Selling your home
The right preparation, pricing, positioning and promotion all shape your final sale price. Here’s how we approach each one.
Prepare your home for sale
First impressions matter
Improvements (strategic repairs and upgrades), staging and professional photography all translate into tangible maximum sale price results. How we handle inspections and disclosures are also key to a smooth seller sale as well as contributing to long-term buyer satisfaction, which translates into reduced risk of liability.
KENT WOODLANDS | SOLD $3,600,000
Improvements
Putting your home’s best foot forward
We curate your home for maximum appeal, and advise you on cost-effectively presenting your home in its best light.
We can recommend improvements to your house to enhance its attractiveness and marketability. If desired, we will coordinate and schedule professionals to perform these improvements. Notice the dramatically different feel, and thus perception of home value, the below before and after pictures evoke. Consider this, your biggest expense could be the money you don’t make on the sale of your home by not making strategic improvements.
We kept costs low for this Kentfield kitchen makeover. Most of the original items are still in the photo on the right, including the flooring, the lower cabinets, and even the countertop!
This Mill Valley kitchen benefited tremendously from new cabinet facings, improved lighting and other strategic, cost effective practical decorative details.
Staging
Showcasing for maximum value
Staging a home is a powerful way to expand the pool of potential buyers. Drawing a roadmap for buyers, through staging your home, allows a buyer to visualize themselves living in your home, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will want to buy it, make an offer, and in some cases compete to get it!
Professional photography
All marketing starts with photography
A picture is worth a thousand words, or thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars!
In this day and digital age, buyers are judging your home based on the photographs or videos that they see online. In some cases they may be purchasing your home without even setting foot inside, and they are relying on those photos to make their decision. We have only seconds with which to capture someone’s attention online as they are scrolling through so many available homes. Showcasing your property in the best light with proper preparations and professional photography can increase both the number of prospective buyers, and thus the final sales price substantially.
The above photo of our Tiburon listing was taken on a digital phone. The image on the right was taken by a professional photographer. Which photo would you choose?
Price it strategically
Our goal is the highest selling price for your home
Purchasing a home is both an emotional and an investment decision for any buyer. The emotional component plays a powerful role in the buyer’s decision-making process. Through the correct pricing and presentation of your home we are able to fully capture a buyer’s emotions, which will affect the ultimate selling price and terms. The confirmation of fair market value is achieved when more than one buyer is willing to compete to buy your home at that price level or higher, which also translates, in the buyer’s mind, to the confirmation that the purchase is a good investment as well.
In the real estate world the highest price for a home is typically achieved by full market exposure to all buyer prospects that are qualified and in a position to both afford and appreciate your home.
The value of pricing at market value
Expose your home to the greatest percentage of qualified buyers
The strategy is to perfectly price your home upon its market debut, as that is when your home has the largest audience. The largest amount of “eyeballs” will be on your home in the first few days and the first weeks of hitting the market.
If the price is too high, then you may never recapture the buyers that passed it by the first time around. The longer your home sits on the market, the more a buyer reasons that there “must be something wrong” with your home, because if it were sought after, they reason it would have sold by now. Even if you reduce the price at a later date, the impact of the reduced price is not nearly as powerful as it would have been initially.
The phrase “you do not get a second chance to make a first impression” is valuable advice to heed.
Other considerations
Although the listing price you place on your property will influence its sale, there are many other factors that come into play. Some of these factors are within your control, others are not.
Factors within your control:
Preparation (the physical condition of your property: home, grounds, staging)
Pricing (the correct debut price is of enormous strategic importance)
Positioning (who is the target audience for your home + how do we reach them)
Promotion (marketing)
Factors not within your control:
Your property’s location
Recent property market values
Current economic indicators
Other factors to consider:
The ease of showing your property
The selection of the real estate sales professional you choose to represent you
Position it for the right buyer
Who is our target audience for your very unique home?
What are the attributes of your home that will most attract the kind of buyer that will be interested in your home? What channels do these buyers pay attention to, how do we find them, and how do we get their attention when we do?
MILL VALLEY | SOLD $2,700,000
Whom will your unique home most likely appeal to?
We start by clearly defining who the perfect buyer is for your home, otherwise known as our target audience. Are these urbanites starting a family who have saved up for their first home purchase, ready to transition from their condo in the big city? Or are they wealthy empty nesters seeking a personal sanctuary or family compound?
Note that when we do strategic improvements to your home and stage it artfully (plus showcase it with the right photography) we are broadening the buyer-pool for that property. In other words, we are expanding the reach of whom your home will appeal to.
What are the attributes of your home that will be most attractive to our buyer?
We focus on playing up the attributes that are in line with our assessment of our buyer’s priorities. When it comes to the potential buyer objections about your home, we have a choice of investing in remedying them (if they are remediable), reimagining them (perhaps through minor architectural/design changes) or acknowledging them and accounting for them in our pricing.
Where will our target buyers be found?
The right channels we use to deliver our message about your home to prospective buyers are crucial. Different buyer types spend time consuming media through a variety of digital and analog channels. Our key to targeting the right buyer segment is to understand where the different buyer types can be found, both virtually and physically. Our background in developing digital marketing strategies for technology companies gives us the edge in creatively and effectively marketing your home to the RIGHT buyer pool.
How should we craft our message to our buyer so we stand out from the crowd?
We describe your home and its attributes in a way that speaks compellingly to our target buyers, through impactful images, videos, and the written word. We understand the importance of tailoring our marketing message to each specific target buyer group when accessing them through specific marketing channels. Our ultimate goal is to appeal to the broadest buyer pool possible.
Promote it widely
Reach as many qualified buyers as possible, as quickly as possible
Partnering with Golden Gate Sotheby’s International Realty® means leveraging local experts with a global reach, showcasing your property to the widest target audience to achieve the highest market price. There is no competition.
You only have 6 seconds, so make them count
Buyers form their first impression of your home within the first 6 seconds.
In alignment with the stellar reputation of our brand, we carefully and professionally photograph your home to present your property in its best light. Our websites are designed to best display our professional high resolution photography for every listing. So what is next? From video to digital to print, our properties reach more buyers than anyone else’s. Maximum exposure to the highest quality clients ensures maximum results.
Reach the largest number of qualified buyers for your home
Sotheby’s Realty draws far more unique visitors than other luxury and local competitors.
