Here’s a tool you can use to overcome a bad listing
Sometimes there’s a bad listing that is just a bad listing. That’s where a professional real estate agent or broker needs to get creative.
And that’s where a neighborhood map-based real estate search tool can be very handy.
You’ve all seen the photos. Messy living rooms. Bedrooms right out of “Hoarders” on A&E. Yards filled with enough stuff to open a mini-Toys R Us.
But perhaps the house is sound structurally. Or the house is located in a prime location. Maybe the home is in a very, very hot market.
You certainly don’t want to turn the listing down.
An agent or broker can gently remind the owners how they need to de-clutter the home. Get the clothes off the floor. Take all those knick-knacks and collectibles down from every nook and cranny. Throw out all those boxes in the garage. Clean the carpet. Take out that ugly lounge chair from the living room (Remember the comedy “Frasier” and the dad’s duct-taped chair? Cute, until you need to sell the place).
However, as agents and brokers know, some people just won’t “get it.” They will make some effort to de-clutter the place. Pick up a few toys and clothes off the floor. Then just in time for the next showing, the stuff comes back like the tide.
In their minds, they will think they cleaned the place up. In reality, they didn’t. Certainly not enough to stop turning off buyers who can’t see beyond the tricycle in the living room and the 10,000 stuffed animals in the kids’ bedrooms.
One tool you can use to help overcome this situation and market the property is a neighborhood search tool such as SpatialMatch.
You can do what you can to promote the positive attributes of the property. You can warn potential buyers all day long on how to look beyond the clutter and appreciate the structure. But it might not be enough.
With SpatialMatch, you can also bring in the benefits of the neighborhood. The neighborhood search tool is integrated with a map and data widget filled with thousands of businesses, local schools, parks, roadways, boundaries, etc.
So, the seller’s living room might be crammed. But hey Mr. Buyer, look at this beautiful spacious park located just three miles away from the property.
There might be wires from all the kids video game consoles throughout their bedrooms. But Mrs. Buyer, what you should really be concerned about is the proximity of this home to some of the best schools in the area. Show them how they can not only see the distance of the property to the school, but also detailed information about the schools such as student/teacher ratios, etc.
The driveway might be filled with bicycles, soccer balls and oil stains. But Mr. Buyer, look how close it is to the interstate and your job. You can remove the bicycles and the oil stains. But you most likely can’t convince your place of employment to move closer to you.
All of these images can be displayed on the SpatialMatch tool embedded on on a real estate website help to create a positive image in the minds of potential buyers and helps to overcome the negative images they see when they view the home.
What this also does is create an image in the mind of the buyers that this agent is not just trying to whitewash the appearance of the home. But this agent is working extra hard to help us understand the true value of the property, minus all that clutter.
Maybe even the sellers will even pick up on this extra effort (you can certainly show them what you are doing to market the property as well). Maybe they will be so impressed they will make the extra effort to get that broken-down old car out of the garage. Or pull those weeds in the backyard. Or paint over those crayon marks in the kid’s bedroom.
But don’t count on it. However, with a hyper-local data and map widget such as SpatialMatch, you can count on having a way to counter a bad listing with Mr. and Mrs. Clutter.
To see some example of photos from bad listings, check this out.
