How Do You Sell A Property Off-Market?
Ironically, the marketing process isn’t too different.
The benefits of marketing a property off-market rather than going public on the MLS (at least for a period of time) are quite simple:
Continue living in your home
No accruing staging costs
The running Days On Market clock doesn’t start (a metric used for public perception of if a property is hot or not)
The question we are continually asked: ‘Why wouldn’t I just list my home on the MLS?’
Short Answer: You might end up doing so, but the off-market marketing period can be extremely valuable. The rewards are typically greater than the relatively non-existent downside.
Long Answer: The idea of an off-market or private listing period is to market a home to an already vetted list of buyers who are actively in the market and have either provided their contact information or sent us an email requesting a particular property. In an ideal world - which happens more often than you’d think - is the buyer for a home in a San Francisco building is already in our database or one of our partner’s databases. By creating a visually beautiful marketing package and sharing it with potential buyers with already established buying intent, the opportunity is created for selling a home without needing to stage it with furniture or move out for the ideally vacant listing scenario.
Days on Market - A metric that represents the public perception of buyer psychology - the longer a listing stays on market, the more people ask ‘What’s Wrong With It?’ The off-market strategy has the ability to off-set the first 30-60 days of public perception, while giving high-intent buyers the ability to still tour it and submit an offer.
But what if a buyer has been watching it off-market, then they see it sit on the market for 30 days?
This scenario is two-fold; if a buyer has been watching a property both off & on the public market, that buyer is interested in your home. The more days that accure on market, the more likely the home sells; the watching party is in a constant state of weighing the risk of waiting vs. the reward of acting. Either way, this is a good thing for an owner trying to sell a home. That buyer will either eventually act out of FOMO, or they never planned on acting in the first place
Putting Together A Marketing Package (while you live in it):
A wonderful technological advancement in recent years for the real estate marketing space is the quality of virtual staging. Virtual staging is a process where traditional real estate photography meets advanced photoshop. Virtual stagers take photos of each room as they would in a traditional photo shoot, then spend hours behind the scenes scrubbing furniture & clutter out of the photos and inserting modern, beautiful furniture. Chances are you wont even recognize your own home!
The nature of condominium buildings allows us to also create a buzz around the amenities, the shared spaces, as well as the exterior of the building itself with its proximity to local favorites; food, bars, offices, etc.
The complete marketing package of a listing would include a digital floor plan and comps - both of which can be achieved without interrupting your home life.
How Do Tours Work?
This is where the narrative can have some disconnect. Buyers have seen beautifully rendered photos of a home, then they step foot inside it and it’s completely different to what they imagined. This is where storytelling comes into play; a pivotal skill in sales. A good realtor can use the pre-established image a potential buyer has in their heads and build on that picture throughout the tour, highlighting key qualities of the home and detering their eyes from your well-used sofa and occupied counter-tops.
Fielding Offers Off-Market:
Exactly the same as you would while being listed on the MLS, agents can submit their clients offers as they normally would in a regular listing.
For more information on utlizing our team and off-market strategy, head on over to the Homeowners section.