10 Real Estate SECRETS Agents Won’t Tell You! #HomeStaging #RealEstateMarketing #SellYourHome

Think your agent is telling you everything? Well, think again. Today, I've got 10 secrets that I really had to dig deep to find these, because these are not everywhere. You can't just look this up on ChatGPT. I'm telling you, I'm ready for you. I'm going to give you these secrets, the inside scoop, and I've got a bonus one if you're thinking of selling by owner. So let's get into it. Real estate agents know everything. Yeah, I hate to say it. And the reason real estate agents know everything is because we're in people's homes. We are meeting families. We're seeing interactions between children. We are talking to a lot of people about this house that's on the market. And so real estate agents do know a lot. They know how you interact with your spouse. They know what your house looks like on the inside. And if you're not careful, those real estate agents will tell and share that information with other people. And I've said this many times. I think it's a real honor that people invite me into their homes. But there are many agents who do not keep that information to themselves. I would say that most of the agents do. There are some agents though who do talk about their clients to other people and they shouldn't. And that is just something I just want you to know is that real estate agents do know everything. It's just a matter of, do they tell everybody everything? So I really hope not. If you ask agents, do you want to be the first, second, or third real estate in? Real estate agents are going to say they want to be the third agent in. Now I know you're a little confused by this. So there's a saying. It's, do you want to be the first love? You want to be the second marriage? And you want to be the third agent? And the reason why is because if you are the first agent, the first agent usually is overpriced in the house. If you're the second agent, that's when the agent comes in and the sellers are like, oh, the reason we didn't sell that first time is because that first agent was bad. So this second agent is able to get the price down a little bit, but not all the way. And then the sellers on the third agent are like, we are done. Just sell our house. So there is a saying that we do want to be the third agent in. I hate to tell all of you that. So what that means on the other side is price your home correctly. Here's one that you may not know, you may not realize, but print and internet ads really don't sell a listing. Now, many agents come in and they start talking about all the marketing that they're going to do for your house. They're going to put it in the print publication. They're going to put it online. It's going to have all of these additional ads spend that they are doing. And that's one of the reasons why you think you might want to hire that agent because of all this marketing supposedly that they're doing. But the reality is that any real buyer is already working with an agent. It's true. Real buyers are working with agents. They have been online. They are stalking the neighborhood. They're driving around waiting for that next house to come on the market. And the way they know that next house is coming on the market is through their agent. Typically, it's in a search that's set up and sent out to them. Maybe it's Zillow, not as much, maybe Redfin. But the reality is that by the time a print publication comes out with your ad, maybe it's a month, that house is stale. Like that is not to help sell the home. That's to help get the agent more publicity. And it does work because many times you'll see, wow, that agent is super busy. They have all these listings. They're saying, I'm putting all these print ads and publications, but the print ads are not working. The internet ads, the retargeting, it really isn't working. The best thing you can do is have a great agent who has great relationships with other agents, who understands the community, and also who takes great pictures. Great pictures and pushes it out the right way. Because that is really how you're going to find your buyer is they're already going to be working with an agent. So if an agent comes in and says, I do all of this marketing, the next question I want you to ask them is, really, how much does that actually help sell the home? As much as I'd love to say it did, it really doesn't. Your buyer most likely is going to have an agent coming in the house. So there is a huge frustration with many buyers and sellers have with their real estate agents is the lack of communication. The lack of communication. They aren't responding to texts or emails. They don't give them updates, things like that. And the reality is that many, many real estate agents are super disorganized. Like I can't even tell you, they don't understand how to use their email. They don't sort their email, especially if they're using like Gmail. They have no idea how many emails they have in their inbox. And they're just missing a lot. Now, as real estate agents, we do get a lot of emails. We get a lot of people trying to sell us stuff. Our transaction team from our brokerage keeps emailing us every day as well. And so for those agents who are disorganized, they are going to miss something. Absolutely, they will. So it's not you, it's their inbox. And there are many agents who are just super, super disorganized. That's why when I'm introducing people to agents, I want those agents to be reaching out to the sellers because I want those agents to show how they communicate with those sellers. So many agents just are not organized. And that is a real problem in our industry. So I'm going to advise you that you probably want to work with an agent who might have a transaction person of some sort or a team of some sort, because those are the agents who have systems and processes and they know exactly when they need to respond to people. When you have agents who aren't as busy or they're doing it part time, they don't have a full system. So that's one of the things that we look for when we're introducing agents out to sellers, is this fact of do they have support? Do they have a team? Now, not everybody has to have support, but if they don't have support, they have to be very, very organized. So now if you have an agent who is incredibly like super bubbly, talkative, very fun, very kind of all over the place, knows everybody. Those are the types of agents that usually don't have a great handle on kind of the detail work. So for those people, you're looking more for like a transactional team or something like that. So I just want you to know that there are a lot of agents out there who do not have the ability to be organized and their inbox is a total mess. So I have a few more to go, and I want to remind you guys to download my seller's playbook. This has been downloaded over 20,000 times and it's free to you. You can go ahead and download it. You're going to find the five things that are going to get your home sold fast for more money, stress free. I