A recent marketing study found that homes which placed at least two monkeys in a cage on the front lawn for two or more days each week, along with a supply of peanuts which prospective buyers could feed to said monkeys, sold for 18% MORE and 22 days QUICKER than the home would have sold for without peanuts and monkeys.

THAT is an amazing study and it has NEVER been proven wrong. Oh, it’s false. Absolutely made up out of thin air. But it has never been proven wrong. How could they? You can only sell a home once. You can do it with a competitive price for the condition and location, then correctly enter it in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS). OR….you could try the peanuts and monkeys. You can’t do both, so we simply can’t know for certain that the peanuts and monkeys would have been better.

It is the age-old mistake of thinking that since one thing happened after something else happened, then surely the first thing caused the second thing. Scientists call it “confusing correlation with causation.”

Rain dancers, faith healers and charlatans of every stripe have been using it to line their pockets for generations.

There are certain things which real estate agents absolutely know have no causative effect on the sale of a home.  Despite that fact, many agents continue to do them! Why?

Does it help them obtain new clients? Does it make their current client think that they are actually doing something to earn that ‘rockstar’ commission?  Is it, perhaps, harmless activity that simply helps promote the agent in the minds of future potential customers?

You’ll have to ask them. Be prepared, though. They can point to a study that says whatever version of peanuts and monkeys they are doing is very effective–and that study has never been proven wrong.

We believe that price, condition, location and proper MLS exposure results in the sale of a home at the best possible price in a reasonable amount of time. Anything that does NOT help that approach is a waste of our time and your money. That’s why we don’t do them.

OPEN HOUSES don’t help you sell your home. They do allow unknown people to walk into your house and look wherever they like. The agent on duty cannot possibly stay with every visitor in every room simultaneously. What kind of person waits for an ‘open house’ when they could simply have their agent set up a private showing for them at their convenience?? Two kinds, generally. The non-serious ‘looker’, for one, and an opportunistic thief who doesn’t want their real identity recorded with an agent.

FLIERS attached to a dispenser on your yard sign don’t help. If anything, they can hurt because they don’t provide any market feedback. If you put out 20 fliers and they are all gone in a week, you don’t know if 20 separate, qualified, interested, serious buyers took one each, OR the neighbor’s kid has a new, full-color squadron of paper airplanes! Without fliers, interested buyers usually call the agent and your agent can easily track those calls to determine overall interest. After all, if they won’t even bother to call, how serious can they be?

VIRTUAL TOURS AND ADDRESS WEBSITES sure seem impressive, but they are used to eliminate homes from consideration as often as not. A potential buyer who only looks online will never get to appreciate how quiet your neighborhood is or see that the tile, which they think is not for them, actually looks much better in person!

AN AGENT’S WEBSITE THAT COMES UP ON THE FIRST PAGE OF GOOGLE won’t sell your home. Agents spend their time and money to accomplish this because it means more customers and clients for THEM, not you. They brag about the ranking of their website–like it really makes a difference in the sale of your home. It doesn’t. Don’t take my word for it, just ask them when was the last time that a buyer purchased a home from their website. Buyers look online in the beginning, but they buy only after they have seen the home in person.

At Metro Discount Realty we believe in doing everything that helps our clients achieve their goal of selling their home–including charging a fair price which doesn’t penalize owners for having an upper-bracket home! And we avoid doing anything that doesn’t help achieve that goal. By not wasting our time and money, we can charge LESS and not waste yours either!