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A hot book in a cold real estate market

By
Richard Wilner
Published Feb. 14, 2010, 5:00 a.m. ET

Real-estate agents caught in the downward house-pricing spiral have to pull their clients into the future and away from the nostalgia of past higher home values if they want to close the deal, a leading real estate agent claims in a new, hot-selling book.

“The challenge is that in a buyer’s market, buyers usually make offers in anticipation of the market dropping,” writes Gary Keller in “Shift, How Top Real Estate Agents Tackle Tough Times.”

“This means that it’s up to the real estate agent to pull the seller forward not just to where the market is today, but to where it is likely to be in a few weeks or even months,” Keller claims. If the initial price is too high, then buyers’ agents will pass on the home and it will be very difficult to re-focus them on your property.

“The window of opportunity will close,” Keller says.

When it comes to talking to real estate agents, Keller, the chairman of Keller Williams Realty, the third-largest residential real estate firm in North America, and the author of two best-selling books on real estate, is the flavor of the month.

“Shift,” the No. 1 real estate book and top-selling investments book on Amazon.com, talks straight to agents and breaks down the tough-times game plan into 12 easily digestible bites.

The most out-of-the-box advice concerns pricing strategies — in a buyer’s market, sellers are always thinking of the past and buyers are thinking of the future, and vice versa in sellers’ markets — and overcoming buyer reluctance.

The best way to overcome buyer reluctance is to convince them that they can’t time the bottom of the market, and to remind them about the many other reasons they are looking to buy a home — the schools, proximity to work and the added space compared to their current residence.

In a cute but effective exercise, Keller tells agents to draw a downward angle line on a piece of paper, representing the declining market. Ask the prospective buyer to guess when you’ve gotten to the end of the decline, then suddenly turn the line upward.

“Now!” the buyer will shout, as the line has moved upward.

Of course, Keller explains, they have missed the bottom.