Choosing a real estate agent
Let’s start with the SLIGHTEST sales strategy for selling your home and that is to sell your home yourself. Also, don’t go looking for a budget broker who will do it for half the price. Invite 2 to 3 full service real estate agents in your area who are well regarded on Funda. For this purpose, use www.verkoopmakelaaroffertes.nl if necessary.
Good attendance
Choose a start-up package with professional photos, a home video and 360 degree photos. You should take the home video and the 360 degree photos because they will give your home a higher ranking on Funda.
Smart asking price
In most cases, it can be helpful to set the asking price just below market value.
If the property is worth €360,000, then it may be smart to bet the property at €350,000.
With a more competitive price, you usually attract a few more viewers which can push the price up. Another argument of an asking price of €350,000 in our example, is that this puts you exactly between 3 price ranges on Funda, giving you a wider reach.
However, be careful not to bet too sharply. Not only is it unnecessary to have 50-60 viewers over. It’s also not fair to the people who think they can buy your house for the asking price when in fact it should fetch at least €10,000 more.
You also have the skimming strategy. By this I mean: bet too high and lower the price a bit each time until a buyer bites. This is a terribly stupid strategy. Do not do this!
Just using the actual value minus 2% to 3% is often fine. You find out the true value by having the 2-3 real estate agents you invited do a valuation.
On sale soon
Optionally, your real estate agent can give away the home as a “teaser” through his social media channels or mailing lists, among others. Giving seekers first rank can help recruit the first batch of interested people in advance. NVM brokers also do this by making the home visible 1 to 2 days earlier to searchers searching through an NVM broker, before the home appears on Funda.
Timing
I often like it when a property is live on Funda Wednesday or Thursday morning. The reason is that the house will then still go into the weekend as reasonably “fresh. In fact, Friday and Saturday are days when a lot of people look at Funda. Also, you’ll then be sitting pretty during business days when the real estate office is most accessible. When people see a property they want to make an appointment right away. It’s bad when that can’t happen because the real estate office is already celebrating the weekend and people have to wait until Monday to be called back.
Funda
A real estate agent may dish out sales tools like his window display, social media, a private website for your home, a neighborhood mailing, a mailing to a file of seekers and so on. All good tools that I won’t dismiss, but there is 1 thing you need to know:
Funda = leading in the Netherlands! 95% of buyers come through Funda eventually!
Therefore, make sure the presentation on Funda is checked, double-checked and checked again! If your property is live, do so immediately. It happens very often that there are mistakes in the advertisement that cause unnecessary confusion for potentially interested parties.
So put your focus on the Funda ad. The rest of the sales tools are less important!
Purchase agents
If there are many applicants, I would always give priority to viewers accompanied by a buying agent. In my experience, the highest bids are always from buying agents. Individuals often do not know what to offer. They rely too much on the asking price and don’t understand what to look for in order to make a targeted smart offer. In addition, the risk of dissolution of a sale with private individuals is much higher. For example, they don’t yet have a mortgage broker lined up who can get to work for them right away, they are more likely to abandon it within the consideration period, and individuals don’t know what all needs to happen after wills are agreed upon. Result: delays, problems, ambiguities, time-consuming firefighting and irritation. Brokers therefore usually reserve the first viewing spots for buying agents only.
By the way, consider this too: some of the people without a buying agent often do not have a buying agent because they want to save these costs. If they want to save a few thousand dollars on the most important purchase of their lives, why would they go ahead and make a nice high offer on your home?
Investors
A very fine target group are investors. People with money who buy homes regularly (with or without a buying agent) always bid without reservations, bid high, can take delivery quickly, and are not shocked by construction details. Keep this in mind!
Viewings
Viewings are scheduled directly on top of each other. Make sure your broker doesn’t schedule too much but also not too little time. For a 130m2 single-family home, plan 30 minutes per viewing, for a 45m2 flat plan 20 minutes per viewing.
In doing so, you also ensure that the departing viewers will encounter the arriving viewer. This provides a healthy bit of “fear of missing out. It works very oddly, but if you as a viewer have looked somewhere, are excited about the property, want to bid but feel like you are the only one who has come to the property, then in this day and age you get the feeling that maybe there is something wrong with the property. Competition activates people’s “sense of hunting.