promise you it's well worth the time to download the playbook. So the next one, if you price your home incorrectly, it could cost you everything. So there's a lot of strategies in pricing a home. And one of the things that I talk about is the number that you price it at. So I've talked about this a lot. If you've seen my videos, you guys probably already know this, but you want to price your house up to a certain number. You need to think about where the natural fall is for searches. So people search up to a certain number and they search from a certain number and they might search from $400 to $500,000. Now, if your home is priced at $399 and they're searching $400 to $500, you will not end up in that search. The other thing is let's say you're willing to take under $500 as a seller. You're like, you know what? We want somebody to negotiate with us. We're willing to take under $500. But then you list your home at $509, $502, $504, even like $512. I don't like those numbers at all because what you're doing is you're eliminating all of those people who are looking up to $500. So if you are thinking, you know, I'm willing to take less than $500, but we want them to kind of come in. We want everybody to come in. We want as many offers as possible. You need to be priced at $500, not $499, because then you're going to miss the people searching $500 and up. The other thing you need to be thinking about is that if your house needs a lot of work and you've sort of priced it accordingly, and let's say you know your buyers may be like a $600,000 buyer. If you price it at $499, you're going to miss those people who are looking $500 and up and are missing that steal. Now, sometimes I do the $99s, and it all just depends on the specifics of the house. But you just really want to keep that in mind that if you price it incorrectly in that first go around, you might be missing a lot of people who are looking for your home. Open houses, they work and they don't work. And this is the whole thing is that open houses get kind of a bad rap. And then you hear that, you know, agents just want to sit them so they get leads or some agents say, no, they work and you don't know what to think. And the reality is it all depends on the specific market. So yes, buyers come into open houses who are not represented many, many times. They're walking down the street. They're curious. They come in, they meet the agent who's working there. They like the agent and then they list their house or they use them to buy a home. That is one of the best ways for agents to get new business. Hands down. It is one of the best ways to meet people and to kind of do a mini interview. But the reality is that depending on your market, you might need open houses. My philosophy and open houses is that I do not do an open house the weekend after it goes on the market. You might find that that might be different for me here or there, which it may be true, but typically I will not put an open house into the computer for the weekend right after we go on. And the reason why is because most of your buyers are going to come in in that first few days with an agent. You want to see how serious people are and the way you know people are serious is that they have an agent and they schedule an appointment and they come to the house. Open houses are hard because a lot of people come in, they don't put their information down, but they also don't put their agent name down. When somebody comes in with an agent, it's much easier to get feedback. So if I have a house that I know for sure is going to sell in like four days, five days, I'm putting it in. Yes, I'll have an open house because I'm confident we're going to sell it that weekend. I don't need to know if I'm testing out the market where I'm kind of like, you know, I don't know if this price is right. We could be wrong. I don't know if this is going to actually go. I won't do an open house because I want to actually see how many scheduled showings have happened. And there have been times before where, oh gosh, you know, we'll have no showings. And I'll be like, boy, we really hit this one wrong right out of the gate. So that's why open houses have to be very strategic. Now, if we're not getting any showings at all, yes, I will schedule an open house because I would rather there be somebody coming in for an open house than nobody at all. So open houses work. They do work. I have sold homes and open houses and they don't work. I have had tire kickers come in as well. So this is a personal thing that you need to talk about with your agent and understand that if your agent suggests, you know, I really think we need an open house. It's not just because they want the leads. In fact, they probably don't want to take up their Saturday or Sunday sitting at the open house if it doesn't really mean something or it's not really important. So that one is really, really location specific and definitely need to talk to your agent about that. Okay. Many agents look experienced and the only reason they look experienced is because they have fantastic Instagram pages. So this is something that really kind of hate this. You know, I'm not a huge Instagram person. I like talking to all of you on YouTube. I like explaining it. I talk too much. I know I've heard that. I spend too much time on a lot of things, which makes Instagram for me, not a great format. Now there are many agents who spend a lot of time on Instagram or TikTok doing different types of marketing of themselves and all these, you know, homes they have and listings they have. And it's great. It's fine. It's totally fine. Like I don't have a problem with them doing it, but what it portrays to you is that they're super experienced. What this shows is that they're actually great marketers, but they're great marketers of themselves. It doesn't necessarily translate into experience. So you want to make sure that if you find your real estate agent, because they do a lot of Instagram posts and you're seeing them everywhere on social media, you need to see if that translates into actual sales. Now, if you don't know how to do this, you don't know how to start. You can always reach out to me and I'm going to go ahead and find you two to three agents. Now, the way I look for agents is I'm looking at their experience. First of all, their transactions. And as I've told you before, I like to see about 150 homes in the last five years. Now it doesn't have to be that way, but if they're pretty consistent, five years is good. I want you to have somebody who's typically over five years in the business, somebody who has a website, functioning website, and their marketing looks good. Now you also want them to be focused in the area that you are in. Many agents will say they work in certain areas, but they don't necessarily do that. So the way I'm looking for them is to see who are the top agents in that area. But then I also dig in even further to find out who has the best team, who has the best marketing, who has the best listing pictures. And then I'm sending you