PRE-INSPECTION

Before your property ever reaches the market, we may recommend having a licensed home inspector come out and conduct a detailed inspection, which will result in a detailed inspection report. The purpose of this inspection is multifold:

• We want to identify potential problems that may scare a prospective buyer.
• We want to save you a lot of money by resolving problems with licensed contractors before the buyer discovers them through their detailed inspection and then tries to re-negotiate the sales price based on problems that have not been remedied.
• We want to command top dollar by positioning your property as one that is meticulously maintained by an owner who demonstrates pride of ownership, as opposed to a property that is suffering from severe neglect by an owner that has let their property go.

We ensure that it can command top dollar by identifying and resolving problems before your property reaches the market. Buyers will be confident knowing that their purchasing property has been meticulously maintained.

STAGING/SHOWING

Preparing the home for Showings

A buyer will be at your property for between ten and fifteen minutes in a typical property showing. During that time, they will be making a decision involving hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. It is our job to make that ten to fifteen minutes unforgettable. To accomplish this, we recommend minimizing personal items, reducing clutter, and staging the home to show in its best light. This allows the buyer to see their belongings in the home.

We may recommend a home staging company. You may be asking what home staging is and what the difference is between home staging and interior design, and you wouldn’t be alone. How can you tell the difference? While home staging is a home design type, it differs from interior design. Home staging means preparing a home for sale.

On the other hand, interior design refers to working with a homeowner to personalize the design to their particular tastes. Staging, from our perspective, is positioning your home based on the market trends that buyers are responding to. It may involve colors, the amount of light present, or arranging the furniture more invitingly.

The end goal of staging is for a prospective buyers to stamp their feet, throw their hands up and say, "I want this house. What do I need to do to get it, how much do I need to spend, and how do we ensure that nobody else gets this home?"

That’s the WOW factor we want to create, and home staging is a big piece of that.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Since almost every prospective buyer will look at your property's photographs before they schedule an actual viewing, world-class photography is the third thing we need to sell your home for top dollar.

When we say world-class, we are not talking about taking photos on your mobile phone, your small digital camera, or even the really good camera you bought that you may or may not know how to use well. We are also not referring to the local company that will come out for $99 and gives you twenty-five photos the next day.

This needs to be somebody highly skilled at taking residential real estate photography and who understands how light is absorbed in certain rooms by specific pieces of furniture, how certain times of the day are better for photography, and how certain types of weather are good or bad.

Then they need to be able to take those photos and edit them, ethically and legally, so that they can be displayed online and offline so that your property stands out from the other properties on the market, making it genuinely compelling to buyers and agents.

We have just the person for this! Our professional photographer is an employee at Magnolia Homestead Realty and is ready to capture your home.

MARKETING

We could talk about marketing for days, but it suffices to say that today, we need to market your home to everyone looking at real estate. Now when we say to everyone, we don’t mean blindly shot-gunning your property to the entire market and leaving it at that; that’s what the MLS does for us.

We want to market to everyone in the sense of niches — specific buyers who are likely to purchase this property, at this price point, in this geographical area, for a specific reason.

To accomplish our objectives, our marketing plan may include, but not be limited to, the following:

• Broker Preview
• Property Brochures
• Email Marketing
• Just Listed Postcard
• Signage
• Homes and Land
• Ocala Style Magazine
• Ocala Magazine
• Executive Global Magazine
• Architectural Digest
• Omni Escapes Magazine
• JetSet Magazine
• Financial Times
• Bloomberg
• Mansion Global
• Wall Street Journal
• South China Morning Post
• ShangLiu Tatler
• Hong Kong Tatler
• PropGoLuxury
• FinancialTimes.com: http://financialtimes.com/
• Vimeo
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Trulia
• Zillow
• Realtor.com: http://realtor.com/
• MLS.com: http://mls.com/

COMMUNICATION

Here at Magnolia Homestead Realty, we strive for excellent communication. We have implemented several means of communication so that we are always on the same page and setting the level of expectation. We will always do the following:

• Communicate regarding showings, tailoring the times, and process around what works best for you.
• Collaborating and reviewing market trends and feedback from showings
• Presenting all offers
• Communicating and attending all necessary inspections, appraisals, etc.
• Coordinate and attend the big day!

We love sharing the home selling process with sellers and look forward to a relationship with you as we navigate the home selling process for you.

URGENCY

Another vital aspect in selling your property quickly and for top dollar is to create a sense of urgency. So how do we create urgency? By knowing the market, the numbers, the property, and most importantly, when most of the property showings are taking place.

In most markets, most property showings take place on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, so we want to launch your property onto the market late Thursday afternoon.

By utilizing this launch strategy, we will represent that we anticipate a crazy hot weekend, with tons of showings and most likely multiple offers, encouraging prospective buyers and their agents to race out there to try to beat the competition.

We have found this launch strategy to be much more effective than going on the market Monday morning and being on the market several days before the weekend momentum hits, thereby losing the big rush that allows us to create that sense of urgency whether we’re talking about Condos in the heart of Downtown Ocala, single family homes on the outskirts of town, waterfront homes in beautiful Dunnellon or Farms in the horse capital of the world.

SCARCITY

In addition to creating a sense of urgency, we also want to create scarcity. You might think that scarcity is something we cannot create, but let us tell you how we do it. We create scarcity by marketing your property as a unique individual property that really cannot be compared with anything else — a property that’s one of a kind.

We want to identify your property's unique aspects that we can. An excellent example is a reasonably standard property on a regular residential lot with a fairly standard price point but a lot of fruit trees. We would strive to accentuate those fruit trees, writing sales and marketing copy about how great life is living in a home with lots of fruit trees.

And it works.

We want to create scarcity in your marketplace by identifying unique features and positioning your property accordingly.

What unique features of your property make it truly one of a kind?

NEGOTIATION

When it comes to negotiation, we want to negotiate from a position of strength, not from a position of weakness, and most importantly, not from a position of desperation. This axiom holds for both the seller and the seller’s agent.

As your agent, we will never come across as needing to sell. We will never say things like:

• "I would like to work out an offer with you."
• "We would love to see something from you."
• "Send me whatever you’ve got. I will present it to my client; you never know what will happen."

Instead, we will constantly position your property as one that is going to move quickly and for top dollar, saying things like:

• "I would love to find time for you to see the home because I’m not sure how much longer it will be on the market."
• "I doubt this amazing property will last this weekend."
• "Is your client prepared to move quickly? Because that’s what it is likely to take to get a home like this."

So, throughout the transaction, we will negotiate from a position of strength. This positioning will enable us to achieve the maximum sale price in the quickest possible time.