Why Do We Go Into Such Detail when describing a home?
In my prior life, I was a commercial broker. I had very little knowledge of how the residential side worked. I just never paid much attention to it. I noticed flyer boxes sitting in front of homes (usually empty) and sometimes saw open houses. However, I already had an appreciation of the MLS, so when we were ready to sell our first home, we just made sure our Realtor belonged to the MLS and had some experience. We figured one agent was about as good as another.
Sure enough, we received our flyers with the standard two paragraph description of our home along with the room measurements. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I remember thinking to myself "We're going to get killed on this sale. We have a lot of money in this home and no way of letting the prospective buyers know about it". What surprised me was there was absolutely no way for us to convey to any prospective buyers that our home really had some quality, unique features and even substantial upgrades. If the prospective buyers found our home on the MLS and compared it to others in the neighborhood strictly on a price per square foot basis, our home would appear very overpriced. Who would come look at it?
Rhonda and I made a list ourselves of every selling feature and upgrade we had in our home. We left the list inside our home for any potential buyer to pick up. But because the prospective buyers had to physically walk inside our home to get the flyers, what good were they if we weren't getting showings? Even flyers left outside in a box would only be seen by those who happened to drive by our home and pick one up. The MLS only provides 4 lines of text to describe the special features of the entire home, so that wasn't doing us any good? We were hamstrung! How were we ever going to show prospective buyers why we felt our home was worth what we were asking? We eventually sold the home at a loss, but it taught me a good lesson ... and one I never forgot!
When I made the leap into the residential side the next year, the prevailing attitude with many Realtors seemed to be "this is the way its always been done, so why change now?" As great a tool as the MLS is, I have always felt that agents relied too heavily on it. Before the Internet, that's all there was, so the MLS was driving our industry. I also believed back in 1998 (and still do today) that many Realtors simply have absolutely no desire to professionally market a home. Their goal is to "list" the home and hope another agent can sell it for them.
For all of these reasons, I decided to take a non-traditional route when I started out. I chose not to join any residential real estate company. I went into it "cold turkey" and without the first clue about how to sell a home. I was most definitely apprehensive that I would not be able to provide for my family, but I knew two things without an ounce of doubt ... A) I could market a home better than what I had seen and B) I knew how to put the Internet to work to help me do it! I reasoned (prayed) that when given a choice, most Sellers would rather go with a Realtor who really took the time to understand their home and market it professionally over a Realtor who didn't. So that is how this concept of extensively "detailing" a home came to me. I have never seen another company go to the extent that we do to understand a home and convey its features to potential buyers. My goal from the first was to give buyers every piece of information they needed to make an informed decision as to the value of our listed homes.
Keep in mind that it is often a compilation of the little things that really inflate the price of a home. For instance a stainless steel Viking Professional Cooktop and hood can easily cost $10,000 and add $2.00/sf to the price of a 5,000 sf home. Several slabs of 3 centimeter thick granite in the kitchen can add another $2.00/sf. More granite in the master bathroom can add another $2.00/sf. An uneducated or uninformed consumer or their Realtor might see two 5,000 sf homes sitting side by side, one with the aforementioned features and one without, and think the home priced at $6.00/sf less is the better deal. But it could very well be the home priced at $6.00/sf less is actually the home that is overpriced. We have always believed the key to getting fair market value for our homes was to price them fairly, provide thorough information to support those values, and create a sense of excitement about them.
So how do we "detail" our homes? The entire process takes us about 5 hours to complete from start to finish. We begin at the front curb (literally) and work our way through the property, front to back, then sides, and then room by room, describing everything we see. We then ask our sellers to fill in the blanks on those things we cannot see. For example, sellers are quick to tell us they paid extra to foam insulate the walls, or they had 77 piers under their home, or they just completely replaced the HVAC system, etc. Sellers sincerely appreciate the time we take to understand their home. They also know that thousands of buyers have an easy conduit to their home from anywhere in the world. This is where our tremendous Internet presence comes in.
We firmly believe that our marketing program is second to none in the entire industry. We are all about quality over quantity and that goes for our wonderful Realtors as well as our listings. We have built our reputation selling homes from $500K to $1.5 million, but you might be surprised to know that we provide the exact, same marketing package for every home we list, regardless of price. This includes our detailing, floor plans, virtual tours, aerials, and of course, our professional pictures. If we commit to marketing a home, we throw all of our resources into it! Our sellers trust that we are going to help them get the best possible price the market will bear!
So if you are considering placing your home on the market and believe your home deserves the marketing we provide, please give us a call!
Tom Grisak Estate Homes Realtors, Inc - Texas License # 0329533
Your Realtors for Allentexas, Fairviewtexas, Lucastexas, McKinneytexas, Murphytexas, and Parkertexas