REAL ESTATE: WHAT BUYERS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SELLERS

REAL ESTATE: WHAT BUYERS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT SELLERS

The following information is provided by the Center for REALTOR® Development (CRD).

NAR has been administering its annual Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers survey since 1981. The survey has grown from 59 to 131 questions, and gives us great insight into the trends, wants and needs associated with the most significant financial decision of most people’s lives: purchasing a primary residence for themselves and their families.

In this article, we’re going to dig in a little deeper into the findings from the 2018 version of the survey to focus on sellers:

Sellers Are Staying in Their Homes Longer
In the last 30 years, sellers have remained in the same home for longer periods of time. From 1987-2008, sellers stayed in their homes for a median of six years, with the only exception being 1997, when the median tenure bumped up to seven years. After 2008, the median tenure began to increase by one year each year.

By 2011, the median tenure reached nine years, where it remained for three consecutive years, and jumped up again in 2014 to 10 years. It decreased to nine years in 2015, but rose in 2016 to a median of 10 years, where it remained in 2017, effectively doubling since data collection started three decades prior.

It’s not necessarily clear why sellers are staying in their homes longer, but one possibility for some is that they are waiting for their equity to increase, especially given the economic downturn.

Seller Relationships With Agents Are Steady and Strong
Eighty-nine percent of home sellers worked with a real estate agent to sell their home. In addition—same as last year—90 percent of sellers listed their homes on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), which is the No. 1 source for sellers to list their homes. Only 4 percent opted not to list on an MLS.

Client referrals and repeat business are the predominant ways sellers find their real estate agent. Most sellers—85 percent—said that they would definitely (67 percent) or probably (18 percent) recommend their agent for future services.

Sixty-two percent of sellers were “very satisfied” with the selling process; 26 percent were somewhat satisfied. Only 13 percent were dissatisfied with the process.

Key Skills Sellers Want in Their Agents
Sellers place high priority on the following five tasks: market the home to potential buyers (21 percent); sell the home within a specific timeframe (20 percent); price the home competitively (18 percent); find a buyer for home (15 percent); and help fix the home to sell better (15 percent).

The reputation of the real estate agent was by far the most important factor when sellers selected an agent to sell their home (34 percent). Sellers also place value on the agent’s trustworthiness and honesty (18 percent) and whether the agent is a friend or family member (16 percent).

FSBOs Are Decreasing
In 1981, FSBO home sales accounted for 15 percent of all sales, and agent-assisted sales accounted for 85 percent. FSBO sales have declined over time, and in 2017, FSBOs accounted for 8 percent of total home sales again for the third year in a row. This is the lowest share since data collection began.

FSBOs typically sell for less than the selling price of other homes. For FSBO sellers, those who know the buyer tend to have higher median household incomes compared to those who did not know the buyer. Where FSBO sellers knew the buyer, the time on market for the home was usually a week, and sellers received 100 percent of the asking price.

To learn much more about sellers and seller representation overall, please consider checking out the education, benefits, and resources offered by CRD and its SRS Designation. In July, the featured 25% OFF course at the Center for REALTOR® Development is the Seller Representative Specialist (SRS) Designation Course, which is the basic requirement toward obtaining this credential.

For more information about other courses and programs, please visit the online learning portal from NAR’s Center for REALTOR® Development (CRD) and the Learning Library. Here, real estate professionals can sign up for online professional development courses, industry designations, certifications, CE credits, Code of Ethics programs and more. NAR’s CRD also offers monthly specials and important education updates. New users will need to register for an account.




Jason Grace is AZ Social Realty's content editor. Email him your real estate news ideas at jason@cashbuyerslists.com.







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What Is a Seller Counseling Session?

What Is a Seller Counseling Session?

RECBL - Real Estate News

The following information is provided by the Center for REALTOR(R) Development (CRD). A seller counseling session occurs at the beginning of your relationship with a current or prospective seller client and is a strategic activity that helps ensure a high-quality experience for everyone involved.

The consequences of unprepared sellers cannot be overstated. In a recent article from REALTOR(R) Magazine, agent Ryan Zwicky outlines some lessons learned the hard way, one of which was about setting appropriate expectations from the start. Zwicky says, "I learned that trying to please the seller only harms them in the end. It is better to be completely honest and open from the start."

A seller counseling session is a powerful expectation-setting tool. It can be a sit-down meeting in person, a virtual web-based teleconference, or even a long phone call-all supplemented with a print resource, to help guide the conversation. The mode of communication that you use for it is not quite as important as your ability to carve out uninterrupted one-on-one time for yourself and the seller to get to know one another a little more deeply, and to go over how everything will work.

