Official Listing Site Of 1489 BALSAM WILLOW TRAIL ORLANDO FL 32825Offered for Sale at $330,900

Matt Hodge - Listing Agent for 1489 Balsam Willow Trail, Orlando FL 32825

To schedule a showing, submit an offer for purchase or for additional details contact Matt Hodge at 407-962-9099

1489 Balsam Willow Trail, Orlando FL 32825 - Marketing Strategy

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Robert: Okay Matt, so you’ve had this listing at 1489 Balsam Willow Trial or about 30 days now. Talk to me about how you originally found the seller, some of the thing you talked about, and why you think he chose your services over some other real estate agents in the area. Two, why you were excited to list a great property like 1489 Balsam Willow Trail. Also, some of the creative things you’re doing to help market that home and help get maximum exposure. Which ultimately the highest and best possible value for a home.

Matt: Absolutely, I contacted the seller, they had received my postcard. I mail out postcards every month to this community talking about their home values and the trends and where it’s going and what we’re predicting for the future. Just keeping them up-to-date with their home values. He really liked that service and reached back out to me and asked me to sell his home. So, the thing is that we are doing a little bit different to market this house is one, we’ve done an extensive mail campaign. We sent out 5,000 mailers in all the surrounding areas. The open houses that we put on here are really top notch. We put out a minimum of 50 signs. Some agents will say that the open houses don’t really sell the house. One percent of the houses actually receive an offer from an open house, which is true, but you do meet qualified buyers that are looking for houses in that area. So if it’s an area where you list multiple houses, then maybe the house that they met you in is not the one, but maybe it’s a house you have listed down the street. So, really just a shift of thinking on that. But, you know the one thing that is really great about this house, it’s been on the market 27 days now, is the community is really in a close out kind of phase.

Robert: Yeah, so I think that is important Matt. You are in a close out phase. You have a situation where the builder only has maybe 2 houses left. So again, you send out a lot of direct mail marketing, which is personally something I love as well. I do a lot of direct mail marketing, I think it’s a great way to create demands and things. And let’s talk about why creating that demand is so important for the home seller. You know, I think a lot of sellers get lost in this factor. I think a lot of real estate agents feel like when they are marketing, they are marketing themselves, not really for the property. But, the best situation you can create for a home seller is a multiple offer situation. And the reason this is so critical is human nature is we always want to win, right? We are designed to want to win, it’s in our DNA. So when you have a single offer situation, you have the home seller versus a home buyer. And the home buyer wants to beat the seller by getting a lower price and that’s not in the best interest of the seller. Now enter a multiple offer situation, so now you have two buyers and a seller. Well, now the buyers feel like they are competing against each other and the way you win is by getting the house and paying more money. So psychologically when you have a single offer situation you have where the buyer is trying to pay as little as possible to beat the seller. All the sudden you go into a multiple offer situation, now you have a buyer that is willing to pay as much as possible for the house to win and get the house they fall in love with. So, the difference between having one offer and two offers is dramatic in the final selling price of the home. And while like you said well a lot of agents say that only one percent of offers are written at open houses, well how many people walk in and buy on the first visit? You know, how many of those open house visitors turn into buyers later, you know, how many come back? I think this is where that statistic gets skewed is ya, they don’t want into the house and say oh my gosh I love this house, let me write you an offer. There is a negotiation process, there is a thinking process, but I will tell you having these open houses, having the type of marketing you do, the purpose of all this is to drive demand up. To try to create that multiple offer situation, which is then how you get your seller the absolute top selling dollar for the house. The more people walking through that house, the more people are getting the mailer sent out advertising for that house, the fact that you’ve put this house on a billboard on 408 and on hwy 50. Everything you can do to shout out to the world there, hey 1489 Balsam Willow Trail is for sale, and it’s a great house, because if you can create enough demand that you get into that multiple offer situation, now it’s an absolute home run for your seller. This is something I think a lot of people don’t understand and say well how did you create a multiple offer situation? Sometimes it’s created naturally because the market is just that hot. But right now we are in a situation where the market isn’t quite that hot, it’s not as hot as it was a year ago. The multiple situations aren’t happening naturally, so how do you create multiple offers in this market? You have to take market share away from other houses. And the way you take market share away from other houses is by advertising, by creating additional demand by sending out 5,000 postcards you send out, by putting the home on a billboard on two major arteries in East Orlando, by holding open houses and inviting people and getting the word out. Because your goal is to get your seller, your client, the absolute top dollar for that house and advertising is a huge part of that.

