that the property they are purchasing has been meticulously maintained.

Staging

In a typical property showing, a buyer will be at your property for between ten and fifteen minutes, during which time they will be making a decision involving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. It is our job to make that ten to fifteen minutes amazing. To accomplish this, we strongly recommend using the services of a professional home staging company.

You may be wondering what the difference is between home staging and interior design, and you wouldn’t be alone. How can you tell the difference? While home staging is a type of home design, it is in fact different from interior design. Home staging means preparing a home for sale. On the other hand, interior design refers to the act of working with a homeowner to personalize the design to their particular tastes. Staging, from our perspective, is positioning your home base on the trends in the marketplace that buyers are responding to. It may involve colors, the amount of light present, or arranging the furniture in a more inviting way.

The end goal of staging is for a prospective buyer to stamp their feet, throw their hands up and say, “I want this house. What do I need to do to get it, how much do I need to spend, and how do we ensure that nobody else gets this home?”

That’s the WOW factor we want to create, and home staging is a big piece of that.

Photography

Since almost every prospective buyer will be looking at photographs of your property before they schedule an actual viewing, the third thing we need to sell your home for top dollar is world-class photography.

When we say world class, we are not talking about taking photos on your mobile phone, on your small digital camera, or even on the really good camera that you bought that you may or may not know how to use really well. We are also not referring to the local company that will come out for $99 and give you twenty-five photos the next day.

This needs to be somebody that is highly skilled at taking residential real estate photography, and who understands how light is absorbed in certain rooms by certain pieces of furniture, how certain times of the day are better for photography, and how certain types of weather are good or bad.

Then they need to be able to take those photos and edit them, ethically and legally, so that they can be displayed online and offline in a way that your property stands out from the other properties on the market, making it truly compelling to buyers and agents.

Marketing

We could talk about marketing for days, but it suffices to say that today, we need to market your home to everyone. Now when we say to everyone, we don’t mean blindly shot-gunning your property to the entire market and leaving it at that. That’s what the MLS does for us. We want to market to everyone in the sense of niches — certain buyers who are likely to purchase this property, at this price point, in this geographical area, for a specific reason.

To accomplish our objectives, our marketing plan may include, but not be limited to, the following:

• Broker Preview
• Property Brochures
• Email Marketing
• Just Listed Postcard
• Signage
• Orange County Register
• Los Angeles Times
• OC Homes
• OC Estates
• Executive Global Magazine
• Architectural Digest
• Coastal Real Estate Guide
• Omni Escapes Magazine
• JetSet Magazine
• Financial Times
• Bloomberg
• Mansion Global
• Wall Street Journal
• South China Morning Post
• ShangLiu Tatler
• Hong Kong Tatler
• PropGoLuxury
• FinancialTimes.com
• Vimeo
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Trulia
• Zillow
• Realtor.com
• MLS.com

Urgency

Another vital aspect in selling your property quickly and for top dollar is to create a sense of urgency. So how do we create urgency? By knowing the market, knowing the numbers, knowing the property, and most importantly, by knowing when most of the property showings are taking place.

In most markets, the majority of property showings are taking place on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, so because of that we want to launch your property on to the market late Thursday afternoon, and schedule a broker preview (open house for brokers) for Friday morning.

By utilizing this launch strategy, we will represent that we anticipate a crazy hot weekend, with tons of showings and most likely multiple offers, encouraging prospective buyers and their agents to race out there to try to beat the competition.

We have found this launch strategy to be much more effective than going on the market Monday morning and being on the market several days before the weekend momentum hits, thereby losing the big rush that allows us to create that sense of urgency. Whether we’re talking about Newport Beach in Orange County, Oceanside in San Diego County, or any location in Southern California, this strategy works!  

Scarcity

In addition to creating a sense of urgency, we also want to create scarcity. You might be thinking that scarcity is something that we cannot create, but let us tell you how we do it. We create scarcity by marketing your property as a unique individual property that really cannot be compared with anything else — a property that’s one of a kind.

We want to identify the most unique aspects of your property that we possibly can. A good example of this is a fairly standard property on a normal residential lot at a fairly standard price point, but which happens to have a lot of fruit trees. We would really strive to accentuate those fruit trees, writing sales and marketing copy about how great life is living in a home with lots of fruit trees.

And it works.

We want to create scarcity in your marketplace by identifying unique features about your property and then positioning your property accordingly.

What are the unique features of your property that makes it truly one of a kind?

Negotiation

When it comes to negotiation, we want to negotiate from a position of strength, not from a position of weakness, and most importantly not from a position of desperation. This axiom holds true for both the seller and the seller’s agent.

As your agent, we will you never come across as needing to sell. We will never say things like:

• “I would like to work out an offer with you.”
• “We would love to see something from you.”
• “Send me whatever you’ve got. I will present it to my client, you never know what will happen.”

Rather, we will constantly position your property as one that is going to move quickly, and for top dollar, saying things like:

• "I would love to find time for you to see the home because I’m not sure how much longer it is going to be on the market.”
• “I doubt this amazing property will last this weekend.”
• “Is your client prepared to move quickly? Because that’s what it is likely to take to get a home like this.”

So, throughout the entire transaction, we will negotiate from a position of strength. This positioning will enable us to achieve the maximum sale price in the quickest possible time.