A Griffith Listing

Real Estate Services by Jon Griffith

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Short Sale Follow Through

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(May 11, 2009 - Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images Europe)

As a listing agent specializing in short sales, I have run into many situations that raise red flags throughout the short sale process. One of those is finding out that the home owner isn’t prepared for the commitment involved in pursuing the short sale.

When you enter into a short sale listing agreement with your brokerage, represented by your REALTOR, you are hiring them to not only market your property, but also negotiate the short payoff to your lenders. While there is no official difference between a short sale listing, and a regular listing, the fundamental game-plan that we implement when we market your property is quite different than a traditional sale.

Your agreement to sell short is taken very seriously by your agent because of the amount of work that is involved after receiving an offer. It also must be taken very seriously by you, the owner. If at any point in time you doubt whether or not you really intend to walk through the process of a short sale, then you may not be a true candidate for a short sale. You see, even if your circumstances would support a short sale, you need to be completely committed to the process and you need to see it through to the end, whatever result that may be.

Presenting Your Home: Photos

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80% of all buyers use the internet to shop for a home.  It takes an average of 12 to 18 months for them to actually purchase a home, from the initial thoughts of selling their home to the process of purchasing yours.  Since those people start on the internet, listing your home without photographs would be as effective as driving a car without gas.

Think about how many products you’ve been sold on because of the marketing that goes into it.  How much of that marketing contained images of people, places, the actual product?

If your house does not have a photo, people will not look at it.  They will not show it, they will not even think about it.  It’s gone, and getting them back will be difficult if the image is added too late, and here’s one reason why.  When I look for new homes on the market, I skip the properties without photos at first, then I go back to look at the ones without if I think my client would like it, based on my knowledge of the area.  If I go back at a later date and a picture has been added, it actually has a greater chance of being skipped because at that point, I’m looking for the results that don’t have photos.

The new FlexMLS allows us to search for listings based on whether or not they have photos.  This basically eliminates properties from my search if it doesn’t have a photo.

Part of my marketing plan, which is by no means an added benefit, is that I take lots of photos.  I say that it’s not an added benefit because no property should be listed without photos, period.  I don’t just take photos, I publish a property website for each listing, publicize it to as many places on the internet as I possibly can, and I create my own custom slide show for your home.

ARMLS used to offer photography services for us.  They would take a shot of the front of the property for us and we wouldn’t have to do anything, but it would only be one mediocre photo.

ARMLS announced today that they would be discontinuing this service and they offered the following reasons for the change:

  • Over half of the listings currently in TEMPO were marked “do not photograph” when they were entered into the system.
  • 80% of the half that WAS photographed by PhotoReal had their exterior photo replaced with one supplied by the listing agent within two weeks of the listing going active.
  • 90% of the current listing database has photos provided by agents rather than the PhotoReal photography service.

What’s the most important thing to note in these three points?  “WITHIN TWO WEEKS OF THE LISTING GOING ACTIVE.”

The fact that agents enter listings AT ALL WITHOUT PHOTOS is hurting the potential sale of your property.  List with me and I’ll make sure you don’t experience those gaps in service.

For an example of a website that I created for one of my listings, click here.

Flex MLS In, Tempo Out

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Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service is making a huge change this month from the old Tempo system to the new FlexMLS system, finally!  We have been waiting for more robust search capabilities, faster searching, and better statistics reporting for quite some time.

After evaluating the new system, even though it’s not everything I’d hoped, it is a vast improvement over what we’ve been used to.

It’s possible that your agent is not aware that during the transition to FlexMLS, the only information pertinent to you that will be transferred from the old system (Client Gateway) to the new system (Portal) is your contact data.  If you have been used to logging into your custom website to view properties that have been saved, your searches will not transfer to the new system.

This means that your agent will need to recreate those searches to get the valuable information you need back within your reach.  Of course, if that doesn’t happen quickly enough, I’d be happy to create a custom portal for you with the right criteria to get you back on track with your house hunting.