Episode 3 - Listings...the good, the bad and the ugly

Hi Everyone! Welcome to All Things REAL our show where we chat about all things 'real'...real estate, real life....realationships, not much is off the table.

In this episode your hosts Jennifer and JP are back giving you the secrets most real estate agents won't tell you. During this episode we share what makes a good listing, our pet peeves about listings and more. Take a listen to get the insider info and tips on getting your property ready to sell and how to market it effectively.


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Transcript

Welcome to the all things real podcast. We are your hosts, JP hunt, and Jennifer McPherson. We are a husband and wife real estate team here to chat about things real, real life, real estate, realationships and more you name it. We might talk about it. Not much will be off the table. Join us on this not always perfect journey through navigating life as a team, both professionally and personally. 

Hi everyone today, we're talking about property listings. This is actually property listings take two. Our other one stopped recording on us about six minutes in so this is our  next shot at it.Should be a really good one now. So this is number two. I don't even remember what we talked about in the last one, but in this one  we're gonna talk about what makes a good listing. We're seeing in this kind of market that people are always thinking their house will sell no matter wha....totally not true. I think there's a lot more that goes into it than people realize, am I right?
Well, I mean a hundred percent and there is some circumstances, you know, someone said to me the other day " the house is gonna sell anyway." Even if someone uses cell phone pictures, for instance. And like that could be correct in some ways, especially earlier this year you're right, that house would've sold, but you can easily be leaving tens of thousands of dollars on the table for yourself because we've seen it before in our offer presentations that we've been running just that one more offer coming in can mean tens of thousands of more dollars for the seller on the property
Cell phone pictures is a side note, are my pet peeve, especially the ones taken by the cell phone that you can still see the pillow marks in the bed, or the person standing in the mirror. That kind of thing, wait, my favourite was the guy who took cell phone pictures and  family feud was playing on the television and Steve Harvey was right up there. 
Right. Well, I respect for Steve Harvey cuz I do like family feud, so

As real estate agents we throw around the term sellers market a lot.  I think we take for granted, even though these days it's in the news quite a bit , we all kind of understand what a seller's market is, but if you don't  JP is really great at explaining it.
So basically what it means is the amount of homes on the market and the length that inventory would stay on the market. So sometimes there's less than one month's worth of inventory in the market. And what does that mean? So it basically just means that if no homes were sold or no homes were listed that all the homes on the market would sell in say one month, if there was one month worth of inventory. So historically  a balance market, so where it's sort of equal for buyers and sellers has been like four to five months worth of inventory. Now we haven't had that for quite a while, before the pandemic, we were probably about three months  depending on the market. And then we shot way down during the pandemic and we've really stayed low. So some places had two weeks worth of inventory, which is like a crazy, crazy low amount. And now  we are seeing now a little bit of an uptick in the inventory, but we are definitely still still in a seller's market. But at the same time,  sellers do need to be reasonable still.
 Oh side note, if you're hearing anything that sounds like chewing in the background, it's not JP or myself. It's Archie, our little Yorkshire terrier he's chosen now is the time to fall in love with his bone again. We don't have the heart to make him stop or move him to another room because he likes to be with us. 
 Anyway, I digress. But the honest God truth is right now, what we're seeing is bad listings whether it's poor marketing in the terms of pictures being listed on the wrong board or just being priced incorrectly, they're no not selling, they're staying on the market.
 And these are mistakes again that are costing people again, tens of thousands of dollars very, very easily. And it can be a couple things. It can be maybe the experience of the listing agent if they haven't been in the market for a little bit, like for right now, you know, this is gonna be really  the end of April, that's totally different market in February. So we are seeing things where people are expecting February pricing and we're in April now and the market has changed. And so it's a different strategy now. And if you're not on that, or if you maybe only do one or two listings a year, you're not gonna know that. And if you're not active, then you're again easily costing yourself some mistake that again will then cost you down the road or cost your sellers down the road.
I mean, we just did that condo just the other day and you know, the unrealistic expectation of price. Now I understand us coming in as a buyer. We want it, we work for our buyers when we represent them, we wanted the lowest price possible. But at the same time, we understand what is sold in the market, in that building, in other buildings, in that area. And you know, these people actually refused two offers that were pretty much the same price within 10,000 of each other because they weren't high enough. Now, what does that tell you if you got two offers after holding offers for what a week they held offers ? Then maybe you're not gonna get your price that you wanted. That's just my personal opinion.

