“No-one wants to be a seller in a buyer’s market.”

And who shall blame them? A Buyers Market is when there are more sellers than buyers, and an overall lack of confidence in the market. This affects pricing, and all aspects of negotiation. Home marketing for a seller is often a challenge, but when it’s a buyer’s market, they have to not only attract a buyer, they have to hang on to them, and do all they can to keep that buyer in the deal. That means giving, and giving, and GIVING! It can be ugly. Costly. And downright horrible!

However, for all those out there who HAVE to sell in a buyer’s market… it doesn’t have to be a money-losing proposition. Here are 3 tips on how to beat the odds, attract any and all buyers that there are, and make a great deal.

Tip 1 — Make sure your house is the Category Leader at your price point.

• That means, being the best value
• Put the home into mint condition – super clean, everything working and calm
• The home needs to shows easily and beautifully (with or without professional staging, remember to emphasize the home’s assets and create clear flow through each room so that potential buyers can see them.)
• Show a place for everything, and everything in its place
• Illustrate the lifestyle this home (and price point) enables

Tip 2 – Partner with the Realtor to Ace the Marketing

• Borrow a wide-angled lens camera and publicize the home with only terrific photos (remember 85 – 90% of all home buying searches begin online with people looking at… the photos!)
• Use all the spaces in the MLS listing form to identify and sell each room, under every photo
• Link the photos together into a slide show with music (email me, if you don’t know) and put that on the MLS
• Create a vFlyer (another low cost option) • Create a simple website of your address and add the more emotional selling features there — “the Things I will Miss Most about 194 Long Hill Drive” etc. in addition to the slide show, the vFlyer, the link to YouTube.etc.

Tip 3 – “Blitz” the listing

• Put the listing on every website that takes Real Property listings – Realtor.com, CraigsList, Trulio, Edgeio, Vast, Google, RealBird, Oodle, Lycos, IceRocket, etc.
• Put the slideshow on Youtube, and a piece with you and your family talking about the house
• Use viral marketing techniques — Facebook, for example – and offer an incentive. This is what internet people call an affiliate program , but what the rest of us call a referral fee. Remember it doesn’t have to be money. What else do you have of value that others would like? A tour of your office (if you work somewhere cool like MTV) tickets to a sporting game, a home cooked meal, babysitting, etc.

Bonus Tip – Survive “The Drive-By”

You need to make sure that your house looks the cutest, most inviting one on the block. Clean pathways, colorful flowers, symmetrical plants either side of a CLEAN welcome mat, a shiny metal knocker and glossy, freshly painted door! (Alright, one plant, if you only have room for one, but make sure it’s overflowing with lush plantings and colorful!)

Home Marketing in a Buyer’s Market is completely doable, and for a fair price so long as your house looks like it’s worth what you’re asking and it’s well marketed — i.e. fully and completely exposed to the marketplace.

Home Marketing is all about creating a wide enough appeal so that the maximum number of people can see themselves living in it. “Wide appeal” might suggest generic, no? And, anyway does anyone really know the difference between a Queen Anne and a Victorian? Mission/Priarie vs. Arts & Crafts? And my pet peeve – Tudor vs. Stick? Surely the bottom line is -

“So what if the home is Second Empire – the kitchen’s a wreck and the bathrooms haven’t been touched since the 60s!”

It does matter. If you decorate a Tuscan villa (aka Neo-Mediterranean) with big heavy, intricately carved oak country pieces your buyers cannot see, let alone FEEL, the space, the archways, the detailing, the proportions, the innate beauty and warmth the builder created. You’re leaving money on the table!

The way to get the most value out of any home, i.e. to truly appreciate your home, is to

1. Identify what you’ve got

2. Acknowledge and look after it appropriately

3. Add value in a congruent, harmonious way when you take it to market.

I mean appreciate in the sense of acknowledging the home and its architectural style, i.e. being happy and grateful that you own it, and appreciate it in the context of adding to its value. Maintaining the home and keeping in step with the times is a major part of appreciation – just the same way one updates one’s wardrobe, car, TV. The other part of appreciation is the room-by-room steps you take when the house is being offered for sale, marketing the home to maximize every opportunity.

