I'm selling my home in northern NJ, and hired an agent with a small nearby firm. When he came in, he presented me with a detailed marketing plan - newspaper ads, open houses, MLS listing, internet sites, the works.

So far, he's only done 2: an MLS listing and the inclusion of the property on Realtor.com and Yahoo's real estate pages. The listing isn't even on the agency's own site, which he said was a big part of the marketing plan.

This is a full-service brokerage, and the agent promised full-service marketing. Now, he says his broker doesn't believe in newspaper ads and that they don't bring in buyers.

I told him I'll go with it for one more weekend, then I want an ad in the paper (the Newark Star-Ledger, a major paper with a tremendous circulation on Sundays.) He said it's really expensive (about $350) and not worth the price.

Needless to say, I'm a little concerned. I'm paying a full 6% commission - so shouldn't I get my money's worth? I know the paper works - I found my current home and my previous apartment through the paper - and the size of the real estate section on Sundays tells me it must work for most agencies.

Before I call the broker and complain, am I right to be concerned, or just nervous that I haven't gotten an offer yet?

NJBuyerSeller,
From years of experience I have found that newspaper ads rarely sell the house. I almost never place an ad except for an open house or new constructions. Print advertising is nolonger the media of choice. I will use homes guide adds to drive traffic to my website and to showcase my unusual properties. It is a seller misconception that most buyers see their new home in the sunday paper.

You should push your agent and ask why your home is not on his website yet and what date will it be up. Also ask what he does to promote his website to drive traffic to his site. His site is useless if it gets no traffic!

What about open houses? Open houses are a way for the listing agent to get new clients or buyers for other homes. Open houses generally do not produce buyers for that home.

You need to find out what other marketing you agent is doing. Has he done a Broker open house? Has he been sending flyers to agents in other offices? Has he done Tell 20? Has he done any mailings? Sit down an have a long talk with your agent and ask when he plans to kick his marketing plan into high gear and what he plans to do an on what dates?

Let us know what you agent had to say!

Newspapers, real estate magazines, and open houses rarely sell homes. Many agents realize classifieds are advertisments for the agent, not the home owner.

The problem that I see is that you agreed to use classified ads and he promised them in his presentation, but is now going back on what he promised. He also seems to have made commitments to other methods that he has not implemented. That's an issue that I'd bring up. Do you have any written materials that stated he'd do classified ads?

Before real estate, I was in advertising and had a few real estate clients. Unanimously, the only reason stated for placing classified ads was the perceived value to the seller.

This is what I tell my clients about advertising: Grab the real estate classifieds and find your dream home from the 3-5 line ads full of abbreviations (some of which are undefinable). Going through hundreds of small ads is hard work and rarely achieves any leads. In my experience, the leads genereated by line ads are usually unqualified or bottom-feeders.

Your main problem lies with the fact that your agent has told you something and done the opposite. The pessimist in me says that if he would lie about the advertising, he would lie about other aspects of marketing your home. Furthermore, if he truly believes that classified advertising is not effective (which it isn't), he should have told you this up front.

Thanks for all of your replies. As Dee and Greg said, I think this is more of a "do what you promise" issue than anything else. If the agent had said from the beginning that newspaper ads don't work, I would have been prepared for this.

I guess, in the NY/NJ market, a lot of agents think they can just put your home on the MLS and it will sell itself with no work. That's the impression I'm getting from this guy.

Here's a related question: how many showings usually have to happen before an offer comes in? So far, we've had at least 10 agents bring clients through to look at the place, but not gotten a single offer. We actually priced slightly below two identical units that sold last month because I wasn't convinced this place was worth that much.

Should I be reading anything into that?

Do you know what the units sold for? What knid of feedback have you gotten from your agent regarding the buyers that have toured your home? What is the average market time for similiar units in your area?

NJ, the way I see it you have two serious problems. One has been addressed which is that your agent is not doing what he said he would do. That should be grounds for cancelling your listing...problem solved.

The second problem which every agent here has danced around with excuses is this:
Your agent doesn't know HOW TO SELL your house!

This is the case with the vast majority of agents. They only know one thing and that's to pay another agent to find a buyer for them so that they don't need to know anything about selling.

The notion that newspaper ads and open houses do not sell houses is completely FALSE. The problem isn't the media, it's the use of it. Agents are not taught and don't bother to learn how to properly use marketing to sell houses. Why should they bother when they can have someone else do it for them by entiring your property into the MLS?

To add insult to injury your agent will come back in a week or two and tell you that your house isn't selling because it's overpriced. When in fact it isn't selling because he's incompetent.

I've sold more houses through newspaper ads and open houses than the average agent will sell in their entire life. That's how I know they work.

My advice is this: You can't rely on any agent to market your house, they simply have not been trained to do that. All you have to do is read through this forum and you'll see that agents don't even understand what marketing is. They confuse it with other things like advertising and exposure.

