As we approach another hot summer real estate peak season in Middle Tennessee, we real estate agents are refreshing our approaches to even our most common problems. Today, let’s talk about one we’ve all faced: a stale listing.

When your listing languishes on the market for more than three months—or longer, when it comes to high-end properties—it’s time to circle back and reconsider your strategies. Your goal will be learning how to refresh a stale listing without breaking the bank or temporarily withdrawing the home from consideration.

Is Your Client Frustrated?

Despite your desire to sell your client’s home as expediently as possible, repeated texts, calls, and emails (with a frustrated tone) will let you know that your client is simply out of patience. When your work isn’t tempting buyers, it’s possible that your client may blame you rather than objectively considering whether or not something about their home is lacking.

The longer a listing endures, the more you can expect to experience conflict with your client. Ultimately, your client may fire you. Even worse, they may begin to speak negatively of you online and throughout their community.

Do a Revised Market Analysis

It’s possible that your initial CMA led you to assign this property an overly optimistic value. If this fresh CMA indicates that your initial pricing was too high, bring this data to your client and advise a more appropriate asking price.

If your client refuses, you can at least lean on this (likely more accurate) CMA to continue to recommend a price change.

Reconsider Your Marketing Strategy

As you know, your marketing strategy is one of the most valuable services you can offer any client. When a property fails to sell in a reasonable amount of time, it’s essential that you take the time to examine each facet of your marketing approach and ensure that it’s fully optimized, effective, and diversified.

Social media, online listings, email newsletters, mailers, and other print ads should all be given proper focus. Furthermore, your graphic design, phrasing, grammar, photography, and videography should be as stellar as you can make them.

If you know you have a particular weak spot in one of the key marketing areas, it may be wise to hire help or swap tasks with a fellow realtor whose strengths and weaknesses complement your own.

What’s Your Stance on Staging?

Take this question to your client, even if they shot this suggestion down previously. It will be helpful to remind your client that staged homes demonstratively sell for higher prices. Equally relevant is that they sell more quickly!

The goal of staging is to show potential buyers the kind of lifestyle their investment will secure for them. Selling real estate is about selling an opportunity for the life buyers have dreamed of, and staging is the most direct way to reach this goal.

Photography and Videography

In terms of a potential buyer’s first encounter with a property, the marketing landscape we all face has become nearly entirely virtual. Consequently, photography and videography have never been as crucial to the successful, timely sale of a listing. 

Even if your buyer has no interest in reducing their asking price, they may be persuaded to invest in high-end real estate photography. This is doubly true if you have in fact collaboratively decided to stage the house since the first photographs were taken.

Like portraiture, wildlife photography, and landscape photography, real estate requires a skilled specialty photographer to be captured in its best possible light. Given the value such a photo shoot and videography session could (and likely will) bring to your client, you should feel confident urging them to invest.

Rework Your Listing Description

Ideally, listing descriptions are engaging, clear, concise, and grammatically pristine. Invite buyers in by describing attributes that will impact how they envision themselves living day-to-day in their new home.

Read your listing and your reworked listing aloud to both yourself and a fellow realtor. Choose someone whose listings you admire and take their response and advice to heart.

Remember, they aren’t criticizing you! They are analyzing your writing as a standalone product, then lending their skills to your efforts to refine it.  

Face The Bad and the Ugly

Sometimes, we encounter a client who wants to put their property up for sale without remedying a serious issue. If the paint is peeling, the roof is leaking, or the lawn has been consumed by spiky weeds, your best work won’t override a buyer’s ability to notice such obvious red flags.

Don’t be afraid to kindly, yet honestly, speak to your client about these issues if they are what is driving buyers away. If they want to sell their house without budging on asking price, they may have to put some work into the property first. 

Retrace Your Steps

Have other real estate agents brought buyers by and had them give your listing a hard pass? Perhaps those agents would be willing to share their honest feedback with you, especially as relates to the information they have gleaned from their clients.

If the feedback is consistent across several agents and concurs with your own thoughts about the property, share your findings with your client. If they are prepared to hear what you have to say, acting on the information you have brought them will likely help bring in buyers who subsequently place offers.

Don’t Give Up Yet

Until you’ve worked your way through our recommendations, don’t give up on your listing just yet. However, if your client shoots down your every idea and refuses to budge an inch, you may decide your time will be better spent with a more flexible, motivated client.

Either way, we hope you are able to move on from your stale listing soon!