most important home sellers need to ask before

selling their home

12How to answer the

Expert Advisor Guide

QUESTIONS

It’s important to be able to differentiate yourself from the average frustrated agents (AFAs) in your marketplace by being able to articulate your competitive advantage as an ExpertAdvisor™. Below is a list of 12 questions we determined were the most important questionshome sellers should ask any agent they interview and we want to arm you with the answers to set you up for success. If you have any additional questions you would like answered, send them to support@naea.com as we are glad to help.

What’s the difference between marketing and advertising a home and how does this difference affect me? There are many definitions of both advertising and marketing and the differences between them. But it can be stated like this: • Advertising tells a story about something to attract attention. Advertising is a step in the marketing process. • Marketing is the planning of, and steps taken, to bring sellers and buyers of any product – especially a house – together.

The best way to distinguish between advertising and marketing is the pie chart below. Notice how the pie chart is broken down into several slices that include advertising, product pricing,distribution, customer service and sales strategy. Most agents in our market place specialize in advertising, i.e., putting an ad in the paper, putting your listing on the MLS and the Internet and putting a sign in your front yard.

An Expert Advisor™ does all of those things, but then puts in place marketing strategies like theSeller’s Incentive Club™ (to attract a larger number of agents who will show your home), uniqueselling propositions like our Guaranteed Sale Program (that gets buyers to contact us to buy their home so they can buy yours) and other consumer programs we make available. The difference is both that your home will sell faster and for more money because we don’t stop at advertising, we add a specialty of marketing for your home to get the most amount of money.

What are the specific elements of your home selling and marketing strategy that affect the selling price and the time my home will be on the market?

The specific elements are included in the listing presentation that I’m going to cover with you, but the main elements are:1) I know the market better than anyone in the area. I’m a student of the local, regional and national real estate market and economy. Being an expert in this area lets me help you price your home properly so it will sell faster and for more

money. And, it allows me to position your home in the market place for maximum exposure, so more buyers see it to drive the price of your home up.

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Advertising

Sales Strategy

Customer Service Distribution

Product Pricing

2) I invest $X,XXX per month on marketing and advertising. This is more than 30% above what my closest competitor in this market place spends. As such, your home will get more exposure to a larger number of buyers, giving us the best chance to

find a buyer who will pay the price you want for your home.3) We have a Buyer Acquisition strategy. This strategy is 100 times more efficient than that of other agents in the area. We follow up with

buyer inquiries on your home faster and with more skill than other agents in the area, we get more buyers to work with us who will want to see your home. Any time you can drive the demand

up on your home, you always have a better chance of selling it faster and for more money.4) We sell more homes and employ a straight-line negotiation strategy. This strategy helps us get you the results you want on your home sale, netting you up to 18% more when your home sells. Know we’re not living and dying on the sale of your home to make

sure we feed our families, so we can focus on getting you the best deal without putting our own needs first.

We cover a whole lot more, in detail, during the presentation that will show you how we furtherdistinguish ourselves from the competition to get you more money in the least amount of time.

Do you require a pre-inspection and that my home be staged before I sell? If not, why?

I absolutely request both a pre-inspection and strategy for all of my sellers.

We require the pre-home inspection because of the huge savings you get by doing it, not to mention theheadaches you avoid along the way. Not only are you saving as much as 7 to 1 on the cost of any repairs or replacements the buyers may want you to do after the home inspection is done, but also, you give thebuyers fewer opportunities to re-negotiate the price of your home when they have a home inspection in their hands showing that the issues have been detected and resolved.

We require your home to be staged so that it really stands out among the competition with the sea of homes available in today’s market. Know that a well-staged home fetches as much as 6 to 10% more than the competition and sells in as little as 30 days, so it’s almost a no-brainer to invest time, elbow grease and a small dollar amount into netting a lot more for the sale of your home.

With the Internet being the first place that most buyers look for a home, can you identify for me the best Internet property marketing methods and why they work?

As the old saying goes, “It’s one thing to be on the Internet, it’s an entirely different thing to be found.”

We pride ourselves on doing the best job in our marketplace to get your home the Internet presence it needs to sell. As part of being an Expert Advisor™, we: • Market on the top 5 real estate websites, Realtor.com, Yahoo! Real Estate, Homes.com, Trulia and Zillow so the largest number of buyers will see you, • Use professional photography and virtual tours to ensure that the “first” showing of your home is amazing, • Write professional copy to appeal to the hot buttons of buyers looking for a home like yours and • Target buyers based upon their lifestyle, occupation, family, school and safety needs.

We also track all the Internet leads we get and report the information to you so you know exactlywhat’s going on.

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What reporting do you make available that show how many unique visitors are seeing my home on the various websites my home will be marketed on with you?