For sale sign
If the property is live on Funda, make sure there is a sign. A sign catches the eye of anyone driving, biking or walking by, and these passersby tip off people in their network who want to live in that neighborhood. It happens too often that the sign is not put up by the broker until the1st viewing begins. This while the property has been live on Funda for just under a week by then. A missed opportunity!
Bidding strategy
I actually always start with an Amsterdam bidding system. If 1 party makes an opening proposal and it is good enough to be officially negotiated with then other parties are only allowed to make an extreme proposal. This can result in some nice bids being realized or a party placing a VERY high bid and attaching a time lock to this. That is, a party might bid, say, €50,000 above the asking price under the condition that they would be told that same day or no later than the next morning whether they had become it or not.
The party who makes this VERY high offer, buys off, as it were, that other people can still come and view the house. This is harsh and aggressive but often results in above-average sales revenue for the sellers.
If there is no bid with a time lock but there are several parties eager to bid, we attach a closing date to the bids and say, for example, that any interested party can submit a final proposal to the broker before, say, noon next Wednesday.
Another bidding system is the tender. Before you start with all the viewings, you indicate that all the bids will close, for example, next Friday at 12.00 and that everyone can place a final bid before that time. The property is then shown to as many interested parties as possible and everyone can submit their bids ‘blind’. I am not a fan of enrollment. The reasons: you are shooting with buckshot. It is still unnecessary to show 40-60 people a property. Indeed, in the age of Covid-19, this is also irresponsible. Are you going to get a higher return with 60 viewings than with 30 viewings? I don’t think so. The buyer of a home is usually in the first 20 viewings. These people are on top of the housing search, they are motivated, often have a buying agent and therefore know much better what to offer. With the registration you avoid intermediate ‘knock-out’ bids (which can be so interesting) and a higher yield can often only be caused if the broker does not keep his mouth shut and plays people off against each other illegally.
The bids
Don’t automatically choose the highest bid. If it was way overbid above the asking price, chances are it was overbid above the assessed value. That is, the maximum value that the buyers’ appraiser can write on paper for your home has been exceeded. If the appraiser writes down a lower value than sales price, then the buyers cannot finance the entire sales price and the financing reservation folds. The sale will then be rescinded and we can start all over again. Therefore, go for a bid in any case where the financial caveat is reduced or omitted altogether. For example, a limited financial caveat for a sale price of €380,000 may be to obtain a mortgage of up to. €350.000.
Furthermore, it’s very important to know if the prospective buyers have really had the finances figured out and what their profile is. Employees on permanent contracts often get financing faster than entrepreneurs. As a sales agent, I always ask questions. Is there a condition included about purchase subject to finalization of divorce settlement? Don’t. Misery.
Is a building inspection included? Then make a clear agreement in advance about the maximum amount of repair costs below which one may not dissolve. Take that broadly. A home that is good and that you think has little going on will soon have €5000 in direct repair costs in an architectural report. Put this amount a lot higher.
Leave property on available
As long as the bill of sale has not yet been signed, leave the home for sale and have your real estate agent maintain a list of new applicants who are interested. For what goes around comes around. Not signed = still officially for sale. Keep applying pressure with this.
Speed it up
Make sure that the buyer, within 2 days after the sale (if applicable), schedules the architectural inspection and the valuation for the following week at the latest. I had a sale where this was not done after 1 week and everything was delayed. As a result, a postponement was requested for the financing reservation.
Keep interested parties warm
Anyone who bid and didn’t make it should be called and informed nicely (preferably the same day). Tell the people who finished in2nd,3rd and4th place that if anything changes (the sale doesn’t go through after all) that you will contact them directly.
Then, if it happens that the reservation of financing expires and a postponement is requested, and you want to play hardball, you can gauge whether you have one or more “backup buyer(s). You can then refuse this postponement. I would never do this right away. Providing a few days or just under a week of extra delay for financing is often wise and also as fair. However, I have experienced that after the 6 weeks reservation + 1 week postponement another 1 week was requested. We knew we had another prospective buyer for almost the same amount. We then made a conscious decision to draw the line and refuse this additional postponement in order to thereby enforce that the purchase simply became unconditional. And this then succeeded.
Good luck with the sale!