Anytime you rely on an agent to sell your house for you you are asking for trouble. The proper use of an agent is as an assistant to your own selling effort, not as a means of abdicating your role as seller.

If you want to sell your house in days for top dollar there's only one thing you need to do:
Make your house easy to buy.

The other units are sold for about $8000 more than I'm asking right now, and they stayed on the market an average 20-30 days.

My agent, however, has only said he's gotten very "positive comments". He really won't give me answers, other than a few people have come through and said my place is too small. [Prices around here are so outrageous, agents are showing 1 bedrooms to 3 or 4-person families.]

Last night, after much pushing, he finally told me that a buyer was ready to make an offer about $7000 below asking price, and that he told the agent not to bother. Shouldn't he have asked me first?

I told him to tell the agent to submit the offer. I'll probably wind up rejecting it, but shouldn't it be my call?

That's great advice - except it's missing any sort of solution.

It's easy to blame the realtor (and I am), but it's a lot harder to come up with real-world solutions that will get this place sold faster and for more money.

What do I do to make my house "easy to buy?"

Tell this agent that you want any and all offers on the home or you will file an ethics complaint with the realtor association and you will file a complaint with the licensing division.

I see you have two problems here one being that since your house has been on the market more than a few weeks you've lost 60-80% of your potential buyers.

What I would do at this point is believe it or not..TAKE THE HOUSE OFF THE MARKET. The relist in a few couple weeks. Most of your buyers have forgotten that you exist. They also think there's something wrong with the house.

When you relist try to incorporate marketing that gets you the most offers. For some idea visit the local bookstore for the book "how to sell your house in 5 days." Check out these two sites 5-daysale.com and anystreetaddress.com.

You'll get some ideas to market but it's unlikely your problem can be solved overnight.

You have more serious problems than you think here. You're not only trying to market the house but you need to tell people that there's nothing wrong iwth your house.

The other problem is you have to be honest with youself. Sometimes there's no market for your house so take it off the market and wait to relist in a few weeks or months.

go here read http://www.agentsonline.net/forum/ultimatebb.php/forum/1.html

You'll see that most agents think the secrets to selling houses is to price a house right. LOL..
Let's hope some of these price is right agents can jump in to offer some advice.

It's good to see a real life problem asked by a real life seller.

Your agent should have never have rejected an offer as that is your decision and yours alone.
Call broker and tell them you would like a new agent assigned to your listing because the agent took it upon himself to tell a buyers agent not to bother submitting an offer because it was 7K below list. If he is reluctant to assign you a new agent then ask to be released from your listing contract.

Have the new agent pull it from MLS and/or relist it a few day later.

What comments did you get from you agent when he walked thorough your home. Did he give you any objective feedback to make your home more sellable? You may need to step back and take an objective look at your place.

Is it neutrally decorated, paint, carpet etc...
Are your rooms cluttered with furniture making them look small?
Are the carpets clean? Do they need to be replaced?
If there are any issues here then leave the house off the market and give a new paint job throughout and have carpets cleaned, deodorized or replaced. Your new agent may have contacts that can get your carpet installed and paid for at closing.
If you do paint & carpet add 6-7K to your new list price and put it back in MLS. Make sure your new agent has a brokers open house. Make several dozen cookies and serve some ice tea and coffee as agents love broker opens with snacks.

NJ, there are essentially 3 ways to make your house easier to buy:

1. Reduce the price
2. Raise the terms
3. Marketing and sales

All agents understand #1. A few understand #2, and virtually none understand #3.

As Jaber pointed out if your house has been on the market for more than a couple of weeks then it is stale and buyers will be thinking something is wrong with it. The only way you will get a buyer through an agent at that point is to follow the advice of the agents here. Make improvements and reduce the price.

A lower price will reinvigorate interest. But of course you don't want to reduce the price if you don't have to!

As a second option you can change your target market of buyers by offering some form of owner financing or rent to own. I've used that many times to successfully sell houses for 20-30% more than the highest offer an agent could bring.

Regardless of whether you lower your price, raise the terms, or leave things as they are. You still need to imploy some commonsense marketing and selling.

It's not enough to say "here I am!" which is all a for sale sign/ad does. You have to speak to what buyers want and give them a reason to buy your house over others. One way to do this is to use attractive slogans like:
"No Money Down"
"Rent to Own"
"Cash Back"
"Owner Financing"
"Easy Qualifying"
"Highest Bidder"
"No Closing Costs"
etc.

It's amazing just how easy it is to sell a house and yet most people (both private sellers and agents) somehow manage to screw it up. Here are some pointers:

1. If you will be showing the house yourself then prepare a list of answers to as many questions as you can think of which buyers might ask. Buyers will ask about the lot size and the square footage, whether the house has central air and how far schools are. So be sure you have the answers memorized as best you can, and on a fact sheet.

