10 Things You Can Do to Sell More Real Estate This Winter

Baby, it might be cold outside, but your real estate leads might be even colder. When it seems buyers and sellers just want to hunker down and wait for spring, you need to get out and get busy marketing your services. How can you convince clients who are lukewarm about selling in the wintertime that it’s a great time to list their homes?

Here are 10 things you can do to sell more winter real estate.

Take advantage of the housing shortage

1. Less inventory on the market plus demand from motivated buyers might translate to a maximum profit for sellers.

Parse expired and withdrawn listings

1. Search the MLS for homes that didn’t sell and do a little investigation into why not. If the home was inappropriately priced at the time, the seller might be open to adjusting it and relisting again in the current market. If there were improvements the seller didn’t want to make, perhaps they have since taken the time to do so and the home is now ready to put back on the market.

Find motivated buyers

1. Watch the local news for business who are opening their doors or expanding operations in the area and are hiring. This can be a great indication that housing might soon be in greater demand.

Find motivated sellers

1. Again, the local news can be a resource for you: Layoffs in the area can indicate sellers who need to offload their mortgages sooner rather than later.
2. Inquire within at homes with For Sale by Owner signs outside. It can be a pretty quick conversation to find out how the process is going with the owner and if you can be of any assistance.
3. If the home is in foreclosure, the bank might be more flexible towards the end of the year in offering prospective buyers a deal, enabling the seller to get out from under the mortgage.

Take advantage of the lack of competition

1. If other sellers in your market are unwilling to sell in the winter, that means your client has less competition for the serious buyers who are out there looking.

Capitalize on the numbers

1. According to a Worldwide ERC survey on U.S. domestic transfers and relocations, employees who accept job transfers are given an average of just 33 days to move and report to their new job. That is a pretty tight window in which to research, find, tour and close on a home that might be hundreds, if not thousands of miles away.

Appeal to the clock watchers

1. Or in this case, the calendar watchers. The tenet goes that spring appeals to buyers looking to get their new homes in shipshape for summer, and summer appeals to buyers wanting to acclimate their kids before school starts. But winter can appeal to buyers who are anxious to move into their new home before the end of the year — or shortly thereafter — perhaps to be ready for the holidays, for tax reasons or simply to get settled.

Offer them your (nearly) undivided attention

1. If fewer sellers put their homes on the market in winter, the ones who go ahead and list with you might enjoy the lion’s share of your time and efforts.

The dreaded off-season doesn’t have to mean your business goes into hibernation. Much of the traditional dogma about selling in winter no longer holds true, and the new technologies and updated marketing techniques adopted by savvy real estate agents can reduce or erase a seller’s typical aversions to listing a home in winter. Serious buyers search for homes all year round; sellers should be out there, too.