The market in the Seattle area isn’t taking quite the beating it is in the rest of the country, but the number of homes on the market is growing - there are nearly 50,000 homes and condos for sale in western Washington now, up from about 30,000 when we launched in December. Some of that is the normal cycle of the market (more homes for sale in the summer), but not all of it.

That means more choices for home buyers, which means they can be pickier about quality and / or price. So what to do if you’re selling your place? The experts weigh in:

Greg Swann of the BloodHound Blog

Homes are being sold every day. There are fewer buyers than there were a year ago, a lot fewer than two years ago. But even though too many homes are on the market, some of them are selling.

Which ones? Those homes that offer the greatest perceived value to buyers.

And where is that value perceived? In the quality of the home or in a bargain price.

The seller of house number three can beat “the market” in one of two ways. He can refurbish the home to the quality of house number one, then undercut it on price by five or ten percent. Or he can leave the house the way it is — and cut the price by twenty percent.

Jim Duncan, Real Central VA:

1) Make your house stand out because of the price (make it more competitive than the rest).
2) Make your house spotless. Clean windows, baseboards, floors, corners, cabinets … everything.
3) If you don’t have a huge back yard, make it functional as it is. If you do have a huge back yard, offer your riding mower.
4) Make it sparkle. Do any and all reasonable (and some not-so-reasonable) repairs before it hits the market.
5) Remove any and all objections that you can before the house goes on the market. You only get one chance to make a first impression.

If all that sounds like too much, you can always just sell your home in 5 days, but I suspect that the same rules if you want to get the full value. Just last week I saw signs in Greenwood, Seattle touting “this home will sell Sunday night to the highest bidder.” I should have followed up…

The Estately team ends up explaining what we do to people – we’re small and we don’t have the name recognition that millions of dollars of venture capitol will bring you. People always seem to ask a few of the same questions though:

Q. How are you different than, uh, what’s it called, uh, Zillow?

A. We have nearly every home that is for sale in Washington and we have tons of local information to let you know what is nearby every home. Estately is a member of the North West MLS so there are over 45,000 Western Washington homes for sale on Estately, while there are only about 150,000 for sale nationwide on Zillow. If you’re looking to buy a home, you should look on Estately or you might miss the best one for you.

Q. So are you like Redfin?

A. In some ways we are: like Redfin, we have an innovative map search interface and we use the comprehensive database of MLS listings. But in some ways we aren’t: we have loads of local information about every home in our database, including which bus and transit stops are nearby, which parks and schools are nearby. We also have information about every neighborhood and city in Western Washington (and pictures for many!). We also have unique search features like text search (’hardwood floors’ anyone?), “transit search” (don’t like driving to work?) and true area search so you can narrow your search to only the homes in or near the neighborhood you’re interested in. But the biggest difference is that we don’t employ real estate agents. There are so many great real estate agents with years of experience out there (and many more mediocre ones!) that we decided the best way we could help people buy and sell homes and get the hyper-local advice and support they need was to match them with great agents in their area through Estately Agent Match.

Q. How many people work at Estately?

A. There are two of us.

Q. You mean like two business people and a bunch of developers?

A. Nope. Two of us. We both work on strategy, coding and our feature roadmap. Galen does most of the design and the interviews and Doug works on the heavy lifting code tasks. We have both interview real estate agents for Agent Match.

Q. What’s next?

A. Our road map is chalk full of great features, some continuing to focus on finding a home (our specialty!) and some that continue to extend our mission (making finding, buying and selling a home easier). Our most recent innovation, Agent Match, is along those lines: once you’re ready for expert help, we recommend great agents who really know the area and can meet your needs.

If Jim Duncan sold real estate in the greater Seattle area, we would recruit him for Agent Match. He’s good.

Here’s one of his clients:

We overlooked this home because it only had a photo of the outside, but the home next door to it was for sale and I found a virtual tour through Trulia- it is beautiful. Depending on the shape this one is in, we could go in at $240-250 and have some cash left for renovations. The outside looks well-kept.

The realtor is doing his client a disservice by only having one photo, but the resultant lack of interest may work to our advantage.

And here is his response:

I like to show properties that have one or fewer photos - it usually means that the Seller will have had less traffic and will therefore be more willing to negotiate a lower offer.

If your Realtor has actually seen every property you clients might want, you can seriously leverage bad staging, no staging, bad photos and inept marketing to find gems in the rough. If you’re selling, take a look at your Realtor’s past and current listings and ask yourself “would I want to check out that house?”

My suspicions were confirmed by Strange Maps the other day: as a Seattlite I am surrounded by a lot of dudes. Not just locally; all along the West Coast it’s as though we’re still feeling the effects of the gold rush of decades ago.