There is no one set way to do a seller counseling session, but there are some best practices and resources-home-grown or for-purchase-that can help you plan the conversation beforehand so that you don’t forget any aspect that needs to be discussed. For example, the Real Estate Business Institute (REBI), an affiliate of NAR, offers sets of customizable PowerPoint(R) presentation templates to help with structuring the conversation. The slides can be reorganized and adapted as needed to your situation. For those that want to take their seller representation skills to an even higher level, REBI also offers its Seller Representative Specialist (SRS) Designation course online at NARs Center for REALTOR(R) Development. It also offers the course for classroom delivery, and a schedule of upcoming courses.

Regardless of the exact structure and the exact resources used, a seller counseling session is an invaluable strategic tool that will help you succeed as a seller's representative. Below are 10 reasons why.

1. Demonstrate Your Value - The session helps you showcase your service package by giving you the opportunity to highlight and explain your business background, your education qualifications, the extent of your experience, and the value you bring to the process. Your expertise and service orientation will help your client feel at ease and taken care of.

2. Set Expectations - The session will help you set expectations so that in the long run there will be fewer surprises (and therefore fewer delays and less confusion). The client will come to understand their role, your role, and the roles of everyone else along the way. Things will run more smoothly. Smooth transactions lead to more referrals.

3. Get on the Same Page - As confusion and potential misunderstandings are addressed and cleared away up front, the session will help put you and your client on the same team so that you are working together with each other, and not at odds or toward opposing goals.

4. Reduce Risk - Because of this meeting, there will be fewer chances for confusion, missteps, breaches and conflict. Whenever processes are made clearer at the outset, the risk of veering off into antagonistic or dangerous waters is greatly minimized.

5. Explain What You Can and Can’t Do - An important aspect of further reducing risk is addressing what you as the client advocate can and cannot do. By addressing this early, there will be fewer or no client expectations or demands that you do something which is unethical, illegal, uncomfortable or just plain fishy. You can go over how agency works in your state and all of the seller disclosures required. You can also discuss what the REALTOR(R) Code of Ethics requires of you, your fiduciary duty to your client, and what that looks like in day-to-day practice.

6. Outline the Process - Your client will be a more calm, confident, and cooperative partner once they have a big-picture scheme in their mind about what the entire process will entail. Do this for them in the seller consultation session; give them the big picture, 50,000-foot view. This may be second nature to you, but to them, the entire process may be foreign and disorienting. They may not need as many check-ins along the way, and it will be less likely that they will become upset with you if you have explained the overall process beforehand.

7. Position the Property - Having an in-depth conversation about the property, its current position in the market, what can be done to improve this position, like staging (and what cant be overcome) will help you down the road when you and your client have to deal with price reductions, price negotiations, concessions, contingencies, multiple offers, deals that fall through and so on.

8. Explain Fees - Understanding the line items of the different services clients are paying for will head off a number of questions, objections and frustrations down the road, especially if things get challenging. Having a talk about fees as connected to the value of what you do to help the property succeed in the marketplace is key.

9. Gather Preferences - The seller counseling session is a great time to gather information to help you understand how your client prefers to communicate and be treated. Do they want a daily or weekly check-in, by phone or text? How would they prefer open houses be handled? What makes them stressed and what puts them at ease? You’ll want to gather this information to help you serve them in the way that works best for them.

10. Provide Resources - The session will provide you the opportunity to share resources that the seller can take home with them, review in detail on their own time, and ask questions about later. The value of takeaways and reading material as time-saving educational tools cannot be underestimated. The seller counseling session helps you present and offer these materials so that the seller knows they exist and understands how to review them.

To learn much more about seller counseling sessions and seller representation overall, please consider checking out the education, benefits, and resources offered by REBI and its SRS Designation. In October, the featured 25% OFF course at the Center for REALTOR(R) Development is the Seller Representative Specialist (SRS) Designation course, which is the basic requirement toward obtaining this credential.

For more information, please visit onlinelearning.realtor.

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More homeowners cashing in on their new housing wealth

More homeowners cashing in on their new housing wealth

More homeowners cashing in on their new housing wealth
#realestate #cashbuyerslists #home #owner #cash #housing #wealth #piggy #bank #value #investment

Homeowners are opening their favorite piggy bank again — their homes. As home values rise faster than expected, that increased homeowner wealth suddenly seems more enticing. It's showing up in big remodeling growth and higher profits for retailers like Home Depot and Lowe's, but it also serves as a warning sign. Now, as millions of borrowers come up from underwater on their home loans and many more see their home values jump sizably on paper, borrowing more is back in favor.
Read More> http://bit.ly/RECBL-March7




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