High volume sales is the model of Walmart, KFC, Jiffy Lube, Expedia and Dollarama. If you go to KFC on Twoonie-Tuesday to buy a chicken meal deal, you won’t be getting personal attention from their CEO, you’ll be served by an entry-level counter clerk. Their job was created to function without much flexibility to think strategically or to problem solve. It’s a low-service position that doesn’t fit with the values of The Village Guru, because selling your home for the best possible price is a lot more complicated than cooking some fries.

High Volume Sales = Less Personal Attention & Lower Quality Service

The Village Guru is a team, not of 30 sales staff, but of professional admin staff, receptionists, designers, and creative artists, all working together to give you better service. When you hire The Village Guru, you always get me, Jeff O’Leary, Broker, to manage your listing. I provide the strategy, I implement our marketing procedures & systems, and I negotiate your sale.

This is the reverse to most of the über teams, where you are primarily serviced by the assisting agent, with back-end support from the billboard agent you thought you were hiring. That billboard agent puts his/her name on all of the team listings to ensure his/her sales count looks as high as possible. It does not mean they actually managed all of those sales. And if he/she is not part of all of those transactions, there will be much greater variance in the quality of service delivery, expertise, knowledge, ethics & communication skills. A large team of sub-agents will not manage the complexities of a real estate transaction the same way. Who will you get handed to?

Here’s an example:

Imagine your home is worth between $900,000 and $980,000, depending on presentation and condition. And your home is in decent shape so it would likely sell for $950,000 with little effort to prepare it.

Now what if you were showed sales data that predominantly supported the lower end price and were diligently advised to price around $939,000 and you might even get a bit more. Sounds positive.

You sell for $948,000, you’re pleased as can be, and the agent has once again sold for over asking price. Everyone is happy…….so what’s the problem?

What if you could have listed for $969,000 and sold for $963,000 with a more effective staging and marketing plan? Would you not have liked the opportunity to consider this option, if it was a reasonable and cost effective plan? What would you do with that extra $15,000? There’s no right or wrong answer, but a lot of owners are still missing out on the opportunity to make more money on their home. It requires a good plan & some preparation work, but the payoff is significant. Some agents are afraid to even ask, for fear they will offend you.

Would you be happier with the agent who sold your home for 101% of asking price,  but didn’t obtain the maximum value for your home, or the agent who sold your home for 99% of asking, but also got you $15,000 more? This is a very simple example to show you that accepting statistics on face value can be a very costly mistake.

Selling real estate is complex, and involves a lot of variables that cannot be factored in to one simple equation. There are many different methods to selling a house, but if you are looking for the highest possible sale and the best possible service, you must be skeptical and question anything that sounds too simple, too easy, too good to be true.

This sales ploy plays on your fears of uncertainty with the market.

Will buyers come? Will the house sell? Maybe you can skip all of that stress if you choose an agent who says they have a buyer. But it’s not advisable to have a selling strategy that is dependant on hope and luck, not when we have data and technology that tells a very different story.

This “I have a buyer” or “I have a 5000-person buyer database” is a very old-school approach that completely ignores the immense and dominating power of the Internet. Yes we all have databases, yes we can all door knock and send out flyers. But it has been proven that the Internet is the single most effective vehicle for finding buyers, and so the most effort should be focused on where it is most effective. To ignore this, and put hope on an unlikely option that might make you feel safer, is a recipe for great disappointment.

But by then, after the buyer that the agent spoke of doesn’t materialize, you’re already signed into a contract and you’re stuck. Better to learn now what really is the best way to attract the most qualified buyers to your home, before you sign out of hope or fear.