We’re putting our house on the market in San Francisco and I’ve been interviewing agents all week. Each neighborhood in San Francisco (ours is the Lower Haight) has its own personality and a corresponding base of people who want to live there, so a realtor’s knowledge of our area was very important. I prepped for this process in part by looking at names on “for sale” signs and visiting nearby open houses… which, it turns out, is a strategy almost nobody uses any more.
I learned that today most buyers start their home search on the internet and that the vast majority of sales in San Francisco are originally researched direct from the online Multiple Listing Service. That would be different in some areas, but in SF there is strong cooperation among agents and nobody has proprietary listings.
So, it follows that two things are critically important in choosing a realtor: a/the way in which they actually utilize the web to present their homes and b/their overall comfort level with the web in the way they market their services and the homes they represent.
Agents that don’t put multiple photographs of the property online, so prospective buyers can see what it looks like before they go to the house, are putting their sellers at a big disadvantage. I’d say the more information the better—floor plans, detail photographs, go for it—so long as they are organized so I know what I am looking at. And, don’t do it with a slow-to-load flash presentation on a third party website accompanied with a music track. One of our top choices did just that and it hurt them in the final decision.
Romancing the home is fine (and it can and should be done with good staging and good, well-lit photography—and of course a great verbal narrative!) but it can’t be at the expense of accessibility to the basic information that a buyer is looking for as they click through many listings.
As for web savvy, the realtor we went with didn’t have the flashiest (nor Flash®-iest) website but it was solid. He was one of two, out of 7, who was following me on Twitter prior to the appointment. (The other one sent me an email announcing that they were following me, which is not cool.) He had also researched me personally and knew, for example, of my lack of success in selling a screenplay. (Fortunately he did not offer opinions as to why that was.) And, after we met, he was one of the few who followed up with a PDF version of the presentation.
But this was also the only realtor who sent a personal thank you note via snail mail after the meeting. And he was totally and immediately attentive to follow-up contacts from me or my wife (who was 3000 miles away, making email accessibility essential). In the end, the day was won with smart selling using all the tools available, both old and new.