The Three P’s of Real Estate Sales: Price, Product, and Presentation

Today’s market can be described as a “buyer’s market” and to sell your home in this environment requires a different approach than it did in the “seller’s market” of 2005-2007. I have found that The Three P’s in this article will sell your home faster and for more money. I believe you will find it a very logical description of the process and one that has been extremely successful for me in our current market. Here are The Three P’s…

1. Price

Properly pricing your home is critical. The tendency is to overprice, which has a negative effect and causes a great deal of unnecessary stress. Many Realtors will give you a number that is overpriced in an effort to be selected as your listing agent.

All agents will do a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA). The reality is that it is a very subjective document and the numbers may sometimes be manipulated and not dictate the true market value. Carefully review any CMA you receive to see if the adjustments that the Realtor has made are reasonable.

I personally use a professional appraisers approach in valuing your home, and have reviewed well over 1,000 appraisals in my years as a mortgage broker. I understand what adjustments they make and I use a similar approach to determine a range of value for your home. Buyers in this market will pay more for a home that they perceive as giving “added value” and I will discuss how I generate that added value in the second of our three P’s.

2. Product

Let’s talk about your home as a product because once you decide to sell it – that is what it becomes – it is no longer your home. It is a product for sale and it is entering a very competitive market. Let’s look at it another way with an example:

Imagine if you were an entrepreneur and you were bringing a new product to a very competitive market (and real estate certainly is). Now imagine that the wrapping on your new product is not very good and maybe the edges are a little dirty, and it does not quite work as well as the other products on the market. How do you sell this new product? You guessed it, you have to discount it and offer it at a lower price.

Here are some statistics for the island of Oahu for the last six months that you might find interesting. In the single family home category there were 1,518 price reductions and in the condo category there were 1,921 price reductions. That is a total of 3,439 price reductions in the last six months. We don’t want you to be one of theses statistics.

How do you make sure your PRODUCT is the best looking one on the market and avoid these price reductions? You allow me to professionally stage it for you. Just like you may have seen on the HGTV show “Designed to Sell,” we will come in and assist you in getting your home ready. We don’t give you the traditional laundry list of things to do and tell you to call us when you are done. We go through your entire house with you and give you our professional third party opinion on specifically what needs to be done.

We go beyond that as we will physically assist you in preparing your home for sale AND THEN we will professionally stage it with a combination of your furniture and our inventory of over $140,000 in furnishings and accents. Using our re-design experts and our staging company, Stage it Hawaii, we will make your home the best looking home in its price range.

We provide all of these services as no cost to you as you are already paying a substantial Realtor fee and we feel you should receive added value for that very large amount. Once the home is properly prepared and fully staged we will have a professional photographer take the photos that will cause buyers to add your home to their “must see” list.

3. Presentation

We have properly priced your home and made it the best looking home in its price range, and now we are going to “present it” to the public. We do this primarily through our Hawaii Life Real Estate website. In today’s market, 96% of buyers begin their home search online.

Hawaii Life Real Estate has established itself as the premier Hawaii property search website and is the most trafficked real estate website in Hawaii. The average person looking for property will use a search engine, such as Google, to look for “Hawaii property for sale.”

When they do that our website will show up at top of the first page of Google and buyers will immediately begin to see photos of property for sale (with our listings being at the top of the page). We generate over 120,000 hits per month on the website and have over 2,000 requests for more information from potential buyers. No one will give you better results.

Today’s market requires a very different approach than it might have in the seller’s market of 2006-2007. The Three P’s described above continually sell homes in this challenging market.

Please call me at 808-216-7300 for a free consultation on how we can sell your home faster and for more money. You can also visit StageItHawaii to see how professional staging will increase the value of your home and you can always listen to my radio show “Stage It To Sell It” on AM channel 830 at 4 PM every Saturday.