2. When showing the house you or your agent needs do a few things. First, you need to be friendly and accessible without appearing desperate or intrusive. Second, let buyers walk through the house on their own. This is especially important if there are 2 or more together because they will want to talk to each other about what they see without you overhearing. If they have to whisper or speak a foreign language that's only going to make you both feel uncomfortable. So let them walk through and put away anything of value if you're worried about them stealing something.

3. Be prepared ahead of time and make it very clear to potential buyers that they have only one concern: Do they want the house?
They need to know that you will take care of everything else. DO NOT leave critical issues like purchase contracts and financing up to the buyer, their agent, or even your own agent.

It's such an obvious thing to have purchase contracts ready to go in case someone wants to buy on the spot, and yet most FSBOs and even agents are not prepared.

I have to agree with most. Our broker doesnt list in newspapers either. It is in our sales presentation, but we advise the customer ahead of time. We get more calls from the yard sign that the very expensive news paper adds. If you list with us you get MLS, Homes Mags, Signage, monthly showcase in the papers, Weichert.com, Realtor.com, and all their partener sites like Yahoo, Google, Plus open houses and walk ins.

Chip

I would ask him what he plans to do instead of the newspaper advertising. If he doesn't think it's worth it he should find something else that does. Most homes sell in the MLS. If you are not getting a good amount of showings somethings wrong with the MLS listing. In my market it makes a huge difference to get an well written *awsome* property discription and tons of pictures in the MLS. I try to put 16 pictures in the MLS for all of my listings. (Some properties are so ugly you can't take 16 good pictures- haha). Most properties are sold in the MLS- make sure your property is standing out from the competition there.
I charge full commission (6%) but I present the property like few others do. If someone's not happy with my service for any reason, they can cancel their contract with me at any time- 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you replace this guy look for someone with a guarantee. If they are confident enough to offer a guarantee, chances are they are good enough that you won't have to use it.

NJ,

I would take RealDealers advice with a grain of salt as he is a Canadian Investor and not a Realtor and is always putting agents down in his posts. It appears that he cannot even read as you saw from my advice that you should make a few minor improvements and raise your asking price.

Improvements all depend on your homes condition. Over the years I have found that paint and new or professionally cleaned and deodorized carpet are the cheapest things a seller can do to get them a higher offer on their home. Buyers notice these things immediately.

Rent to own or owner financing are fine if you do not mind being still tied to the house and payment but if you are planning on moving out of the area that is definately not your best options.

Those catchy riders are great unless the buyers are working with a Realtor as the Realtor has already pre-qualified and in most cases has a letter of pre-approval so the no money down thing has already been taken care of by the lender. Lenders have hundreds of programs out there to fit most buyers needs.

As far as making offers on the spot, every Realtor I know always has listing & buyers packets in their car so that on the spot offer is covered.

Thanks everyone for your advice.

In the last two days, an additional 7 agents have come through my place. None have turned to offers yet, which makes me very suspicious.

But, I'm going to give my agent the benefit of the doubt until this coming Monday. If no offers come in by then, it's time to give him the heave-ho.

New development:

This agent is also representing me in the purchase of a new home. I just found out the new home had an underground oil tank. The seller offered to transfer his "tank insurance policy" to me, but the policy requires me to stay with the seller's oil provider and not allow anyone else to service the oil heat system. Plus, the "proof of insurance" they provided had someone else's name on it and had expired in 2004.

I said no. My lawyer said "Heck, let's ask them to remove the tank and see what they say."

That was two days ago, and the seller's attorney has yet to respond. So I asked my agent if he had heard anything from the seller's agent. His response:

He's advising me to skip a tank test because this insurance policy is in effect?

For my own information, I called around to several testing/removal services, who said a simple tank test costs about $500 - while removal of the tank can cost upwards of $10,000 if there is leakage.

I e-mailed him back about the entire situation, to which I received an auto-reply telling me he'd be out of town for the next 4 days, and to call his cell phone "if you need to get a hold of me immediately".

Meantime, the home I'm selling is still on the market. This is the second time he's disappeared since we started listing.

Am I crazy, or does it seem like this guy only cares about making his commission and nothing else?

I'm tempted to call the broker and have a fit, but I just want to make sure my intuition is right here.

is he available if you have questions? yes, via cell phone. i don't see where he's disappeared on you.

just wait and see what they have to come up with regarding the insurance and such. if you're not happy with it, you have the right to have it tested or removed, at your cost unless otherwise stated in your contract.

We all need to take some time off somehow- but we know we'll never get to take a vacation like "regular people". We always have our cell phones on- even during our 10th anniversary dinners. If anyone ever wants to know why we charge as much as we do- that's my answer- we're on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It would have been nice if your agent would have let you know that he would be out of town, but he's got his phone with him- we always do.

