When the market was hot, most brokers didn’t need to worry about getting their listings extended. As long as the listing was reasonably priced, and even if it was priced a bit above market, the frenzy of activity from interested buyers would normally be enough to sell the property within its original listing period. But today many brokers are experiencing a different market, and with higher interest rates, tighter financing requirements, and general overall concerns about the economy, today we have a market where people tend to be much more cautious about buying.
Keeping this in mind, because of the reduction in the amount of solid buyers today, combined with their insistence on buying properties for less than the prices that the sellers are often willing to accept, you can easily find yourself in situations where you now need to turn to your owners and ask them to extend your listings.
But when the market was hot, and when you had good activity going on with your listings, you’d be regularly reporting in to your owners just by submitting the offers you were getting from your buyers, and then you’d be actively negotiating back and forth between the principals, to close the transaction.
However, now when you’ve got very little activity going on, and have either zero or very few offers to discuss with your owners, it is still very important to remain in constant communication with them, because otherwise it will be easy for them to then believe that you’re doing nothing to market their property, and they’ll begin thinking about listing it with another broker instead.
So what I recommend doing here is determining how often you should be checking in with your owners, and advising them on what is going on with the activity level that you’re generating on their property. You could prepare a list of the different reasons why, in general, a property might not be moving, and then when it’s time to report in to a given owner, look at your list, and determine which items on the list will apply in this specific situation. In addition, you could call and survey some of the brokers within your area, too, and ask them why they believe that the property isn’t moving, and then report the results of this survey to your owner.
In addition to this, it will be great if you can tell the owner some new and different activities that you will now be doing, when attempting to move their property. Because if the problem is that the property is overpriced, the solution then becomes the owner lowering their asking price. But if you believe that the property is priced fairly, then the burden is totally on your shoulders, to then find the one person or company that will pay the owner’s price.
So remember to keep in contact with your owners, and if you can convince them that you’re definitely still working hard on moving their property, and they can feel this from you, then you’ll have a much higher probability of being able to extend your listings with them, whenever it becomes necessary.
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If you’re interested in improving your prospecting, getting more listings, and closing more transactions in your brokerage business, and you’d consider doing one-on-one coaching work together, send me an Email or give me a call!