Research is Key to Making More Money on Your House

Hi, guys! Naomi here!!!!

I’m back to talk to you about how to sell your house for more.

Today, we’re going to talk about how research impacts you selling your house for more and the research that you can do to make sure that you have the best chance of selling your house for more.

You know, all the clients I’ve worked with really just want to know one thing. They want to know that they’ve done absolutely everything in their power to sell their home for the most possible money.

For many of my clients, this is the biggest investment they have ever held or it is a form of employment. Lots and lots of the property investors and property developers that I’ve worked with, this is their only income.

It’s not a hobby. Making sure that every single time they sell a property that they sell it for more is absolutely essential.

Back to those four things that I often talk about: location, agent, price point and presentation. There’s so much research that goes into making sure that you nail those.

Whether we like it or not, once we’ve bought a house, our location is pretty fixed. When we’re going to sell it, that’s not something we have that much control over. However…

We do have a lot of control over the agent that we choose.

We do have a lot of control over the presentation of the property.

We do have control as the owners of a property or the developers or the investors of the property on the price point that we sell it at.

Day in and day out, though, I have clients ask me

“How do I know what price to sell it at? How do I know which agent to choose? How do I know who my market is?”

The key answer that I tell absolutely every single one of those people is research.

Due diligence.

It doesn’t just come to you in a bolt of light in the middle of the night. Although, at times that can sometimes help my clients.

However, research is the main and only substantial way to make sure that you feel confident and you know in your gut that you are selling a property the best way and with the best chance of meeting the market and maximizing your return on investment.

There’s a lot, a lot of information out there about how to choose an agent. It’s not something we’re going to cover today because it’s certainly not something that I just want to give you in a two-minute snippet. I want to devote an entire video to how to research and choose your agent.

The one thing I do want to talk to you about today is how to research your price point and suss out your competition a little bit when it comes to selling your property.

I cannot stress enough that this really is the responsibility of the vendor or the person selling the home.

It is your asset, you’re the one that wants to maximize it, so you either pay someone to do this research for you or you do it yourself. It’s not that difficult.

At the bottom, in the link below this video, I have a link to a checklist — a property comparison checklist — just for you today. It usually sells off the site, but I feel so strongly that I really want to impress upon you the importance of research that I’m giving that you to guys for today.

Click the link below and get the free property comparison checklist.

What that does for you is it takes you step by step through the things that are really important for you to think about when comparing your property and where it sits, how well or not well it’s presented and the price point that it needs to sit at in your market.

One thing I do hear a lot are statements along the lines of:

“That one down the road sold for like 9,500 more than what I think it was worth.”

“That one sold for like $1.5 million, Naomi and ours has a pool.”

“That one sold for $550,000 and it’s huge and ours isn’t that big. How are we ever going to get what we want from it?”

These sorts of stories around people comparing, people maybe validating where they think their property sits in relation to presentation or in relation to price.

The bad news I’ve got for you all is that’s really, really subjective.

99% of the time when I have these conversations with clients, it’s around very much how they feel about their property emotionally; very much about how much they’ve invested in their property and not necessarily about what the market says about their property or what their property truly values.

I’m not saying that’s always in a negative manner. In some cases, clients undervalue their property. In some cases, I find clients looking down their property.

Whether that’s so that they don’t have a disappointment when they sell or whether they truly don’t see the value in their property and truly don’t know what the market is offering or expecting.

It works both ways.

It’s not just people feeling that their properties are worth more than they are.

The one really important thing to do is take that subjectivity out of it, become an objective seller.

Become an objective seller who is selling a product and not a home. I know that’s a really big call for so many people who have lived in their properties for so long, but it really is an important step in getting your property ready for sale.

Research is the key.

Research is one of the things that can help you with that detachment. Research can help you understand the market and how your property needs to be presented to make sure it meets the market.

Let’s go through, quickly, a few of the things that you’re going to find in the checklist below.

You need to be objective.

For me, the main way I can ever be objective in life is with a list. Lists. I wouldn’t say I live by them, but I use them heavily. Without a doubt, when it comes to due diligence and to research, you need to use lists.

You need to have some objectivity. If you’re trolling the internet or you go into open homes — and you might have seen five in a day — they can all start to blur.

Having a list and having a way that you can sit back and objectively compare the lists with a table at the end is so important.

• Print it out
• Read it
• Before you start looking at any more open homes, I want you to go through it.

The sorts of things that you need to be thinking about are, obviously, land size. That is absolutely massive.

A house that, for example, maybe sells with twice the land size to yours, as a general rule, if the property is in comparable condition and presented in a comparable way and marketed as well as the other property, it more than likely — given it has a decent location — will sell for less.

The sorts of things that I want you to think about objectively and research when you’re looking at how to present your property and also about the price point are things like:

• Land size
• Number of bedrooms and condition of the bedrooms
• Location, proximity to schools
• Proximity to services
• Proximity to transport

In a positive and negative manner. Are you on a main arterial root that’s really noisy? Are you two minutes’ walk from a fantastic bus station in a quiet cul-de-sac?

All these things effect the price that you will get and the price that you need to look on putting onto your property. The other part of the research isn’t just around price point.

It’s also around presentation.

Here’s a great example. When somebody’s looking at many, many open homes and there’s a house that’s really comparable to yours, if you updated your kitchen recently but one of the things you didn’t do (because it isn’t something that you wanted) is you didn’t put on stone bench-tops.

If the thing that you notice when you’re looking at all the properties in your area that your target market will be looking at as well is that they all have stone bench-tops, then that could be something that you need to consider in regard to preparing your home for sale.

Will that be something that effects your sale-ability or effects your return on investment?

I’m by no means suggesting that everyone go run out and put stone bench-tops on. I have some hard and fast rules about investing in properties for sale and about putting in one dollar in has to be two or three dollars back into your pocket.

What I am saying is I don’t want people just to look in relation to the cushions and the lamps.

You’ll hear me talking about cushions and lamps all the time and about how preparing a home for sale is so, so much more than that. This is exactly what I’m talking about today.

Preparing a home for sale starts with research.

Research about the agent — which we’ll talk about later — research about the price point and research about the presentation of your property. It’s a minefield area, it is.

What I want you to do to get started is download the list below. I’d love to hear your comments on it — anything that you think that we could add to make that an even better resource for people — and start using it.

That will make sure that you never miss the mark and that you minimise the chance of letting subjectivity, in a positive or negative manner, affect the way you view your property.

Get to it. Happy researching. We’ll be back with you really soon.