Some homes just don’t sell. You could have a perfectly priced, beautifully designed, magnificently decorated, home in the best location and it doesn’t sell. Why? Sometimes, the person(s) you hire to do this for you (Realtors), are not doing such a good job. Great pictures, and plenty of them, are the foundation of getting your home sold. Probably 90% of home searches start online. Want to know what happens when a potential buyer sees your home online with only one photo? Simple: “NEXT.”
Many people do not like househunting. After the first several homes, they start running together, you get worn down, the process become tedious and it eventually feels more like a chore. The easier it is to include or exclude a home (i.e. with proper photos), the better chance of your home making an impression.
I’ve said all of that to say this. Check your home’s photos. Below are photos of homes that have expired within the past month. See if you can tell why people may not want to set up an appointment to see them.
Who cares about walls? Ever hear of a wide-angle lens? Show me features! An $850K home with no inside pictures, you’re kidding, right? This is 2008, some Realtors still only put one photo in the MLS? UGH. A listing with no actual picture of the home, inside or out, only the land surrounding? Could it be that bad?
September 3rd, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Hi, I’ve been searching for houses, and I couldn’t agree with you more! For example, there is a house advertised on 3506 - Triana boulevard in HSV, and it has a nice video presentation of the interior. Why can’t more listings include a basic presentation like this, especially with today’s internet software technology like Adobe Flash etc.?
Another element I have found that I wish would be changed is that sometimes listings do not include the land dimensions or even the square footage.
Finally, I wish that all listings contained the actual street address of the property. This way, it can be viewed on Google Maps, Mapquest, or some other online map service.
Like you said in your blog, it can become tiresome very quickly for potential buyers to wade through stacks of listings, and after a while they do indeed tend to “blur together”. I suppose the “cloud’s silver lining” of this scenario is that the few listings that do have good presentations will hopefully draw more attention to themselves and stand out from all the others.
Thanks for your blog. While I’m here, I was also wondering, is there a way I can sign on so that I can view your listings? When I try, I get an error message or an entirely blank page. Please let me know at your convenience, thanks!
September 3rd, 2008 at 7:45 pm
Neil,
I couldn’t agree with you more. For starters, every listing should have 23 pictures and a virtual tour. Pictures of furniture are pointless, people want to see details and get a feel for room sizes, back yard, porches, bathrooms, master bedrooms, etc. I actually saw about 5 $1M homes that didn’t even have a picture of the master bath!
Land Dimensions: I wish more agents would get the land dimensions and put them in the listing. An acreage number can only tell you so much. Unfortunately, as long as it’s the “option” of the agent whether or not to include this, the dimensions will be few and far between.
Square footage and street addresses: This is a complete different animal. We are strictly forbidden by our MLS to display square footage and street addresses and/or a map to the property. The sad part is, this is not their fault. Several of the “big guys” in real estate made the push to have addresses removed from the public side of things because they thought it was cutting down on their sales calls. (We actually used to be able to display them.) Square footage was a casualty of this. I’ve actually pushed very hard to have a vote to display them again, and it was brought to the membership about a month ago, but the motion did not pass.
Thank you for reading! I’ll check on that error and see what’s going on.
Seth
September 20th, 2008 at 7:02 pm
I fully agree with the frustrations experienced by Neil. My husband and I recently relocated to Huntsville from Texas, transferring with the DoD. Although we are enjoying the area thus far, our search for a home has become an unpleasant experience and a full-time job primarily because the local Huntsville MLS lacks the KEY parameters on popular search engines such as Realtor.com. Because the Huntsville MLS does not display the key parameters such as square footage, street address, age of home, we are unable to effectively narrow our search of potential homes before contacting a realtor for viewing.
Masking the vital data from the MLS is a major disservice to both the buyer and the seller of homes in this area, especially in light of current market conditions. I do not want to waste my time nor the precious time of a realtor who will likely show me houses for which I will later not be interested.
I truly don’t understand how the sales philosophy here of masking vital MLS info is helping realtors, buyers, or sellers. Apparently, the only way to obtain the full MLS data is to have a realtor send you a list displaying the full information. Currently, I have several realtors sending me, via email, full MLS listings for the “parameters” I provided to them. And each day I receive email updates. Being a newcomer to the area, I don’t quite know yet what my “exact” parameters are until I become more familiar with the area and with the available homes on the market. If I decide to change my parameters, I have to request a new listing and with that comes more daily email updates, clogging my inbox. This is a terribly inefficient way to market homes and unnecessarily eats up both my time and the time of the realtor. Why waste a realtor’s time in sending this info daily, when that data can be viewed by everyone on sites such as Realtor.com at their convenience?
By having the full information displayed on the MLS, I can quickly narrow down my search to the houses I know I may potentially want to buy because I can preview the neighborhood (via Google Maps or drive-by), eliminate the homes with too little or too much square footage, and eliminate homes that are newer or older than I wish to purchase. It’s a no-brainer to make this info available to potential buyers via the popular real estate search engines! The real estate market here could be more efficiently served by displaying the vital data buyers absolutely need to make home purchasing decisions.
I have traveled to many places, and this is the first place I’ve lived where searching for a home has become an unpleasant chore and has consumed far more of my time than is necessary. I’ve always been able to narrow my list of potential houses before contacting a realtor which, consequently, allows me to purchase a home more quickly and with a more enjoyable and satisfied outcome.
I don’t believe masking this info from potential buyers is going to be a good sales strategy in the future when BRAC tranferees begin arriving. Homes sales are very sluggish nationwide and will not likely improve anytime soon. This philosophy by the local “big guys” is antiquated and will likely slow home sales further resulting in LESS income for realtors as homeowners are forced to reduce their prices with every week of market stagnation.
In fact, to reduce my frustration and save time, I have begun searching ForSaleByOwner.com and similar websites where I can get ALL the information required to make an informed decision. On behalf of us newcomers to the area, THANK YOU Seth for pushing hard to have the data displayed again. I think the “big guys” better wake up before homeowners are “forced” to switch to ForSaleByOwner.com as their primary tool to move their real estate.