Well, I mean, it's generally true. Generally, your first offer or your first chance of offers are the best ones you're gonna get. And I mean, this particular condo was something that look at, we are literally right now we're a hundred thousand dollars over what the condo would've sold for in say November, but were probably about $50,000 over what the comp in the condo would've sold for in January or February. So this is something with the seller's expectations. They literally are still a hundred thousand dollars up from November, but they're only looking at February. And so they think they're losing $50,000 and that's just not the case. That's the current market. So this is, again, the expectations were set improperly for this and that's what's happening now. So then it causes a lot of stress on everyone's side. It causes a lot of stress for the sellers, the selling agent, it causes stress for our buyers. Because again, we are explaining to them, this is what's happening now in this current market. And you know, they're educated now and they're, they know what's going on and that's the big thing buyers are. Or, you know, at least our buyers are super educated in the current state of the market. And in this case, now this has been a big waste of time for everybody because these people really wanted, you know, $50,000 higher and it's not gonna happen.
 I think as a listing agent, sometimes it causes you a lot of  heart palpitations  when you take a listing that you know is going to be overpriced it's never worth it. We just went through it...somebody in our neighbourhood  wanted to list their house. I guess the price I told them that they would get didn't suit their expectations and they ended up listing quite a bit higher. The funny thing is  they ended up sitting on the market  for a while,  they ended up having to reduce their price. And low and behold, they reduced the price to where I said they should be priced at in the beginning, which was annoying,  and then they finally ended up selling. But that's after time on the market because you know what the telephone game is almost the worst thing. Well, my neighbor said he sold for this or this and that. Right. And that's almost the worst thing because you don't know for sure.
 And a lot of people are relying on certain websites that are out there and there's some value to them of whether you're looking at condos.ca or house stigma and all that kind of stuff, but what people need to realize that  they might be good for some information that's maybe  downtown Toronto kind of thing or in the Toronto area, but some other real estate boards on the backside do not feed into these sites. So they're not getting complete information. So a lot of people are looking at these things as gospel and they're not, they're either showing that homes didn't sell when they actually did, or the amounts are wrong or whatever it is. So again, this is again where you need someone trusted working for you on, on your side. Because again, that helps set expectations. Because the other thing that these websites don't do is they don't tell you what's happening currently in the market. They might have an algorithm that tries to tell you that your house should sell for this much or that much or whatever it is, but you need boots on the ground. You need people that are active and, and know what's happening in listings all around in that specific market and have been inside the properties, cuz an algorithm can't tell you  that carpet was crappy and will need to be replaced, or the paint on that house was all scuffed up and somebody just took it because the layout was what they wanted and they're gonna totally rip out everything, the kitchen and remodel it, all the, you know, the algorithm, doesn't tell you all of that. So it's just something to watch out for. And another thing we're also seeing is sometimes, the agents are not members of the local board. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, so sometimes people don't understand that there's a bunch of different boards that we list on right when we market property. So on the back end of things like, so everyone sees realtor.ca, but there's  individual real estate boards on the other side. So there's the Toronto real estate board, which is the main one because that's the biggest on, and that's the one that gets quoted a lot of times in a lot of news articles and things like that. But that really only covers from GTA to about the Durham region. So about to sort Bowmanville that area. If you look at  Oakville has its own real estate board, Hamilton, Burlington have their own, Kitchener. Waterloo has its own,  Cambridge has its own, all that kind of stuff. So if you're not listed on the correct board,  a lot of people might just say, well, I'm in to, you know, list my Hamilton property on the Toronto board. And that's it because it shows up on realtor.ca but now what you're doing is you're cutting out all of the local Hamilton  realtors  who have all set up an auto email for their clients. And those clients are not gonna see that that listing. So, you need want someone that's investing the time.  We actually invest money into our business where we belong to the Toronto real estate board and we also belong to the Oakville real estate board,  what that does is that between sharing agreements and data agreements the Oakville board basically covers everything outside of Toronto. If we list something on Oakville, it goes automatically all the, the Niagara, the Kitchener or Waterloo ones. And then we also listed on Toronto because again, you could get obviously buyers from the Toronto region coming out to these other areas. So you want to cover your bases. So that's where listings on multiple boards is super valuable.
I mean, I think all in all, everything we've talked about all boils down to marketing the house properly. Part of marketing for us is what we do to get the house ready to list. We don't just walk up, put the sign on the, in the yard, you know, seller signs of paperwork and boom, it's on realtor.ca. There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes that I think if you haven't sold a house in the past 10 years or so, and maybe we'll do another podcast on that  that there's a lot more that gets done these days to prep a house for listing.
It usually takes thousands of dollars and a couple weeks worth of work, depending on the house and what you're gonna do. We're doing one, in Hamilton, for instance, and it's gonna need a couple weeks worth of work. We're gonna be changing up some flooring, some painting, you know, just some general cleanup and more like cosmetic things again that are going to increase the emotional pull because that home, once it's staged is gonna look really, really nice. And we want the maximum number of people coming through there to fall in love with that home. We don't want them just to see just sort of a standard home in that area. I mean, right now, if we put it up on the market, would it sell probably, but again, we would, if we go through these steps, our seller would be leaving money on the table.
All  these steps, put some money into the property and they're probably are gonna put around 10,000 into the property to get it ready. But realistically, they're probably gonna get that back two to three or four times over
My biggest tip, I think, uh, would be that paint goes such a long way.  I mean really when it comes to marketing a property, my biggest tip would be  a fresh coat of paint. Sometimes we don't see that our paint color has changed.
I mean, again, it's all, you know, little things, right? A fresh coat of paint on any house can brighten up the whole thing, making sure that the, even the, the light bulbs that they're all the same sort of hue you know, you can go in the store and there's like
Future clients that JP pet peeve
There's daylight. And there's like sunlight and there's, I don't even know Moonlight. I don't even know all the different ways  L E D and this and that. Look  if people walk into every single room and there's a different hue coming from the light bulb, which is, yes, it is a pep peeve of mine. It's such an easy fix. And again, it's a little thing that adds to the emotional pull of home and leaves people leaving with a really, really good feeling in it, because they're walking to them, picturing themselves, you don't want them thinking like, oh, this is dumb here. This room's like stark white and this room's like a warm white or whatever it is. And it's crazy the kinds of things that buyers get turned off of. And they'll pick the smallest things. Sometimes now times it's an objection over a bigger thing, but they'll find the smallest thing. And that's what they just keep, they can't get over the smallest thing and then they don't put an offer on the property.

