ShortSaleWealth.com

Hi everyone,

We had a great call last week where I shared some of the secrets that I used to sell one of my properties in this SO CALLED DOWN MARKET in only one weekend.  I literally got 6 offers on the house within 2 days, and sold the property with ease.  I got a great follow up question via email in reference to our call last week, and thought I would share it with you. (See below…) 

Also, on the call I offered up an incredible deal on our upcoming 4 day Short Sale Wealth bootcamp, which is close to being sold out.  The event is taking place right here in St. Louis on August 27-30, so don’t wait.  Book it NOW!  Here’s what you’re going to get. 

-          One full access ticket to 4 FULL DAYS of solid short sale training ($2997 Value)
-           Bring a spouse for FREE ($997 Value)
-          My complete Short Sale Wealth home study course ($1997 value)
-          One month of FREE access into our Platinum Coaching program ($197 value)
-          3 months of FREE email coaching
-          Private Member access to the www.shortsaleintensive.com backoffice ($997 value)

These are REAL numbers of what I’ve sold each of these items for in the past, not just bogus numbers that I pulled out of a hat.  This is a grand total of $7,185.00 worth of goodies that I’m putting together for you for only $997, but you have act very quickly!  I only have a few seats left and this event WILL SELL OUT!!!  To register for the event, simply click here http://www.shortsalewealth.com/secure/productdetail.aspx?pr_id=2 and use the coupon code “discount”.   This will get you the special pricing and everything you see above. 

Here’s the question I received.  I hope it helps you! And by the way, if you missed the call, you can catch a replay by clicking HERE 

Hi Shaun,

Listened to the replay of your call yesterday.  I have a house I think I want to try it with.  I have some questions though and wondered if you could provide some insight.

I planned to list the property at 120K, hoping for a relatively quick sale at that price.  House will be in good shape and has a great yard.  It was only a lipstick rehab – we updated some paint, carpet, light fixtures inside.  A potential negative is the house is a bilevel, which are not as desirable in my area as they once were, but for this price point it offers a ton of space (4/2/2 at 1900+ sf) – though really no basement space (this all taking into account with pricing).  House has really nice yard and curb appeal.  Staging goes in on Saturday and we will be ready at that point.

I was thinking of listing at 110K for purposes of this “auction” method.  It would clearly be a deal at that price point, and based on the numbers you were mentioning it seems to be about the same or maybe a little bigger percentage drop for expected sale price.

Questions:

 * Did you only have the house open for showings on Friday 9-11 and 1-3?  Did anything happen on Sat and Sun?  What about people that couldn’t get off work during the day on Friday?

 * Do you think it would be as successful to have it open for showings starting Tues and say no offers would be presented until Thursday at 5pm?  This give more flexibility in showings but possibly decreases the auction environment.  Potential concern with the limited showings model is some realtors can get pretty crabby when others are around during their showing times.  Actually recently had an agent showing her buyers one of my properties when a second couple arrived to meet my listing agent, who they had never met.  When they came inside thinking it was him there the agent started to yell at them to get out

* Is there an advantage to finishing on a Sunday?  I thought it might help to have a weekday end so I could verify financing with the buyer’s lender.

* You obviously didn’t need to worry about seasoning.  Do you anticipate there being any issue with using this method for a quick flip?  (eg, don’t want fha buyers)

* Logistically, how does the “Sunday evening calls” work.  Did you specifically say you need to beat $X to be considered (at least for now)?  Is there any issue with relaying everything through the buyers agents, seems there could be a big lag time for this (I’ll check with them and get back to you, or they get back together to write up the new offer and by the time it arrives it is no longer high enough).  Did you just explain in advance that you would be making these calls and the agents and buyers needed to be ready on Sunday between 5-7pm.  Did you explain in advance there would be this – do you want to beat the next guy – proposition, over and over?

*  What do you believe is the greatest advantage of this technique, simply selling faster, selling for a higher amount, or a combination or both?

 Hopefully these ramblings make sense.  I’d love to give this a try, just have some issues I need to figure out how to handle.

Here was my response…

Dear Coaching Student,

Great questions! 

Yes, I had the house available on Friday, and the same times on Saturday as well.  We had probably 30 or 40 sets of people come through during those times.  ( I lost count…)  Sunday, we did not offer any showings, although we did allow two people to come by anyway.  But at that point, we were also saying, “Are you a serious buyer?  Because we already have 6 contracts on the property…  If you have to put in a contingency to sell your house, etc… you may now want to waste your time to come by…)  By that point (Sunday) we were just tired of showing it non-stop, which is why we got more picky on who we were going to show it to.  That eliminated about 3 or 4 more showings.

I always like the “no show till…” approach, but you have to give people the weekend to see it.  You need a REASON though to not respond to any offers until later.  My reason was that I had to have a family member sign off on whatever we do, and that person wasn’t going to be in town until Sunday night at 5:00, which was true…  Otherwise, agents get ticked at this!

And yes, some of the realtors WERE crabby when there were so many other people around while they were showing the house.  But I don’t care about that.  I want to get the house sold.  Excitement helps do this.  PEOPLE in the house creates excitement.   For the most part though, most of the realtors didn’t really care.  That why if you’re going to do it this way, you need to be at the house during these showings.  It helped me because this was my own personal house, but you can see why it makes sense.

There IS an advantage to doing it on Sunday.  This gives them the weekend to make the final decision and move forward.  I don’t really care if they qualify for the financing yet since all they did was bid the house up.  If they don’t qualify, I’ll go to buyer number 2 tomorrow and see if they still want the house. 

As for seasoning, there is always that risk, so if the property is not seasoned, you’re going to have the same concerns that you would if you didn’t sell the house via this method.  You could have a local bank there as well to offer financing if you wanted.

For the Sunday calls, I simply called each person and said, “$255K is now the highest and best offer.  Would you like to raise your offer?  If so, I need you to submit a new contract right away.”  Then I just continued to do that round and round until I got the highest offer and no one would go up any more.  The person that was in 2nd place knew that they were in 2nd place before I made my final decision.  they just weren’t willing to go up any more than they already had. And yes, I did explain this in advance, sort of…  I told everyone that I would make my decision on Sunday at 7PM, but then on Sunday around lunch time I started making calls.  I started with the lowest offer, called them, and told them what the highest offer currently was.  They didn’t want to increase their offer that much, so I called the 2nd lowest offer and did the same.  They DID increase their offer and send me a new contract.  Then, I called the 3rd lowest person and told them about this NEW high price.  Rinse and repeat.  Make sense?

I think the advantages were that it’s a combination of both.  BUT, it may not be the best thing to do in every scenario.  I knew it would work here with the numbers I was selling at, the house, the fact that I wanted to sell it quickly, etc…  Could I have gotten a little more for the house if I would have held out and waited?  Probably.  But I wanted to move the house quickly, and I wanted to get as close to top dollar as possible.  This really helped attain that.

Hope this helps,
Shaun