NJ, many agents say they're in this business for some higher purpose, but in reality they are all in it for the commission. That's not necessarily bad, usually your goals are more or less in line with theirs. But sometimes your best interests do not work with the agent's best interests, and you better believe they're looking out for themselves, as you should be.

As an example, it is in your agent's best interest for you NOT to get a tank test because it's one less contingency which might stand in the way of getting his commission.

Another example is pricing on the sale of your home. When you do as little marketing as most agents do the only way to get a fast sale (sometimes ANY sale) is to slash the price. What they don't bother to point out is that for every $10,000 "price adjustment" they recommend, they're giving up only about $150 commission after all the splits are said and done.

None of this is inherently "bad", I mean most agents aren't out to intentionally harm their clients, they simply don't know any better. They're just trying to generate commissions to put food on the table. Unfortunately the extreme lack of education in the industry means that the expert you thought you hired doesn't know any more about selling your house than you do.

You also have to consider that the vast majority of agents struggle to get whatever business they get. Just look at what Carla said, on call 24 hours a day for a deal which may never happen! Who needs that?

RealDealer, I agree with you on ONE thing - agents need to not be desperate.

Other than that, what a lovely post you have there. It does appear that this seller has hired a dud of an agent, but please don't say "many".

Some of us are higher evolved and I wonder what you would do if you met one of us?

I don't get to price reductions because my homes sell in 38 days on average, when our area average is 75+.

I don't list a home that the owner won't stage and declutter. Period.

My professional fee is 7%, always. Non-negotiable. List with me and sell in 38 days for 98% of asking price, no price reductions needed.

Cranky, irritable and downright rude? I will walk out the door. Not desperate enough to add those phone calls to my life. Rather be a FSBO? Have at it. Not gonna beg to list with me. When you "cross over", let me know and I will see if we have mutual goals.

What do you think about an agent that doesn't answer her phone after 7PM in the winter and 8PM in the summer? Let's clients know - I'm a better wife, mother and Realtor when I do not. It isn't an emergency, so leave me a message and I will deal with it in the morning. If my client would like to email me, I might check email and respond because I am a night owl, but no guarantee.

All you have to do is simply explain this in mandatory buyer/seller counseling sessions and then the expectations are clear. Nobody gets upset, nobody calls me up expecting me to be a "pop tart" agent. They call and I jump? Nope.

I can't even imagine a situation in which I would be a party to a client purchasing a home with an underground oil tank. When I was an agent in Arkansas, we had such a case and it wasn't pretty. I would be running at high speed.

Does this agent not care about liability? Future lawsuits? Exactly how is this agent protecting himself? Not anywhere do I see a very important fiduciary responsibility - Care, Skill and Due Diligence. Is this agent performing care, skill and due diligence? I think not.

NJBuyer/Seller - you need to find some educated representation regarding this potential home purchase. Don't let ANYONE talk you out of ANY test - test to your heart's content. It may save the future health of your family!

As for your current home, do you have it staged and decluttered? Find a staging professional in your area, pay the $400 or similar, and have them redesign your home. You will sell very soon, if you haven't become too "stale".

My best advice is to can your agent, take the home off the market for a few weeks, get a new look, a new price, a new agent, stage and declutter, neutralize if you haven't already, and hit the market with a splash.

Cheri, why does it take you so long to sell a perfect house at a low price?

Cheri -

Thank you for the honest advice. I'm giving my agent until Monday to shape up, or he's on the road out.

I agree - the agent should be allowed to have a life. He should have been honest with me up-front, though. I have no problem with an agent that doesn't answer calls at night or wants to spend a weekend with his or her family. Just tell me that from the get-go. Don't promise me the world and deliver nothing.

Thank goodness I have a very experienced real estate attorney handling this transaction for me. She had the same reaction you did, Cheri - either get them to remove the tank or run like the wind. I trust her a heck of a lot more than I do my agent.

As to staging and decluttering: the funny thing is, every agent and prospective buyer who's come in when I've been home has said how much they love the paint color and the way we've decorated. Yet those statements haven't turned into offers yet.

But, as I said, if no offers come in by Monday, it's time for a major change.

Hello,

I wouldn't say just because you don't turn off your phone you're a desperate agent. I refer out more business than I take, and I never reduce commissions. My clients hardly ever call me during the evening because I take care of them. They don't panic because they trust me. But if they need something right away I want them to know I'm always available. I don't jump just because someone says "jump". If someone calls me in the evening or when I'm on vacation they usually just need a little reassurace, and I'm happy to oblidge to help them sleep a little better that night. Sometimes I really do need to jump, and I don't want to let them down. People understand I have 4 young children and a husband, and they respect my time to a great degree.