Knowing what your house is, does not mean you have to “keep” everything authentic. No-one wants a kitchen from the reign of Henry VIII! I am no longer the purist I was. There are always choices – in decor, in upgrades, in styling. You will have more success with a home if you stay within style.

Simply put, a Victorian (or indeed anything “picturesque”) will look better with more curly, circular shapes and richly textured layering than a Mission-style home; a Tudor looks best with square, symmetrical styling (and lots of large floral patterns, brocade, bouillon fringe etc.) and Arts and Crafts looks best with simple, linear stuff. While one might feel obliged to do an Arts and Crafts in all Stickley furniture, I don’t think you need to be so literal. However, you should choose something simple, with strong lines.

Architecture is regional. (We know this; presumably because of climate.) If my readers would pardon an enormous license, I would group the architecture of the Northeast and Mid-lantic part of this country into 7 broad categories. This then would guide me (and does in my staging business) as to the style best suited for every house, therein creating a congruent, harmonious, cohesive home that will yield maximum money when sold.

My 7 categories are:

•· Pre-Colonial

•· Colonial

•· Georgian

•· Picturesque

•· Linear

•· Contemporary

•· McMansions

Each category gives you

— an overall feeling – be it simplicity or multi-layered complexity, sophistication vs. plainness, calm vs. excitement

— a certain look – in terms of color, line and texture and

— a guideline on symmetry. Then and only then do I go generic, always looking to widen the home’s constituency of potential buyers.

Identify what you’ve got, and let that guide your appreciation accordingly.  That’s just one of my many home marketing secrets!

When home marketing is something you do professionally, you know that home staging is THE competitive advantage you can’t go to market without.  It is your ace in the hole.  Home Staging works.  We know this; it’s been proven over and over again… it is the only thing that can compensate for a less than perfect neighborhood, location, lot size, position on the lot, everything!  The only thing it can’t really compensate for is price, but that’s a post for another day!

Home staging works because it illustrates lifestyle, demonstrates space and potential, differentiates a home and, most importantly, gets the place sold. How does it do that? By shoring up the value and engaging a buyer’s emotions. Jeanette Fisher calls it the emotional side of marketing Design Psychology.  She writes about it beautifully in her book. For me, selling a house is about getting it into mint condition, (shoring up the value) and then illustrating the home’s assets by triggering emotion.  Engaging emotions…positively… is best accomplished when done subtly, and the way I’ve found most successful with that is to speak to all 5 of the buyer’s senses. Here’s a brief example of what I mean:-

Sight

Using soothing colors in relaxing spaces, vibrant colors in action-oriented spaces and strong, exciting accent colors to draw the eye around the room, feature to feature.

Hearing

Gentle wind chimes, bubbling water fountains… things like that do way more for me to mask road noise than the artificial blasting of jazz from a radio. (I hate jazz, btw. That yahoo ad years ago was a come-on!)

Touch

Soft, luxurious throws; rough hewn linens; rippling silks; plush carpets; glowing, polished floors that seem to lead the eye for ever….

Taste

People get hungry touring houses. A cookie, a fun candy, a snack… goes a long way to ‘puttin’ out the welcome’

Smell

The boiling cinnamon water is old hat now, and seems artificial. And how much bread can one family go through? Put the machine away! However… did you know that one way to make a small house seem bigger is to have a different aroma (from candles, pot pourri, etc.) in each room? Avoid anything really heavy and cloying – like vanilla, patchouli, sandlewood. Look for lavendar, citrus, bergamot, etc. AND BAD SMELLS WILL KILL A DEAL FASTER THAN ANYTHING! If you know that you have a sensitive nose and you don’t like stronger, fresh aromas, just neutralize the place with a product like Febreeze Anti-Allergen spray.

Use All 5 Of Your Senses Like The Home Marketing Pros!

When your senses are engaged, you can’t help yourself. When I first met my husband, I found myself “falling into him” as I listened to his voice. It was rich, magnetic and totally entrancing. Your senses engage your emotion on a visceral level to the point where you just feel positive, and wonderful, and totally delighted.  And, isn’t that how you want people to feel about the house you’re selling?  Surely, the best transaction to have is one where the seller gets a good price and the buyer can’t wait to move in?

From Juliet Johnson, author, speaker and leading authority on home marketing via a combination of staging and online promotion using social media marketing tools.