Yeah. And if there's lots of little things going on with the home that generally leads to now buyers thinking, well, what else is going on with the home? Like if there's lots of little maintenance items, then, you know, they may, again, individual, they may not be massive things, but as a whole, the buyer now thinks, well, has this home had enough care endure over the past few years or whatever it is like just has the home been cared for because if buyers feel that the home has been well cared for, then it again gives them a good feeling and can easily make a difference of tens of thousands of dollars
And prices are so high these days who wants to spend over a million dollars to move into a house that they've got to do upkeep on, unless that's the goal, right. Is sometimes the goal yeah for a flip or something like that. But you know we're generally talking about a home that a family home that someone's gonna move into and that they, they don't want to do a flip or anything like that
 Even an investor that buys a property and they're gonna have a single family rental, some investors do not have the time or the wherewithal to do extra work on top of all of it. So, you know, we find them something that's ready, move, even ready.
Absolutely. Cuz they will easily pay 10, 20, 30, $40,000 more for a home that they don't have to do anything to than one that maybe only needed maybe a couple thousand dollars worth of work. But they will easily do that. Because again, it's just to, to them, it's not what's the word I'm looking for here. It's just a little bit more in their mortgage. They're not worried about the caring it's cost of it and it's worth it to.
I mean we talk about professional photos. This is one of the things for our listings. For sale listings we always use professional photos and video and professional room measurements. 
Because again, everyone is looking at all these homes when they're sitting in bed on their phone or their iPad or whatever in the middle of the night, this is what people do, right? This is, this is always what people do. They talk about it at dinner parties, they bring it up on their phones.
Oh my God, all this kind of stuff. Everybody has to talk about real estate,

