The Right Dialogue is the Key!

As we head into the holiday’s, now is the perfect time to sharpen your negotiating skills and polish your pricing techniques, the following are 3 powerful closing techniques to try. You know that old Floyd Wickman saying, “Worse than no listing is a listing that won’t sell.”  Make sure yours are priced to move and you’ll not only be a hero to your sellers, you’ll set yourself up as the agent to call in your marketplace.

3 Powerful Closing Techniques to Try:

1. Don’t Help the Competition: 

Overpricing your home in today’s market can actually help sell other listings. Explain to your seller to put themselves in the shoes of the buyer.  They’ve got an agent and they’re looking at listings that are priced at market value, show well and have motivated sellers.

If they look at your home and a comparable home and all things being relatively equal, in other words, both are 4 bedroom, 3 bath, 2600 sq. ft. homes and both show well but yours is $50,000+ above market value, which home is going to look more attractive to them when it comes to a bottom line decision for their family?

In fact, when it comes to choosing their property, if your home is overpriced, you’ve just made the lesser priced home look perfect by comparison.  They can feel good about their decision of getting the same sized home for less! You can also pull comparables from your MLS to show real world applications of this.

If the seller overprices their home today and it goes online via the MLS and your multiple web listing portals, their home won’t even have the benefit of SHOWING up when consumers search by price.

 They’ve just priced themselves right off the internet search – eliminating the possibility of that 85+% of consumers who start their search there.

2. The Four Sales: 

A great Floyd Wickman strategy is to use the following dialogue: You know we’ve covered the comparables – the research that I showed you with the prices of the other homes like yours that have sold recently in this area and I know you want to list it at the higher price. I’ve put a lot of thought into it, and you know if we went ahead and put it on the market at your price – and I was the only one that had to be sold on that price – well I guess that would be fine. But in reality, there are actually four sales that have to be made in order to sell your home at that price.

First…I have to be sold and I’ve gotta tell you – all I can go by is the CMA facts and figures that I showed you.

Secondly…the other agents have to be sold on showing your property at that price – otherwise they’re simply not going to show it to their buyers.  Unfortunately, they get their numbers the same way I do – from what’s recently sold in the area and those same CMA numbers.

Thirdly…and this is a big one – the buyers.  Let’s just pretend we sold the agents on it.  Now we’ve got to convince the buyers to pay a higher price for a property when there are other homes like it that are selling
for less.

Unfortunately in today’s world and with the internet, buyers have access to the same information that we have here.  They know what homes are going for in this area.  So that’s going to be a tough sale, don’t you think?

Now let’s just say everything lines up and somehow we even sell a buyer on paying more for your property than we know its worth in this market. We still have one more sale.

Fourth…there’s the lender.  Lenders use exactly the same formulas we do to determine Fair Market Value for a property before they’ll write a loan. Are you familiar with Fall-Throughs? Yeah, fall-throughs are what happens when people are thinking just the way you were thinking about pricing higher and the sale can’t go through because the property won’t appraise for what you’re asking for it. And that’s not what you want right?

3. Empathy vs. Reality Close: 

This dialogue comes from our friend, Coach Gord Gerrie. I understand how you feel Mr. and Mrs. Seller and there is no doubt, many others have felt exactly the same way you do right now. However, what they found was that once they had sold their house and focused their attention on their new home, they understood that the reality of accepting the offered price really only amounted to a few dollars more per month on their next home.

Again in reality, by accepting this offer today, you will know that your house is sold and that the difference between what you had hoped for and what you will receive will amount to less than $X per day in your new home. Would you let $X per day stand between you and the home of your dreams?

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