The Most Crucial Time in a Listing

You have discussed it with your family. You have chatted about it with your friends and neighbours. You pick up the phone and call your REALTOR®. The price has been finalized and you are prepared to do it. You are going to list your home.

Whether it is an investment condo that you have never resided in or the family home with years of memories within the walls, putting your property on the market is a big decision. Now that you are at the point of wanting to sell, the time is now to prepare your home to ensure success. Not only can this lead to an efficient sale, it can also translate into more money in your pocket when all is said and done.

Everyone wants it: the highest sale price in the least amount of time. To understand the most important time in your listing process, we will look at three phases: the week before, the week of, and the three week stretch after putting your home on the market.

Phase 1: The Week Before

After you have come to the decision to list your home, you have arrived at the first phase. You may be ready to list… but is your home ready to be listed? Setting up your home and creating an environment that welcomes buyers to see the space as their own sets the foreground for a successful sale. If you’re selling an older investment condo, sprucing it up with a little bit of spending on new flooring and paint, or perhaps replacing some of the appliances can go a long way in generating the best bottom line for you. These expenses will lead to a higher sale price, and therefore should be factored in as the costs of business in this type of property. Is it the family home going on the market? Prospective buyers need to envision their future life, not your past. Updating the entire home may not be in the budget, but repairing any damage, or switching out the old door handles and faucets for shiny new hardware, may be just the remedy to make your home feel more current.

Ultimately, you want to set the stage and have buyers enter the property finding as few reasons for rejection as possible. For more on how to prepare your property, you can take a look at my previous blog post on getting your home ready to sell.

Phase 2: The Week Of

This is it, the most important time in your listing. Assuming you have hired a professional to sell your home, you should hit the market with impact. Day one arrives and your home makes a splash. All of a sudden, thousands of local real estate agents and prospective buyers see it: a well priced, beautifully photographed, and meticulously maintained new listing. At this point, your job as the seller is to enable the REALTOR® you hired to do their job best. Without question, sometimes being on the market is not ideal - shift workers have different schedules than the majority of the public, families have commitments, and at times, you just need to be in your home to rest after a few hard days of work. Nevertheless, it is of utmost importance to accommodate each and every prospective buyer who wants to see your home, especially in the early going. If you have taken the right steps, the highest volume of individuals will want to see your listing in the first seven days. Turning down showings is like listing with no pictures. Buyers are quick to move on to the next property of interest and often will forget about your home.

Perhaps even more important than the first few days of being on the market is that first weekend. The first weekend should be marked off well in advance to ensure you are out of your home during the initial set of open houses. Typically, agents schedule open houses on Saturday and Sunday, from 2:00PM - 4:00PM. However, this doesn’t mean you can leave your home at 1:55PM. Schedule yourself to be out by 1:00PM and return after 4:30PM. This will allow ample time for your agent to prepare before the doors open, and for any potential buyers who are running late to still make it through. These two days may be the most traffic your home sees, so it is worth making them count.

Phase 3: The Three Week Stretch

The first three weeks will often give you an answer on if there is currently a buyer in the market for your home. Through the first few weeks, most agents with buyers looking for your type of home will have notified their clients of the listing, the public will have browsed online and viewed your property, and any motivated buyers will have scheduled a showing or attended an open house. As well, the primary advertising push by your real estate agent will have been conducted. This stretch of time is when you are most likely to receive an offer, if one is to come. Further to this, you will probably see the best offer for your home during this phase as well. It isn’t written in fact, but there is an old saying in the industry that you can verify the accuracy of with just about every real estate agent: “the first offer is usually your best offer”.

If three weeks have passed with limited interest and the market is relatively active, chances are that buyers simply aren’t seeing the correlation in value and what your home has to offer. This may be due to you having a unique listing, your price point, or simply because the market has cooled off a little since you listed. At this point, it is always worth evaluating the results of the marketing effort, the volume of showings the property has seen, and the feedback from prospective buyers who have taken a look. This information can be used to guide your next steps, which can range from keeping the ball rolling as is to amending the price in order to incentivize more buyers.

Market Timing

Without question, market timing can greatly impact the success of a listing. In Metro Vancouver, we are more than used to a fairly active market almost all of the time. However, during slower times, there is definitely more emphasis needed on patience. Sellers who expect to move their property within two weeks may be caught off guard with the fact that the average time on market for a property can get as high as seven to ten weeks in slower periods.

No matter the market though, you always want to ensure you give your home its best chance to sell. Following the listing phases and structure discussed above will require hard work, but can greatly help deliver the results you desire.

If you're looking to list and want to ensure your home sees a tailored strategy to get you the best results possible, you can email me anytime at adil@adilkhimani.com.

Thank you for reading,

Adil