Here are a few things I have noticed on real estate sites over the last couple of years that I find annoying as a possible buyer (have been living where I am now for nine years, beginning to get the itch to move again):
1. Get a real photographer! You're selling a house worth hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of dollars and you are trying to attract people with overexposed/blurry or poorly composed photos from a $100 point and shoot camera? The feeling I get when I see that is that the seller/realtor really doesn't feel invested in what they're selling, so me as a possible buyer doesn't, either. So spend a few hundred bucks on some good quality photos (and you don't exactly need Richard Avedon for that) or a well shot and presented video tour and sell a six or seven figure home.
Also, you try to sell your home with a single photo taken across the street from your house? Are you kidding? What are you hiding that you don't show the backyard and the interior?
2. The listing copy mentions a view. So where is it in the photos of the home?
3. The obverse of number two: you show a bunch of shots of the home's view but nothing of the interior or the exterior. What that signals to me is that the home is likely a shambles and so you try to elicit emotion from the view to lure some sucker. Sorry, not me or anyone else with an above room temperature IQ.
4. God, I hate extreme photoshopping. Whether it is making a home look like something out of a Vermeer painting or shots done by candlelight and then rendering the resulting image in an unearthly glow, it is obviously so fake that it is laughable. Some of the more artistically designed contemporary homes are made out to almost look like space ships. Who do you think you're fooling?
5. Stop washing your listing copy in buzzwords! Have something interesting to say! Most listing copy is abysmally written and imbued with a smarmy, cliched tone more reminiscent of a brainless cheerleader (or a used car salesman) than an honest and inviting portrayal of the property.
Not interested in challenging yourself to do better than that? Well, in this market, you are not going to last long then. Because the days of just merely putting a for sale sign in front of a fixer upper garnering immediate offers are gone.
6. Not going to tell me the square footage a property has? Then the seller will never get to know how much money I have in my bank account that might have gone to him/her. When I see no square footage listed, I assume it has no square footage, if you get my drift (in other words, the home is postage stamp sized).
7. The days of $1000 a square foot are
over. I already see properties in Laguna, Newport Coast and Laguna Niguel sinking to anywhere from the $600-800/sq. ft. level and that market will only get worse, especially with the loads of shadow inventory not yet online but that will have to appear in the near future and a lot of former high salaried high fliers who went full metal ego on such properties with dubious loan devices who are now washing dishes at Chili's. So you speculators who have had properties on the market forever in some of the higher priced areas need to recognize reality and get ahead of the market before it buries you. That property that you bought two years ago you still want double the taxable value for? Thanks for the unintentional comedy.
8. The address isn't disclosed. I understand the security reasons for this. However, in this market, where money is tight and unemployment high, people are using Zillow and Redfin and other resources and checking them twice to ensure that they aren't going to pay bubble peak for a home that is sinking in value. And you can't do that unless one knows the address beforerhand. So people will tend to gravitate to properties that they can get facts and figures about. Unfortunately, that won't be yours.
9. I do not want to see anything painted directly on the walls or kids' names on cutout foamcore tacked to the walls of bedrooms! It's usually gross and tacky. Are you trying to sell the home to yourselves or other people, most of whom aren't going to have your "aesthetic sense" (*lol)? If it ain't in a frame or on a shelf it doesn't belong on a wall.
10. Don't have images of polarizing television personalities in your photos. Buyers should only be thinking about looking at how nice your home is, not how much distaste they have for Bill O'Reilly. In fact, just leave the tv's off. If they are to be included with the house, they can be checked during inspection.
11. Don't be dishonest about the area a home is in. Don't say it has great schools when everyone knows it is in a gang ridden war zone and the schools are barely standing after decades of neglect and have test scores so low you almost get the bends after looking at the numbers. That sort of disingenuousness only makes you look disconnected from reality if not an outright hustler.
Here is an example: "GREAT HOME FOR FIRST TIME BUYERS,GREAT INVESTMNT FOR A SINGLE FAMILY LOOKING TOWARDS THE FUTURE."
This is for a 900 sq, ft two bedroom home on Fifth Street in Santa Ana California, which is a big rundown hispanic gang battleground. I mean, you tell me that a $90,000 in Orange County California isn't going to have problems? The only future anyone who lives in this house will look forward to is dodging bullets long enough to get out of that neighborhood one day. I mean, come on!
Not far from there is another two bedroom house: "THE LOCATION MAY BE IDEAL, YOU ARE CLOSE TO ALL THE GOOD THINGS IN SANTA ANA; SCHOOLS, PARKS, RECREATION, SHOPPING AND SO MUCH MORE." That "More are the gangs like the Fifth Street Rulers (a gang) who inhabit the Delhi barrio, near where that home is located.
Look, call it an affordable home in a low income ethnic neighborhood if you want, but don't make it sound like Leave it to Beaver was filmed there.
12. Arguably worse, though, is very vague or non-existent copy accompanying a home listing. Again, I am just not feeling the love when I see this. And if the realtor doesn't seem to be enthused enough to write anything about the property, well, it is probably for a good reason, or so one would assume and therefore tend to pass on going to see that home.
"APPROVED===APPROVED GOOD FOR FIRST TIME BUYERS"
That is the entirety of the copy for a $325,000 four bedroom home in the City of Orange near El Modena High School. Now that isn't a great area by any means, but it is a lot better than downtown Santa Ana and yet that is the best the realtor could do? Really?
I'm done now. Thanks for reading a rant that may be redundant as you may have seen the same complaints before. But it also has to be said that the above maladies still infect real estate ads.
Oh, and personally, I can't get enough of 70's faux wood paneling, avocado counter tops and appliances and orange vinyl living room furniture. Every day is a Brady day!
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