those choices so that when you get those agents in front of you, it's basically, you just get to choose them based upon your gut. And there are some agents that we send that don't have great bedside manner and they're kind of rude sometimes, but they're good agents. So you need to decide if that's kind of what you're looking for. But go ahead and fill out the link, click on the QR code and we'll go ahead and make sure we set you up with a couple of agents to help you get started. It's a big secret. Some agents will overprice your home just to get the listing. Many times agents don't know how to price. That's part of the problem is they literally just do not know how to price. So the issue is that you, as the seller sitting there, you're choosing between two or three agents. And this happens to me. Actually the last two listings that I lost were maybe because I was truthful in my pricing. I told my Facebook group this, that I lost two listings and they couldn't believe it. But no, I mean, I lose listings and I had priced these two homes lower than the two agents who had got the listing. Now one of the agents was not even close to being as experienced at me. And the other agent was an agent who was as experienced as me. And I knew she was good. So this other agent came in about 150 more than my price, $150,000 more than my price. Right. And the third agent came in $150,000 lower than my price. So that other agent definitely wasn't going to get it. And so this newer agent comes in, she's done some transactions and she comes in and she got them to believe that her pricing strategy was correct. Now the pricing strategy was completely wrong and kind of did exactly what I'm talking to you guys about is that she priced the house right over a natural break in searches. So the problem is is that house should not have been priced over this natural break. It should have been priced right at that number. So she had people looking up to that number and people looking at that number and up. So the problem is, is that she went in and told them the price of the house and they believed her and they listed with her and they're still on the market. And so many agents do go in and it's called buying the listing. They go in and they buy the listing. So you as a seller, gosh, I know you always want to hear from the agent who has the highest price, but the agents that give you the lowest price are typically the ones you need to go with because those are the agents who are willing to walk away from their commission. And so those are the agents who are telling you the truth because they want to sell your home. When you're faced with three agents, maybe who are all telling you different numbers, I want you to go back and look at the one who is most experienced. And then I want you to go back and talk to that agent and say, can you justify your pricing even further? Because I got two others or one other that was higher than you. And I'm going to tell you that that experienced agent is going to be able to justify their pricing. Now, the agent who might be less experienced will try to, but you'll be able to tell that's the purpose of these videos that you kind of understand and know, because pricing is not science, exact science. It's an art. And the art of this is making sure that you're not doing something to hurt your sellers. I just realized my dog is behind me because I think it's going to rain, even though it doesn't look like it's going to rain. My dog always shows up here when it's going to rain. So I think my dog is a better predictor of the weather because we were not told it's going to rain. Hi Hollywood. Hi. Okay. My last secret that I have for you is actually a bonus secret. Okay. So this one is about if you are going to try and sell by owner. So if you are trying to sell by owner, you can go and put it in the MLS with just like a $250 flat fee broker. And you think that you're listed, right? You think that that's going to put you out there and it does put you out there. But what it does is it ruins your first impression because you may price it wrong. Your pictures may not be good. And once you have done that, it does start to rack up time on the market. So if you are thinking I'm going to sell by owner, I literally just want you to put a sign in your yard. I want you to let your friends and family know. I do not want you to put it into the MLS unless you've done this before and you know what you're doing and you get professional pictures taken because you will hurt your chances of selling your home and you don't know you may be underbidding it. You have no idea if you have not done this before. The second for sale by owner secret you need to know is that when you are for sale by owner, you are going to get a lot of calls from real estate agents who are going to say, I have a buyer. So I don't want you to fall for that. Okay? Now some people may actually have a buyer, but that's when you need to start to question them and say, okay, so how long have you been working with this person? Have you written any offers yet? Terrific. When are you going to bring your buyer by? If they say something like I'm going to come by and preview the home, it's really a way for them to get to know you. Now, many, many agents employ this way of doing business, which is totally fine. It's another way of getting business, which is what we have to do. But I just want you to understand is that the agents that do say they have a buyer and especially if you are expired. So if your listing expires with your current agent and then you get a call the next day, you're going to get a hundred calls the next day if your listing expires or is canceled with agents who say, I have a buyer. And then you're going to say, I've already signed the listing. Because the reason is that if you have signed a listing, those agents cannot speak to you anymore. So I'm giving you that kind of like bonus secret that if you're for sale by owner, or if you're expired or canceled listing, and an agent calls you and says, I have a buyer, I want you to dig down deeper. Now I will tell you, those are the agents that are very, very strong. And those are the ones who kind of push through everything. And those are the agents that you may enjoy. You may like working with them. So if you are going to eventually list with an agent, it's okay to choose them, but I just want you to be aware of where they're coming from. So those are the 10 secrets that agents won't tell you. I want to make sure that you guys are sticking around. You're subscribing to my channel. I'm going to hit a hundred thousand subscribers by the end of this year, right? So I need your help. Also, if you want to join my Facebook group, we've got almost 5,000 people in there, and this is where you can get your answers to questions that you have. What color paint should you make? What about your listing? How do these photos work? Things like that. Because I've got all these free resources and I don't want you to miss out. I can help you sell your home fast for more money, stress free.