Welcome to late spring!  In about 4 weeks it will officially be summer and by now all of your listings should have offers on them or should be in escrow…right?

Hardly.  This market is not recovered to the point where you can make general statements like that.  In years past, it was commonly accepted knowledge that a home placed on the market in spring would have the best chance of selling, due to the larger number of home buyers present in the spring market.  This year that is not always true.

However, there are some things that you can do to enhance the possibility of selling that listing that seems to be languishing on the market.  If you have been diligent in your marketing efforts, and if the home is presentable and in good repair, then there is a good possibility that you don’t have the right price on the home.  In many of our markets, we have seen multiple offers on well presented, well priced homes.  So we know that buyers are out there and they are looking for bargains.

Obtaining a price reduction from today’s sellers is a necessity once the home has been on the market for 30 days with no offers and no sale.  Beyond 30 days, the available pool of buyers has seen the home, either virtually or in person, and they have declined to make an offer.  In order to attract fresh buyers (and even bring back previous lookers) you will need to adjust the price downwards.Obtaining price reductions has always been both an art and a science.  The art is in your presentation and the science is in your ability to pull together the facts and make a compelling argument.

We have all heard that 80% (or more) of home buyers begin their search on the Internet.  We have heard it from many sources, but perhaps the most strident voice is Realtor.com.  They seem to have most of the listings on  line and they do a very good job of tracking visits to each of the listings that they have on the site.  But, did you know that you can get Realtor.com to give you a comprehensive report of the traffic to your listings?  And that you can either email or print the report?

Here is how to obtain this "secret tool": First, go to Realtor.com, then…

-Click on Resource Center on the left side of the home page (Under “For Realtors”)

-Choose your MLS

-Put in your Agent MLS Identifier # (Generally your NRDS number)

-Put in your Agent MLS Identifier # again as your password (Unless you have changed  your password previously)

-Click on Reporting and then click on Listing Traffic

-Click on MLS # (You have to have listings in the MLS for this to work)

-Then click on either printable version or email version

Here is what you will get: (I have removed all identifying information, but other than that, this is an actual report)

As you can see, there was a steady buildup of traffic over the first couple of weeks, but after that, traffic has steadily declined…and there have been no offers.  Do you think that if this was your listing that you could take this report to the seller and convince them that if over 2500 people had viewed the listing and he still hadn’t gotten an offer, that a price reduction was in order?  I’ll bet that you could!

Give it a try on your listings, go get a price reduction and get a closed sale before the end of summer!