I’m guessing the Microsoft area of Redmond bring up the stats considerably, especially given their 75+% male makeup. In fact, with 33,000 Puget Sound employees, Microsoft employs approximately 16,000 of the unmatched men in Seattle.

I keep meaning to post an update to Estately Agent Match, but I’m going to put it off for another day.

People often ask us how we differentiate between great agents and the rest (and let me tell you, there are a lot of “the rest”). I usually say something about client recommendations and a certain feeling we get with respect to how they talk about clients and their work. Some talk about clients like they’re cattle to be herded and some talk about them like frat boys talk about the sorority girls from their last party. But some agents talk about clients as though they actually like them; they talk about the joys of finding the right house and bringing the knowledge from hundreds of prior experiences buying and selling to help their clients avoid common and not-so-common pitfalls. They often end up describing themselves more like coaches and less like sales people.

But Jeff Kempe actually puts better words to it than I can (emphasis mine):

“Selling isn’t about glib one liners, happy hour entertaining or pat answers to pre-conceived objections. It’s considerably less about form than substance. It’s about having the knowledge and developing the trust in order to fill the real needs of your customers, better than anyone else.” LOVE parental mode.”

…

Learn the difference between ACTING like you care about your customers and ACTUALLY caring. That one thing changes everything. Actually caring means thoroughly knowing customer needs and adapting to them, not expecting them to adapt to yours.

Michael Cook been hitting on this too (emphasis mine):

Great sales firms engender consumer loyalty because they are a consultant first and a salesperson second. While working for Procter & Gamble in sales, I learned early on that no one likes sales people, but everyone likes free, knowledgable consultants. When I learned to be both, I started setting sells records and my customers loved me.

Know a real estate agent who fits this description? Send us an email to agent_match (at) estately.com telling us why they were the best for you and we’ll consider recommending them to our clients. We already have a team of great agents working with clients, but we could always make it better.

Every time someone tells me about a trick that helps get more money for a home seller, I can’t help but flip the idea on it’s head: logically it means homes that aren’t employing that trick are a better deal for buyers.

Deal of the day: Homes with good photos sell for more and sell sooner because they get seen by more people (I have no statistics to back this one up - anyone?). Here’s Athol, a real estate blogger with a good sense of humor who sometimes goes by “sock puppet,” on the subject:

My own home had godawful photos. But we saw it last, around the 50th home we saw. If it had had good photos, we would have seen it a lot earlier in the picture.

Also if it had good photos there would have been far more interest in it, and we’d likely have had to pay $10-20,000 more to get it.

Bad and no photo homes DO sell, just not as easily or for as much.

Bad photos mean a bad deal for the seller and a good deal for the buyer, but only if the buyer can see past them and actually visits the home.

In case you want to see how bad it can get (MLS rules prevent us from blogging about North West MLS properties), Athol runs bad photo of the day: Here’s a recent bad photo and here’s another.

On Thursday Anastasia Goodstein, (Ypulse), Niki Scevak (RealEstateVoices), Jason Spencer (StreetAdvisor.com), Karim Tahawi (My-Currency) and I were on the New Kids on the Block panel at the Inman Connect conference last week. I was extremely flattered to be invited to be on this panel; Doug and myself, the two-man team behind Estately beat out dozens of other new real estate startups to be invited and we were billed as “innovators defining the future.” How’s that for hyperbole?! The five of us presented to a half-full room of hungry real estate tech people, real estate brokers and real estate agent-bloggers. I failed to plug Anastacia’s book as promised, but I did manage to lose my train of thought once or twice (thankfully Brad Inman is a gracious moderator).

My fellow panelists were all exceptionally smart, but with the exception of Anastasia, they had all launched “neither chicken nor egg” sites. Now every site starts somewhere – imagine how brave the first seller on eBay was – but launching a product that is 100% user generated is tough unless there is some incentive for the first user. Take YouTube for instance: sure the first uploader didn’t have 100,000 people viewing their video, but they were probably pleased as punch that they could send a video to all their friends without bouncing emails and filling inboxes. Even MySpace had a purpose from the beginning – you could be Tom’s friend, which made you cool to his other 20 friends. Without the incentive to be first, it’s very difficult to get traction.

Given the talent and brains that grace the heads of my stage-mates, I have no doubt that they have anticipated this and are working hard to kick start the content, but for each of my above average stage mates, there are far to many budding entrepreneurs (at least in the Seattle tech scene) who don’t seem to get it. Ghost towns are intimidating and it’s a slog getting the first users to contribute.

By the way, the man in charge of the conference Brad Inman picked out a comment I made about how social networking sites will be relevant to real estate and even blogged about it. Sweet!