Author: Mayur Arora

You’re selling your home and you want to make sure to attract buyers. Not only do you want to get them through the door, but you want to make an impression when they enter your home. You know you need an effective MLS listing, and you know you require professional-looking photographs to make your home “pop”, but what else can you do?

Staging your home has become a multi-million dollar business and with the proliferation of countless home improvement and real estate television shows, most of us understand the necessity of staging one’s home to entice more potential buyers.

The following are essential tips to ensure the successful staging your home:

Get Rid of the Clutter

Most importantly, you need to not only clear away any papers, gizmos, and gadgets on all the flat surfaces in your home, but also clear away any furniture that’s cluttering up your space. You will want to ensure that you keep things minimal to enhance the amount of space you have and not the furniture within that space.

Group Your Furniture

A common misconception is to push all the furniture back to encircle the room and create more space with the centre each room. What actually works better, is to create multiple, small groupings of furniture throughout your home, with lots of space around each grouping. This enhances the space as a whole, opening your home into one large space instead of breaking your home into a series of small spaces.

Depersonalize

A potential home buyer must be able to imagine their own belongings in your space, so pack away your collection of tchotchkes, the candid photos of your last vacation, and the sports memorabilia on the wall. Depersonalize and keep the personal doo-dads and decorations to the bare minimum.

Clean Your Kitchen

Not only should you ensure your kitchen is clear from dirty dishes and leftovers, but also ensure that everything presents itself to be in working order, take the magnets off the fridge, and clear the counters of all the small appliances that add clutter and wires to your clean look. Also make sure to wipe down the front of all appliances and wash (or vacuum) your floors.

Transform a Useless Space

If you have an area of your home that’s gathering junk or just in transition, turn it into a valuable space with the addition of a chair and a lamp for reading, or something else that takes up little space, but adds value. You want to portray every inch of your home as usable space!

Light it Up!

Lighting is essential for more than just photographs! Good lighting creates a welcoming ambience that makes a potential buyer feel at home already. Go with soft lighting in the form of soft lamps to entice folks into the room or a chandelier to impress.

These six essential tips will give you an excellent start to staging your home for a successful sale. For more tips, please see our reports for preparing your home.

In the past, we’ve already talked about discount Realtors® and have also differentiated between what a discount Realtor® offers compared to a traditional Realtor®. We have discussed real estate commissions and how discount realtors® offer a different structure than expensive traditional Realtors®. In addition, we have reviewed the advantage of MLS®, and the method for how to get an MLS® listing is included with the sale of your home, even if you are employing the For Sale By Owner method of selling a home.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s look at specific pricing and savings of For Sale By Owner (FSBO) and discount Realtor® real estate methods.

First, we’ll take a look at the price structure for a discount Realtor®. Using the pricing calculator on the One Flat Fee main website page, we used a test price of a $500,000 “sold price” to calculate how much a home seller would be paying to a traditional agent’s commission, versus paying for the services with a discount Realtor®, in this case, One Flat Fee.

As you can see from the calculation below, when selling a $500,000 home (a very good price for a house within the lower mainland), a traditional real estate agent would receive $9,180 from their commission, while a discount Realtor® would take just over HALF that amount, at $4,999.99. When you also take the buyer’s Realtor® into consideration along with the GST, your savings is a whopping $4389.01:

Real Estate Commissions can be confusing and costly and most Vancouver home sellers do not realize how much commission they will have to pay when their home sells.

How much is real estate commission?

When using the services of a traditional Realtor®, a real estate commission in BC is typically 7% of the first $100,000 and 3+% on the balance, so on a $500,000 home, an amount in the ballpark of $20,000 would be expected at the very least, and don’t forget to add on the tax, too! Without tax, this is already costing tens of thousands of dollars, and using a traditional Realtor®, this amount would sadly actually be a decent deal.

This large amount is typically taken into consideration by the home seller, so because of the extra amount they will have to pay, they’ll definitely be looking to get more money for the sale of their home, increasing the asking price of the home, and thus, the cost for the buyer. Increasing the price could also price the home too high for many buyers, which could cost a sale.

Discount Realtors® allow for more flexibility on pricing than traditional Realtor®, because there is so much less money going to the Realtor® that it permits more wiggle room on the price.

By using the flat fee method, the home seller knows exactly how much they will be paying their Realtor® with no surprises, or alternately, the seller can choose a package that allows them to sell their home in the For Sale By Owner method for a lower price, but with the added bonus of being able to list their home for sale on MLS®.

Using the a discount or flat fee Realtor®, there have been many cases of buyers and sellers being able to come to an attractive deal for both parties without having to waste tens of thousands of dollars on pricey commissions – a win-win situation for everyone involved, including the Realtor® who builds his business on this effective model.

