Master the art of presentation and visibility before lowering the price

Key Takeaways

• Clients hire you to sell their home for the highest possible price — so don’t accept common advice that dropping the price is your only option for a quick sale.
• Focus on presentation to assure your listing is immaculate online and in person.
• Make sure your listing has peak visibility to reach as many buyers as possible.

You have a listing that won’t sell. You reach out to your broker, fellow agents, coaches, and gurus, and what do they tell you? “It’s overpriced. Drop the price. Price is everything.”

It’s likely that you’ve given that same advice to somebody who asked you about a listing that wouldn’t sell. It’s an easy answer: Drop the price. If it’s been on the market for months and it’s not selling, it’s got to be the price.

It’s true — if you drop the price on a listing, someone will eventually buy it. But that’s not what the seller hired you to do. They hired you to sell it for the highest price possible.

Some agents convince themselves that it’s their job to make the seller “accept reality” and lower the price to a point where the agent thinks it will draw an offer — as though everything depends on price. The agent’s advice could potentially cost the seller tens of thousands of dollars. It could also cost the agent months of unnecessary headaches as he continues to drop the price and wait for an offer. It might even cost him the listing.

Why do agents lose listings?

A listing is lost when a home doesn’t sell after months on the market. The sellers may feel that another agent could do a better job — or they might convince themselves that the home will never sell and take it off the market. In either case, it’s an awful situation for the agent who has put a lot of effort and money into the listing with no return.

There are things you can do as a listing agent to help your clients and prevent those issues from ever arising. If you follow the principles of the Listing Triangle, those problems should never be an issue for you.

What goes wrong with a listing?

You get a listing, you work your butt off, you do everything you can think to do — list it on the MLS, get nice photos, host open houses often — but the property won’t sell. Your clients won’t drop their price any further. You blame the sellers for not lowering the price.

In fact, most real estate books, trainings, and gurus will teach agents how to avoid this outcome by learning the skilled art of getting the seller to lower their price. Some agents do this before they even take the listing — they get the seller to pre-agree to lower their price after so many days.

When agents focus solely on price and use the skills they learned from their broker or trainer to basically beat up sellers to get them to lower their price, they’re perpetuating the bad reputation that real estate agents have earned.

How many sellers have you personally heard saying, “My last agent was only focused on dropping the price”? That’s how people feel when that’s the only solution an agent brings to the table once they do the work up front. Clients aren’t sure what their agent does after a property is listed. They’re not sure what options they have other than dropping the price.

There is always something else an agent can do to alter a listing besides dropping the price that could better the odds of that home selling. There’s always more that can be done to make that property more appealing. It might need both a lower price and changes in visibility and presentation. Price, visibility, and presentation are equally important — which is why I call this the Listing Triangle.

You need to become not just proficient but truly a master of each corner of the triangle, to know with absolute certainty that you are doing everything you can to net your seller the highest price for their home.