Lake Martin Property : For Sale By Owner Tips
Lake Martin, like any real estate market, will always have its share of people selling their waterfront property themselves – aka For Sale By Owner or FSBO (pr FIZZ-bo). And that’s fine with me. I am not one of those realtors that looks down on FSBOs as idiots or realtor hating zealots. I think it is up to me as a real estate agent to prove to the FSBO prospect that I will save them time and make them money if I list and help sell their Lake Martin home or lot.
I talk to FSBOs all the time. What I try to do is help them by giving them the clear and un filtered truth about the Lake Martin market and how the market might react to their home. The decision to list or not to list is certainly up to them.
That being said, there will always be a segment of people that choose to sell their real estate themselves, without the help of an agent. So I figure I might as well be helpful in case the FSBO experiment doesn’t go well, maybe they’ll call me. They often do.
I read a great article for advice to FSBOs in today’s Wall Street Journal. Click here to read it. It had a lot of helpful sales strategies for FSBOs.
I would add to the article these suggestions to anyone selling their waterfront property themselves:
John’s Tips to any Lake Martin For Sale By Owner:
1. Get Your Own Website – Go to a domain seller like godaddy.com and buy your own website address. If your home’s address is 123 Lake Street – buy www.123Lake.com or whatever is available. The shorter the better. I do this for all of my listings. Use this on your flyers and advertisements. If you advertise your home on something like fsbo.com, its website will be something incoherent like www.fsbo.com/e34h3449ir4827 – no buyer can remember that, especially one that has been at Chimney Rock drinking beer for 3 hours. Once you have bought your site through godaddy, go to the control panel and choose “domain forwarding” to point the site to the long one at fsbo dot com. That way anyone who types 123lake.com in their browser will be taken automatically to the fsbo site.
2. Buy Custom Signs – Those “For Sale By Owner” signs you buy for $3 at WalMart might be appropriate for your used go-cart that you put out on highway 63, but do you really think it conveys the right image to someone you are asking to spend $600,000 for a waterfront home on Lake Martin? I use Cliff Grinnell at EBanr. His office is in Alex City on the Dadeville Highway. You need at least 2 – one for the road, and one for the waterfront. Make them double sided for greater visibility. I would go ahead and buy 4 so that you can switch them out to avoid being faded or dirty. Also be sure to get 2 “info tube” things at WalMart or Home Depot so you can put some flyers in both signs.
3. Make Effective Flyers – You start by taking great pictures of your home or lot. Then spend the money and have them printed by a high quality color LASER printer. Go to Kinko’s if you have no color laser printer of your own. Get them to go ahead and run 150 copies while they’re at it. The big cost here is the setup for a new print job, each additional copy is not as expensive, so you might as well print them all at one stop. If you’re putting the flyers in the info tubes in the signs, don’t waste a lot of space by pictures of the outside. They know what the outside looks like. Just use one or two of the lakeside so that they can easily remember which one is yours (odds are that yours is the 10th flyer they have pulled that day). If you are putting the flyer elsewhere then include more pictures of the waterfront. Most Lake Martin buyers are concerned about the property’s waterfront, so highlight that.
4. Be Available At An Instant To Talk Or Show The Home – Put your cell phone number on all advertisements. Don’t confuse buyers by giving your home phone in town, your home phone at Lake Martin, your office phone, your fax, etc. Just one will do. Then KEEP THE CELL PHONE ON YOU at all times. When it rings, answer it. If you don’t answer the phone, the majority of buyers will move along and not leave a message. If they want to see it now, show it now.
5. Call Or Email Me With Questions – Every property on Lake Martin is unique, with its own special selling points to promote and challenges to overcome to a potential buyer. If you’re stumped, give me a shout. I am glad to help you think of an answer, even if you plan to continue to sell it yourself.
Do you have another helpful FSBO tip for the rest of Lake Martin? Leave a comment below and help us all out! If you can’t see the “Leave a Reply” box below, click “Continue” then scroll down to the bottom.
If You Don’t Like My Service, Please Fire Me On The Spot
Why do some real estate agents insist on holding their sellers to the last day of a listing contract? I don’t know if my market on Lake Martin is different, but I don’t see the point in guilt tripping a seller into staying with me if they are unhappy or decide not to sell.
Obviously, I am in the business to sell Lake Martin real estate. I don’t go into a listing intending not to sell it, not to give bad service. But I find that in talking to some sellers, they are leery of signing a listing contract for fear that they will be held in slavery by an agent. Once they figure out that they can fire me anytime they want, it makes them feel better about the agreement. I only want them as clients if they’re happy with how hard I am working for them.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I found myself telling this to the owners of these new listings. I 
assured them that if they wanted out of the listing agreement at any time, for whatever reason, that’s OK with me. They wouldn’t owe me a dime. I even wrote it into the listing agreement to let them know that I meant it. It was surprising to most of them.