Although some traditional Realtors® may adjust their commissions on the fly, be wary of this: you could be using a less successful Realtor® who is desperate to make a sale and may skip other steps as well; however, because a discount Realtor® already has a low-cost, a flat-fee system in safe, you can feel comfortable in the fact that you will be saving money and be sure you are using a high quality of service. Because discount Realtors® are focused on a higher volume of sales, they are unconcerned about haggling over high commission fees.

Flat-fee Realtors® definitely have the leg up when it comes to services that home sellers can choose from. With no commission fees and an effective model in place, home sellers have more options and are able to price their homes more competitively, gaining ground over those trapped into a traditional Realtor’s® old-fashioned structure. In the end, it comes down to making smart home selling decisions by using a flat fee Realtor® to save money and prevent that extra stress you don’t need when in the midst of a home sale.

I have had lots of calls about what taxes apply to new construction now that the HST is gone. The old 5% GST is still applicable. There is a rebate available to purchasers of new construction who will be using it as their primary residence. The rebate is 36% of the GST paid to a maximum rebate of $6,300. That is equivalent to a purchase price of $350,000.00. The rebate decreases proportionately on prices up to $450,000 and on prices over $450,000 there is no rebate at all. For buildings that were commenced prior to April 1, 2013 and were at least 10% complete by that date, there is also a 2% provincial transition sales tax. There are no rebates available for that. I also remind you that there is also a GST rebate available to purchasers of rental residential properties. The same limits apply as for purchases as a primary residence.

On occasion I represent real estate agents who are before the Real Estate Board or Real Estate Council or in court because of complaints lodged against them by their client. Often these cases arose out of a failure by the agent to properly communicate with his client. Either the client didn’t understand what the agent told them, the agent forgot to tell them something, or the client’s version of what was said is different from the agent’s version. As you have a fiduciary duty to your client there will always be an initial assumption by the adjudicators that you were at fault, otherwise why would the client have lodged the complaint? It will be for you through your evidence of what transpired to rebut that assumption. The problem is often that the agent does not have solid evidence. There is nothing in writing, no emails, or texts. The decision turns on whose verbal evidence the adjudicator thinks is most credible.

Therefore it is extremely important that you “paper” your file. If you tell a client how much his net proceeds will be after commissions, etc. don’t do it on your phone calculator and show it to him. Print it off or send it to him as an email or text so there is a hard copy. If you are explaining the significance of the non-residency provisions, put it in writing and get the client, if possible, to acknowledge that he received it and understands it. Something signed by the client, or that you can prove the client received, goes a long way to rebutting oral testimony by a client that he wasn’t told about it.

If you have any questions about this, please contact us and we will do our best to answer you.

Selling a home using either a traditional Realtor® or For Sale By Owner model through a discount or flat fee Realtor® means that a seller needs to take some initiative on their own to ensure their house is presented on MLS® in the right way. While it may not be you taking the photos, you want to be sure that your home looks the best it can look to attract more buyers. The following are essential tips to boost your MLS® listing regardless of the current economical climate.

Quality Photographs

If a real estate listing on MLS® contains either no or poor photographs, there’s a good chance the listing will be overlooked. Potential buyers searching MLS® often outright ignore listings without photographs. BC real estate is such a competitive market, there is no reason why you wouldn’t want to show off your MLS® listing with your best photo to represent your home. Take your time and properly prepare to get the perfect shot for the perfect MLS® listing.

Curb Appeal

Included in your MLS® listing will certainly be a photo of the outside of the home you’re selling. Curb appeal is particularly important to lower mainland and Vancouver home buyers. With cities like Vancouver taking such large strides in green initiatives, there’s is a good chance that a Vancouver home buyer will want to have a good look at their future personal green space. Find the best looking real estate listings on MLS® and think of it as a contest.

Focus on trimming and edging your lawn, removing weeds, pruning hedges

and trees, removing dead or dying plants and flowers, filling cracks in sidewalks, updating paint issues, and doing a general cleanup to make the house and property look tidy and well-kept.

Floor Plan

When selling real estate, adding an up-to -date image of a floor plan to your MLS® listing can do wonders by increasing walk throughs for serious buyers.

Staging

While some people truck half their belongings into storage, the most important thing when it comes to staging is to ensure the surfaces in your home are clear. You don’t need books, papers, toys, and clutter to take a potential buyer’s eye away from what’s important – the fact that they need to imagine their own belongings in the home. Potential buyers will be looking for how they can use the home to their advantage, whether they plan to live in it or rent it, so make it easy on them and minimize your belongings – or at least clear the surfaces while you’re taking pictures!

List What’s Unique

Make sure to check the right options on MLS® and include everything that’s in your home. When writing your listing, avoid words that people know to look for (you don’t want anyone dismissing a truly “cozy” space because they assume it’s too small) and emphasize phrases that people want. Whether you have a corner suite on a top floor, a home with a garden entrance and wheelchair access, or are selling a pet-friendly condo with no size limit on the pet – you need to advertise that information to your audience!