But you need something that shows good online because people that's what people are doing. That's their first impression because they will not sometimes go to a home because it's got bad pictures. And again  these pictures go both ways. They can make a home that maybe has its challenges look really good. And then, but also if you take bad pictures, it can make a really, really good home look really bad. And again, you now you're limiting the number of people because the whole goal of marketing the property do a proper, you know, pictures and all that kind of stuff is to get the most people to the house cuz that's how you're gonna get the most money for it.

And information is key. You know, there's nothing, I can't stand worse than when my client's like, well, I kind of like this house and I look at the listing and it's skeleton. There's nothing on it. Like the agent has even asked the home, the seller one single question.

For sure. I mean, you know, bare minimum, you wanting to know something, you know, unless you're in a brand new subdivision, but bare minimum on most homes, you wanna know the age of the roof, the furnace, you know, the windows, the air conditioner, all that kind of stuff. If you get into a bit older homes we're looking at, okay, has electrical been updated? Has the plumbing been updated? You know, if you're into a hundred year old homes, you know, is there you're making note that no, there is no lead pipes in this homes or there is no knob and tube in this home or whatever it is. Yeah. All that kind of stuff is really key because a lot of people will make it. 
I mean I can send an email and ask the questions, but there are gonna be some agents out there that are gonna be like, forget it. We don't know enough about this property. We're not sure

You have to remember if you, a lot of people do not have common sense. That's, you know, that's really what it is. That's the nice way to put it and a lot of people won't put in the work and it's not, we're not talking about a lot of extra work, but they just won't do it. If they, if they, the people will always take the easy way out and people do not want to put in the extra effort and time on these things. And if that's

Also sorry to cut you off JP coming off that's what I do.  But if there's one little thing that the buyer can't seem to get over, having all that information in the listing helps them make up their mind if they don't have that information and say, you know, there's one little thing that the buyer can't get over, but you know, while the roof was just done, electrical's fully updated. This is done. This is done. This is done well, that might sway them to put an offer on your property. 

Absolutely. And again, we at the market, you know, slowing just a, you know, a little bit, some of the crazy froth is outta the market, but it's still out there. I mean, literally I was in a home this week, that's gonna be a flip and they had 35 offers on it last night. Now that is definitely more the exception than the norm. That was a special case. It was very low priced. It was a complete flip in an area, you know a good family area. But again, this is where you want enough people through. If you think about that condo, we talked about at the beginning of this  Podcast. They had two offers on it and neither one they got taken, but if they had three, maybe even four, they may have gotten, you know, right. That they were looking for. You know, you just don't know, but that's one of the things you need to have these things marketed properly and you need to have the, the seller's expectations have to be set properly from the beginning.

Yeah. And we also, we're big believers in staging, shout out to Wendy from Niagara staging. She's our sort of our go-to. We love her we don't stage every single property. Not every single property needs to be staged. And you know, sometimes the sellers don't wanna stage it. But we always, you know, we always think staging at least staging the main floor is a great idea.