Coincidentally, I saw a great post on the same subject by Jay Thompson, the Phoenix Real Estate guy. I agree with his take 100%. It is a real advantage to own your own small brokerage. I can make rules like this for myself. I don’t have to wade through some big corporate bureaucracy. I make the policies, and can work with clients to suit their needs, not according to the whims of Big Brother.
Lake Martin Is High, But So Is Real Estate Inventory
Spring rains have filled Lake Martin faster than almost anyone expected – in the first 3 months of 2008 we went from bone dry to runnething over. Will the waterfront real estate market bounce back in three months, too?
Not likely. There is still a lot of inventory to sell which I think will continue to make 2008 a great time to be a buyer. To wit:
A comparison of the first quarter sales in 2008 shows that in the entire Lake Martin residential waterfront market on the MLS(*), there were fewer sales this year than in 2007.
If you look back to the post where I reviewed Lake Martin waterfront sales in 2007, you will remember that January – March 2007 saw 43 waterfront properties sold:
The same statistics in the first three months of 2008 in the Lake Martin MLS shows sales of only 17:
Is it time for sellers to to give up? Will 2008 see only 58 waterfront homes (17 * 4) sold? Of course not. History shows us that the four months February – May of every year counts for almost 50% of residential waterfront sales on Lake Martin. We still have half of that critical period to go before we get a better prediction on 2008.
Also remember – January and February 2008 sales were also affected by the drought. Just look at news reports from that period – they were dire. Some people openly wondered if the lake would EVER come back. The water level really didn’t start shooting up until the last week in February – when it rose a whopping 4 feet in 7 days. Since then, spirits have been buoyed and more buyers are crawling the coves.
So can sellers relax? Will Lake Martin’s water level comeback springboard the real estate market back into the raging sellers’ market of 2005?
Not likely.
There is still a lot of inventory. There is a lot of competition for the buyers’ attention. It is still very possible to sell in this market (the fact that my lights are on testify to that fact). I am telling all of my sellers that we must continue with intense focus on the golden trinity of real estate: pricing, marketing, and staging. As a seller, you must do all 3 exceptionally well in order to sell on Lake Martin right now. The sellers who get overconfident now will be the last to sell this year, guaranteed.
Are you considering selling your waterfront property now that Lake Martin’s water is up? Or maybe you just wonder how the last 24 months have affected its possible value? Call or email John for a no guilt, no hassle, pain free Comparable Market Analysis. See the contact info at the top of this page. If you don’t want to sell after we talk, no hard feelings – I promise.
(*)Disclaimers: All of the above info was taken from the Lake Martin Area Association of Realtors’ Multiple Listing Service. Accuracy is not guaranteed but deemed reliable. The above does not include sales by FSBOs or developers that sell privately and not through the MLS. But, I do think that the above represents a very large majority of all sales on Lake Martin.
Lake Martin Water Up, Business Is Hopping
This is not a news flash: Lake Martin’s water level is back!
It’s hard to believe, but in the 5 short weeks since I wrote this post about the water hitting 480, Lake Martin stands inches away from its highest possible mark of 490. All of the nay sayers have been proved wrong. Many (myself included) wondered if it would take more than one summer to recover from the worst drought recorded in 80 years. The next time we have a rain shortage, I hope we remember how fast it bounced back.
How has it affected businesses around the lake?
Real Estate
I have been extremely busy in the last month especially. I have picked up all sorts of new waterfront listings. I have been running all over the lake taking pictures and shooting video tours. Buyers are calling again. Turns out, my phone does work! It’s a good feeling. I am no exception, many other Lake Martin realtors tell me the same thing.
All agent fluffery aside, 2008 will prove a great time to buy property on Lake Martin. There is still a lot of inventory out there from the doldrums of 2007. Sellers have reduced prices and (if they’re smart) are still eager to sell. Interest rates are down, so conditions are still very favorable for buyers.
Retail
JT Voltz at Blue Creek Marina tells me that they are “covered up” in work already. Their staff is back full steam and looking forward to a better summer.
I spoke to Oskar (of Oskar’s) this morning and she said that their business has bounced back as well. They are ready to forget 2007 and are looking back to 2006 to plan for their restaurant traffic this summer.
Early season success has not been limited to the Dadeville side of Lake Martin. Green Valley Market and Cafe tells me that last weekend they served about as many meals as they ever have. They opened in 2007, so they anticipate to easily break their own records of catering and restaurant business this summer.
David Naile of Nail’s Convenience Store in downtown Kowaliga says that the last couple of weekends’ nice weather has shown a spike in gasoline and c-store sales. Naile confirmed that he is planning to expand his offerings inside the store to accommodate the higher traffic.
