There are three critical aspects to a successful real estate sales strategy, often referred to as the three P's: Presentation, Promotion and Pricing. Excelling in each of these areas can be the difference between selling your home and languishing on the market.

Presenting your home

Buyers have a lot of options in the current market. The appearance and condition of your home must be differentiating factors if you want the best sales price and shortest market time. Everything needs to work and look good. The home should be "squeaky clean" and presented in a way that shows off its most impressive features. Anything less and buyers will move on to the next option.

The dreaded home sale preparation phase is usually where the agent gives you the long, intimidating list of things to do. Our clients rarely have the time or interest to spend weeks getting their property ready to sell. They are busy with work, family, packing up belongings, and life in general. In addition, the home sale is often triggered by a new addition to the family or a new job - the preparation phase couldn't come at a less convenient time! Some agents will recommend a handyman or let you use their "community truck" with a heavy emphasis on you doing the work.

The Castellana Realty approach goes way beyond the typical real estate model. We don't expect our clients to rearrange their lives to sell their homes. It is rarely the best use of their time. And we don't encourage them to use an unlicensed and underinsured handyman. Our approach is to step in and take responsibility to get the home ready. Our affiliate Castellana Homes is a fully licensed and insured General Contractor, so all preparations are completed quickly, correctly, and painlessly. And we will invest a significant portion of our commission to get the home ready!

Our first step with a new listing is to review the home from a prospective buyer's viewpoint. This meeting typically includes the homeowner and three representatives from our team, including our Castellana Realty broker, our Castellana Homes general contractor, and our stager. Using a checklist, we'll go through every room (including the exterior) and build a list of items required to get the home "ready to sell." Each item is critically reviewed and prioritized to make sure that it adds value through an increased price and/or decreased market time.

Once we finalize the list with our client, we schedule the work and make it happen. On the day the home goes on the market, the most common comment we hear is "it never looked this good while we lived here ... why did we decide to move?!"

Promoting your home

Having a great product to sell is step #1. Telling everyone about it is step #2.

We use a very thorough mix of online and traditional media to promote our client's homes. Since the large majority of people now use the internet to search for homes, we make sure the listing appears through every search engine on the internet - Realtor.com, Google, Craigslist, Zillow, Trulia and many more. We enhance our listings on the major sites with additional text and photos. In addition, we feature the home prominently on our website with integrated mapping and Google Streetview functionality (where available). Finally, with all new listings, we include professionally developed video tours.

Why do we still bother with the newspaper? Many people still use the Sunday open home listing with their morning coffee to determine which homes to visit that day.

We also create full color brochures, host broker tours and open houses, and promote the home through networking and shrimp cocktail.

Pricing your home

With the best preparation and promotion in the industry, we are typically at the upper end of the price points in our clients' neighborhoods. However, it is also critical to price the home competitively. You can price your home to sell it, or you can price your home to continue to own it. The lingering urge to test the market at unrealistic levels ultimately has a negative impact on the final selling price. A competitive price from Day 1 will drive traffic and interest and help buyers see the value in purchasing your home. The more interest you generate, the more purchase offers you'll have to compare.

Our pricing analysis includes:

1. a full market assessment using recent comparable sales
2. a review of the current inventory and pricing
3. market data reflecting overall market direction and days on the market
4. seasonal influences
5. macroeconomic influences

Summary

Each home requires a tailored approach that outlines how it will be presented, promoted and priced. For further illustration of our approach, please review our case studies.

Contact us today to discuss the sales strategy for your home!

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