I go by the rule that you cannot improve what you do not measure, so in my office we track asmuch as we can in order to see what works and what doesn’t. Each of the websites we marketon have indepth tracking that help us see unique visitors that view your home and give us an advantage to follow up with the buyers that are excited to see it in person. Let me show you acouple reports and statistics I track in regards to unique vistors that will help me sell your home.(This answer is dependent upon your individual market. Tour Factory, Realtor.co, Trulia, Zillow,Yahoo! Real Estate, Homes.com, etc. all have reporting functionality. Be sure to articulate whichservices you use and provide them with a visual to see exactly what you are tracking.)

Do you have any information that details what home buyers find the most useful when it comes to a property-marketing ad and what motivates buyers to respond to it?

Buyers who use the Internet also use other information sources (i.e. other real estate agents, yard signs, open houses, print advertisements, home books, etc). However, they didn’t rank them in thesame order for usefulness. Home buyers still rank real estate agents as the most useful source of information compared to the Internet, yard signs, billboards, television and open houses. Coming in last were newspapers and print advertisements. Buyers most often find the home they purchasethrough a real estate agent. When they look at property ads, what buyers valued most were photos,detailed property information, virtual tours, real estate agent contact information and interactive maps.

Can you identify for me what buyers on the Internet say is the number one reason they choose an agent for buying a home they found on the Internet? What in your business reflects that youunderstand this fact?

You may find this odd, but the number one reason a buyer chooses an agent for a home theyfound on the Internet is the time it takes an agent to respond to their inquiry. In fact 70% ofInternet buyers picked that as the reason for choosing their agent. The industry standard is 16 hours (as unbelievable as that seems), but ours is as little as 60 seconds – with a maximum of 15 minutes in extreme cases.

We have Immediate Response Systems that offer a live response in 5 minutes or less, 16 hoursper day, 7 days per week. The connect rate offered by this system is 106X that offered by otheragents in our market place.

We also have a professionally trained sales team that is committed and held accountable toresponding to buyer inquiries.

Do you have a marketing budget that outlines how you’ll spend your resources to market my homeand earn your fee?

I do have a marketing budget and I can outline the fees for you with a simple spreadsheet that I’vecreated, which shows how I allocate my budget to get you the best results for selling your home. (Show them your spreadsheet. Contact NAEA at support@naea.com if you do not have one.)

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What is your strategy to attract qualified buyers from the various sources available today and how will you work to attract co-op agents so they show my home over other homes in the market?

Our marketing strategy focuses only on what works, not what doesn’t. Our pre-listing and marketing teams assemble a marketing strategy that uses the best Internet and print strategies we have to attract the largest number of qualified buyers for your home. As part of the strategy, we use the top 5 websites for buyer lead generation on the Internet, professionally written copy, a highly-specialized marketing campaign that targets buyers based upon their demographics, abuyer loyalty program that brings more than 40% of past home buyers back to us when it’s time to buy again and many other strategies.

We also have a Seller’s Incentive Club™ that specifically targets buyer agents in our marketplacethat are already working with house buyers looking for a house like yours. Since 90% of buyersuse an agent to buy a home, this program is a great way to get more buyers through your home to get you the price you’re looking for. The Seller’s Incentive Club™ program gives buyer agentsthe opportunity to get an additional cash bonus by selling one of our homes listed under this program. We’re the only team in town that has a program like this and we often find that agentswill show our Seller’s Incentive Club™ homes before they’ll show other listings, including their own.

What is your negotiation strategy and how can I count on you to negotiate from a position ofstrength than one of weakness? How can you assure me that the home inspection will not “blow up” my transaction at the very last minute?

Our negotiation strategy is pretty simple: put our needs to the side and put your needs on the frontburner. We use a straight-line negotiation method that gets us from point A (where we are) to pointB (where you want to end up) without giving up the farm to do it. We negotiate from a position ofstrength and protect your bottom line at all costs.

Our mindset is also very simple: use a “peace treaty mindset” where we seek mutual advantages for you and your prospective buyer. As part of this process, we point out the little victories a co-op agent may have won for his/her client making negotiations easier on bigger issues down the road.

The biggest thing we do is protect your home sale from falling through because of a “rope a dope”move from the co-op agent or buyer that could kill the deal.

Can you identify how your team will work to handle my listing from the minute you take it until the day that it closes? Also, identify for me the different departments of your company and show me how they benefit me in the sale of my home.

Not only can I tell you this, I can show it to you. (Show them an organization chart for your company with the different departments in your office and who is in charge of each of the departments. Be sure to highlight how they can contact them directly to help open gates of communication and easehesitancy. For an example of the organization chart that accomplishes the Expert Advisor HomeSelling System™, go to naea.com and look in module 6).

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What do you do, if anything, to ensure that the leads you generate are going to be handled in a timely manner so that we don’t miss out on any qualified buyer prospects? It’s all about accountability and systems. We have an immediate response system that responds toleads within 5 minutes 16 hours a day, 7 days a week and team of highly trained professionals thatare committed (and held accountable to) handling those leads in a timely and professional manner.

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