February 23, 2008
After arguing that we should let foreclosures run their course, we saw just what this would look like in a bank-owned Oakland listing, first noticed by one of the Redfin Forums participants.
In the listing photos, a man sits in front of the house, seemingly with his head in his hands. In the floor of one room there is a large red slick of what appears to be blood, beside a pail of forlorn cleaning supplies. Is it a Halloween haunted house gone bad or something worse?
We cannot display the pictures in a blog post commenting on an active listing, per an agreement with our data providers. But feel free to join the discussion about what exactly is on the floor of this listing in the Forums or comment below…
January 22, 2007
There have been a couple articles circling lately about the value of words in real estate listings. Quick, which of the following words will help sell your home?
- motivated seller
- good value
- clean
- quiet
- new paint
If you guessed all of the above, keep reading. Bottom line: words matter and none of these will help your home sell faster or for more money. Real-estate listings, not unlike personal ads, are crafted to minimize blemishes and maximize perceived selling points.
Deciphering home marketing-speak shouldn’t be complicated, but sometimes we need a decoder ring to help us read between the lines.
Articles in the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post give us a few …
Dos and don’ts:
- Don’t use an overabundance of exclamation points (note buyers: they can show a sign of desperation and an openness to a lower offer).
- Do use descriptive words about price and location. Last year’s top words were: “flow,” “embassy-style,” “enormous” and “lazy.” Supposedly these words connote a lifestyle of to-the-manner-born comfort, mint juleps on porches and drawing-room cocktails.
- Don’t make a plea of “must see!” This is received about as enthusiastically as a dinner-time telemarketing call.
- If you can’t find anything better to say than “new paint,” perhaps it’s best to say nothing at all.
- Sellers would be best served by a listing with “just the facts, ma’am.”
Statistics:
- Homes where the seller was “motivated” took 15 percent longer to sell
- Houses listed as “handyman specials” flew off the market in half the average time.
- Words that denoted “curb appeal” or general attractiveness helped a property sell faster than those that spoke of “value” and “price.”
- Homes described as “beautiful” moved 15 percent faster and for 5 percent more in price than the benchmark.
- “Good-value” homes sold for 5 percent less than average.
and unusual descriptions … that worked!:
- “FAMISHED FOR A FABULOUS FLATFRONT ON A FAMOUS BLOCK? Come feast your eyes on this femme fatale! Even the finicky will find her fetching while fledgling families and canine fanciers will contrive to fraternize.”
- … “pixie perfect, proudly self-possessed and peerlessly positioned for easy access to senate, judiciary.” [HUH?]
Economist Chad Syverson, co-author of a working paper that was the basis for a chapter in Freakonomics, sums it up the best … “the way an ad is written won’t change a dumpy-looking house.”
Our San Francisco blog has a few examples of real listings we put through the decoder ring.
Decoder ring picture credit: Heather McKinnon, The Seattle Times
November 28, 2006
We are experiencing some unseasonably cold weather in Seattle this week. Good for winter sports, bad for driving. During my rally-cross drive home, I caught tonight’s episode of Marketplace on NPR. They had a really entertaining segment about burying a statue of Saint Joseph to speed the sale of your house. Long story short, wherever you bury a statue of Saint Joseph the property is bound to sell. I am willing to bet this will be a question on Bluff the Listener on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me this weekend.
The Marketplace story followed Mike Hickson, a skeptic turned believer after reading a testimonial about a “man who, while trying to sell his home, was given a St. Joseph statue, but scoffing at the notion, threw it in the trash. It went to the dump. Wasn’t he surprised a couple of weeks later when he saw in the paper that — lo and behold — the dump had been sold.”
Mike promptly ordered a statue and “dropped St. Joe into his basement sales office next to the For Sale sign on a Saturday morning anyway. Lo and behold, people viewed the house on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, we got an offer.”
We would like to conduct a more scientific study of the effect burying a statue of Saint Joseph has on selling a home. If you are selling your home and would like to be part of our study post a comment or send me an e-mail. Or if you’ve buried St. Joe to aid in the sale of your home, let us know the outcome.
August 16, 2006
How do you sell a home that isn’t for sale?
Today, we’re trying to find out, as the first step in a program called First to Know. The home-for-sale-that-isn’t-for-sale is a Capitol Hill condo here in Seattle.
The condo owner, Eugene Lin, wants to gauge market demand. So he took some snaps and wrote up a nice little description of his favorite things about the place that we posted to our Seattle blog as a sort of MySpace page for the condo, and now we’re matching him up with all the people on Redfin’s site who have registered for updates on Capitol Hill properties. Hopefully, there’ll be a fit.
Instead of buyers searching an MLS of properties for sale, potential sellers can search a sort-of MLS of buyers.
What we like about this:
–> It’s direct and frictionless: Eugene hasn’t signed a listing agreement or hung a yard sign, and he isn’t interested in paying a traditional commission; he just sent us an e-mail answering some basic questions, with some photos attached.
–> It doesn’t just use the Internet as a marketing brochure: the Internet is great not just for displaying information, like a listing, but also at figuring out what information people want to see. Redfin has a pretty good idea of who would be interested in Eugene’s condo.
–> It’s fluid and provisional: the Internet lets people test ways to think (blogs), to be (MySpace, chat rooms), to do. If you get something wrong, you just change it. Eugene can get a sense of what his property can command in the market, then decide if he wants to sell it in the MLS, or directly to a buyer he meets in the next few days — or not at all.
Living with this quantum jitter of uncertainty is one of the most important ways the Internet has changed how we think. You still need an MLS, for properties that are unambiguously for sale, but marketplaces also need the fluidity for buyers and sellers to connect and converse without transacting.
The traditional real estate industry depends on this idea that buying or selling a house is a terrifying ordeal, consisting of one irrevocable step after another. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The notion that buyers and sellers can work together in a simpler way has stuck with us ever since we read in the papers about a young couple who bought a house from a Wisconsin woman representing herself:
“We sat there and had a glass of wine,” Ms. Murphy recalled. “And they said, ‘Hey, there’s that crack in the basement wall.’ And we said, ‘No problem. We’ll take care of it.’ ” Dealing directly with each other seemed so civilized, she said. “I keep coming back to that.”
But enough chit-chat. Check out the condo, or tell us what you think of the idea. It’s something we began talking publicly about since we first noticed a Finnish website that was letting people make bids on homes that aren’t for sale (the comments on that posting were particularly helpful to us in shaping our strategy, giving voice and urgency to concerns we hadn’t yet worked out). There’s a lot more that we still want to do with the idea.
In the meantime, if you’d like to gauge demand for your very own unlisted property, just write ftk (@) redfin (dot) com. Or, if you’ve already listed your place, you can still create a MySpace page for it on our Bay Area or Seattle real estate blog, too. Just use the same address and we’ll hook you up.
April 29, 2006
At Redfin, we’re always interested in technologies that let you see more about a property in your PJ’s. So we wondered, why aren’t more agents uploading videos to places like YouTube? It’s free, and even when the video itself is kind of cheesy, it’s cool.
Check out the video for this Tukwila fixer-upper. And while you’re on YouTube, enjoy the many-many-splendored weirdness (Kermit lip-synching the Counting Crows, an acrobat-Kung-fu-breakdancer , the greatest lip-synch of all time, another Internet chestnut, and the latest lip-synching phenoms, courtesy of Slate) of the Internet.
