A 10 Step Guide To Successfully Sell Your Toronto Home – Part 4 of 4

Step 8: Launching the Marketing

Once the home has been staged, the marketing plan has been finalized, the marketing materials prepared, the feature sheets printed, and the custom site built it is time to launch. At this point another contract is signed for the MLS listing.

The first step in launching the marketing is loading the listing onto MLS.net.  This will advertise the home to the 27,000 Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) Realtors, their clients, and anyone who checks Realtor.ca. Once the listing is live on MLS the descriptions and photos are then placed on the Agent’s personal web sites, any third party listing site, the Brokerages site, and this is also when the custom site is put live.

Within 24hrs the listing will be sent by MLS to everyone who has signed up for a new listing automated email for properties that match your home.

At this time the “For Sale” sign is placed on the property. All the neighbours will now be buzzing, talking to their friends and family who always wanted to live in the area.

Once it has been on MLS for a couple of days it is very beneficial to host an Agent’s MLS “Open House” with a catered luncheon. Realtors love free food. This open house is important because it allows Agents to get a good sense of the property so that they can determine whether it is worth bringing their clients through.

A colour picture ad is sometimes placed in the Globe and Mail’s Friday Real Estate Section. Several companies carry large ad space on a weekly basis that has specific sections for listings.

A picture ad is also placed in the Globe and Mail, weekend edition. Even though you are getting to 86% on line, you certainly don’t want to miss the rest of them and it never hurts to touch the same person twice. It is also great to advertise the custom website as where they can go for more information.

The Globe and Mail is also a good spot to advertise an Open House if the seller chooses to have one. It is very rare that someone will attend a public open house on the weekend and then end up purchasing the home. Serious buyers will typically request a private showing. The public open house usually benefits the Agent the most because it allows them to interact with potential new clients.

Depending on the rest of your customised marketing strategy the other pieces should be rolled out according to your execution plan.

Private showings will be requested throughout this period, it is very important that the house is looking its best and that no one is home during the showings.  Think about when you buy something at the store, you will never buy something with crappy, beat up, torn packaging if there is the same thing right beside it in a nice new package.

Step 9: Accepting Offers

Depending on the property and the market conditions it is typical to set an offer date upfront in the initial MLS listing. I find 7:00 PM, 9 days after the home is first put it on MLS is the ideal offer time. This allows enough time for everyone to get through the home, make solid decisions and do their own inspections if need be.

Typically if offers are restricted they will be presented at the Listing Brokers office. It is best to set the time so that everyone can prepare their offers, have dinner and arrive for presentations ready to settle in for an evening of negotiations that is why 7:00 pm works well.

If there are no restrictions then any offers to Purchase will be presented to the Seller at the time they are registered. A Buyers Agent will call the Listing Agents office after their client has signed the offer in order to verify that they have an offer and it needs to be presented to the Sellers. Other Agents can also call into an office to ask how many offers are registered this way they will know what kind of competition they are walking in to.

Hopefully multiple offers will come in. This allows you to get market value for your home along with a nice competitive bonus.

Once a suitable agreement of purchase and sale has been negotiated all contracts are forwarded to the lawyer and the certified deposit cheque is placed in the Listing Brokerages trust account and held until closing. Both Realtors commissions are paid out of the deposit so that is one reason why they may insist on a large amount, at least 5-6% deposit.

Step 10: After the Offer is Accepted

The “For Sale” sign is replaced with a “Sold” sign which will be taken down after 2 weeks of exposure.

You may want to be wary about closings that are less than 30 days. A month is not a lot of time especially if something goes wrong. A typical closing time is 60-90 days from the date of purchase so that there is time to arrange a new home to live, storage, movers, mail, etcetera…

This 10 step sequence of events is what I find to be the most successful. Time and again it has achieved the greatest amount of money in the most efficient amount of time for many of my Sellers.

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