Matt: And you know, just going back to the multiple offer situation, that doesn’t mean that someone is going to over pay for your house. What we find is that sometimes when people are buying a house they think about it like buying a car. They will try to negotiate down to 100 dollars, you know and that’s kind of how we are. Once you create that multiple offer situation people are going to pay what they really think the house is worth and if they really want it, they are going to pay for it. So that’s like you said, it removes the seller from that natural that humans want to do, which is negotiate. I am not winning unless, regardless of where the house is priced, I am not winning unless I am paying less than what its advertised. They feel good about that. You know, but like you said that multiple offer situation removes that and it just says hey, let’s be honest, what’s this house really worth to you? And that’s a great position to be in.

Robert: Yeah, so instead of negotiating against the seller, now as a buyer I am negotiating against another buyer. It just completely changes that dynamic. And again, the way you create this is by the marketing campaigns that you’re running. By doing things, and coming on the radio here today to talk to me about this listing and get the message out there. Building a dedicated website 1489balsamwillowtrail.com to get the information out there, let’s touch on that real quick. So one of the reasons that you build these, or have these website built, these custom websites built is there is so much misinformation on the internet. And we did an exercise where we sat down together and we googled 1489 Balsam Willow Trial and the first listing that comes up is Zillow and Zillow says that house isn’t even for sale. So I can just imagine the poor buyer who is out there driving around, they see a sign in the yard at 1489 Balsam Willow Trial and they google the address and the first thing that comes up is Zillow and Zillow says, this home is not currently for sale. And then it talks about what the home most recently sold for, which is a bad thing, because now you’re putting a price in a buyer’s mind which isn’t necessarily available for this house, this was the old sales price. And then it has a picture of an empty lot. Because this was before the house was even built so you cannot possible do a worse job of putting a buyer in a bad mind state. You know you go through more of these listings and you get down to the Trulias and these other sites and even the ones that have it listed they’ve got their estimate on there. And these estimates can be so far off so you know you come in here and you’ve got this home fairly priced at 339,900 and their computer algorithm may say it’s worth 200,000 and as a buyer your thinking oh my gosh, they want 339,000 and the Z-estimate is only 200,000, what a rip off. And that is the last thing you want a buyer experiencing when they first click on a web address and then two, what are Zillow and Trulia doing, they’re throwing other homes in your face left and right. Well hey, look at this home over here in the same neighborhood. Look at this home over here in the same neighborhood. Where by you constructing this single property website dedicated to 1489 Balsam Willow Trail you’re helping get the right information in front of the buyers to help get your seller absolute top dollar for that home by isolating that information and keeping people focused. You know, we get home buyer ADD, you know, we are all over the place and it’s the next shiny object and I think its sites like Zillow and Trulia have perpetuated this because you can’t go on a website, and you know honey, I really like 1489 Balsam Willow Trail let’s go take a look at it and then the next thing you know there are like 30 other homes in front of you and now you don’t know where to go and you’re confused. And while information is great, we can suffer from information overload. And then you throw in misinformation, like the inaccurate Z-estimate, which by the way by Zillow’s own admission is only right about 1/3 of the time. You throw in misinformation where the number one ranking site in google before 1489balsamwillowtrail.com was created, said the home for 30 days wasn’t even for sale when it’s listed in the MLS. You know, it’s insane and it has an old purchase price and even Realtor.com the official website of Realtors has an old listing and says it isn’t currently for sale. Because the page that is indexed in google is not the current listing page. So you’ve done everything right as an agent and put the home on Realtor.com and done everything to get the exposure, but what google is picking up on is the old pages from when it sold the last time which is very confusing for the consumer. And so your solution to this was to create this single property website which I think is great and now you’re getting the right information and the proper information to the home buyer so they can make a good decision. And now the home seller isn’t competing against misinformation to get their home sold.