Again, this is increasing emotional pull in the home. And if it's not staging because if a family's living there and they actually need to live in the house maybe they've got little kids or pets or whatever it is. So it's maybe bringing in like an interior designer. And it's adding little things getting rid of personal items. My mother's especially, she, you know, loves all the family photos, hope Carol Annes not listening but if she was selling her house, we would take those down because we don't want people looking at family photos. We want them thinking about themselves in the home.You're when you're painting, it's gonna be probably like a nice beige or a, you know, an, an off white or something like that. Something that's bright, Jennifer, every kitchen, she wants gonna be a white one. White kitchens will sell More, but we do understand not everybody has that white kitchen. So we're gonna do, you know, everything around it to make everything show its best.
Right. And that's a lot of times that's literally just cleaning off on the countertops.
Decluttering is huge. There's another of my  my pet peeve. There's nothing. I can't stand then, stuff all over the countertop, even my own home but even more so on listings put all the appliances away. We're not using them every day. Put the toaster underneath, put the coffee maker underneath.  You know, that's just sort of, it makes it look clean.
Exactly. It all comes back to the emotional pull of the home and what we can do to maximize it. Every home has something that you can do to maximize the potential of it. And those are little things that, that you can do. The other thing that, because we've both run into this over the last six months, things need, need to work no matter how minor that they might seem. So we had someone out  a new stove for the house, but it wa a secondhand stove. So they told me,  it looks great. It's a stainless steel, whatever. I was like, okay. But they're like, but the door doesn't really work. And I was
I Remember this. I was like, well, what do you mean the door doesn't really work like, well, you know, we got it secondhand And I was like, do you realize when people go through houses and I don't know if you haven't sold a house for a while, or if you haven't been buying for houses for a while, think about the stuff that you do. When you walk around a house, people will go around, they will open up cupboards. They will open up drawers. They will open up the fridge to see how clean it is. They will open up the oven. I promise you. So that particular one we had to get, they couldn't get the door fixed cuz we're in the middle of a pandemic. So now they're short,
No JPS missing the best part of this story. We show up to go check on the progress  they were actually really great. They were repainting everything, doing a lot of work to get this house ready to sell, but we go and we touch the stove just a little and the door fell, the Flippin door fell off!
And these people were great, they spent the money, they spent the time and the effort and  they spent weeks of literally blood, sweat, and tears to get this house ready. Yeah. And at the end of we don't want an oven door that's broken.
 I mean, it looked phenomenal. They painted it. They did the floors didn't they do the floors, the outside. They just totally redid the outside. Right. we staged it, it looked phenomenal  and we, we got, we got a good price for it.

We got the highest price on the street for it at the time. Absolutely.

But that door not working. Could you imagine if you were going to look at a house and you went to open to see how clean the stove was and the door fell off ?

What do you mean? People will that's that's just what happens. Right. So, and we see it all the time too. You know, I was in a house the other day where they, they completely renovated the inside of the house, but all the outside of the still had all the old building materials, all the garbage, all that kind of stuff all on the outside. So now my first impression of walking up, what I think is a fully renovated house, which it was on the inside our buyer was like, well, what is this? The whole outside of it looks crap. And there's all this construction material and all this stuff on the outside. They did a great job on the inside, but the outside doesn't match it. So now the whole thing is shot.  They've wasted their time. They've wasted their effort because no one's gonna buy this house until the outside's cleaned up or they're gonna buy it for way under what it actually could have sold for.
Yeah. So I mean, to sum it all up, we could talk for hours and hours on this topic is just because, you know, we have a lot to say on it. But you know, we hope we've given you some information to help you get your house ready to sell or  just give you an idea of what might be involved in selling your house. Because again, if you haven't done it for a while, yeah. I know everybody says, well, I don't need a real estate agent to sell the house. Well, who's gonna tell you that you had to do all these little things to get all these offers on the table. We, we feel like you do. I mean, at the end of the day it's it's, this is one of your biggest investments, right? If not the biggest investment you've ever made, you want the most money for it. Right. Every seller wants the most money at the end of the day, but a lot of people just don't want to do the work. So you need someone who's gonna be tough with you and not going to basically be a, a yes man or woman to you. You want someone who is going to you, what actually needs to be done, because if someone is just telling you yes, yes. Oh, you're right. You're right. You're right. They're not doing their job. I can promise you that.

At the end of the day  we hope we've given you some tips and  tune in to next time.

 Have a good day. And Archie says goodbye as well.