29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Method works with a little updating, July 6, 2006
This review is from: How to Sell Your Home in 5 Days: Second Edition (Paperback)
I sold my San Francisco condo using this method at market price.
I netted $30-$40k more than if I were to have sold it using the conventional method paying a 5-6% broker commision. Here are the updates I would suggest:
1. use a website service - George Cappony's 5-daysale.com does a great job. The website service should include a way to track the number of hits.
2. If you use a website, expect fewer calls (most people I talked to said they got 5-10). The website does the work for you, and you don't have to be at home to answer calls.
3. Use a minimum undisclosed reserve price to protect yourself. This should be what you think is market price minus the 6% commission you would normally pay. Then make the listing price REALLY low. If people don't say your price is ridiculous, then drop it even more.
4. Place your newspaper ad for 8 days instead of 5 days. Most people only read the Sunday paper, so if you start the previous Sunday, you will get maximum marketing exposure.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I Sold My House in Five Days, July 9, 1997
By A Customer
It isn't every day that a book can save your hide, or change your life, but William G. Effros' "How to Sell Your Home in Five Days" did both for me. My wife and I owned a home in Maine. We needed to move to Massachusetts for work and were unemployed. Our house had been on the market for NINE MONTHS with brokers and no real offers. After reading the book, we followed the directions to the letter, and did what our lawyer said was impossible: Sold our house, and at a fair-market price. After the sale the lawyer could not believe how well the it had worked, and the price we got for our house. He graciously admitted that he had been wrong, and said that he had never seen anything like it. We must be geniuses. I told him to read the book. IT WORKS!!! If anyone has any question about how to do it you can call me (Tim Hunter) at (413) 528-7904 or freesongs@aol.co
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Concept is gold. Just don't get your hopes up., February 2, 2007
This review is from: How to Sell Your Home in 5 Days: Second Edition (Paperback)
The concept of this book makes great sense. However...
POINT 1: First and foremost, ask yourself this VITAL question: When you ACCURATELY describe where you live (as a township or municipality), will that location alone draw attention to your listing with such a low featured price? If the objective answer is "no" then this program will NOT work!!!! St. Louis is plagued by many pockets of unincorporated areas, leaving the homeowner to describe their location in terms of South County, North County or West County.
POINT 2: Using a newspaper to place your "5-Day Sale Ad" is antiquated in most markets. Again, that includes St. Louis. The St. Louis Post Dispatch is a poster child for poor presentation of real estate. Major realtors buy half-page and full-page ads to feature their listings in order of price, not location. For all others (mostly FSBOs), you're left to slot your ad within a tiny municipality that most people have never heard of (even those who live there). And you won't find realtor's listings repeated in these location-specific sections. So guess who looks there? All those who can barely afford your home at its starting bid price.
POINT 3: System doesn't work well in a Buyer's Market. Buyers can sit back and look at a surplus of homes with leisure. Why would they consider jumping into your home if they can't see it until day 4 or 5? Our home spent 6 months on the market in the $200K range using a realtor and attracting painfully few interested parties. We dropped the realtor, dropped our asking price by $15,000. We were then willing to accept $9,000 less than THAT selling by owner. Using this book's method we printed a starting bid at $40K BELOW THAT PRICE. By Friday, when you're supposed to receive a couple dozen or so calls at the minimum, we received only 3 phone calls. Newspapers don't credit you for pulling an ad on day 4. This little 5-day experiment cost us $250.00.
POINT 4: Unless you're in a progressive market, most people just don't understand the concept of a 5-day sale. Especially the real estate agents in my area. If they understood it, they would fear it. Now, if 100 interested parties had walked our home, then I imagine that we could have found 5 parties who understood the concept and would have been willing to play along. We didn't get 100. We brought in less than 20. None of them had done comparisons on the neighborhood. All were clueless.
POINT 5: The book is being revised so WAIT for the new release!!!! The version I purchased (the only one currently available) describes the Internet from a 1998 perspective which says it's not a prominent enough tool to possibly substitute for an ad in a newspaper. As you may have guessed, times have changed. I for one NEVER read the paper for available real estate (mostly out of poor presentation of the paper's real estate section). I use the Internet. I debated posting our home on MLS and [...] websites but you don't review those listings looking for an auction. I feared a massive onslaught of confused Buyers asking what I was trying to pull. Still, it would have attracted FAR more people in this market than our paper could have ever accomplished.
POINT 6: Visit the website associated with this book. It's ALL about buying bundled packages from the author's real estate expert friend. Those packages include listing your home on MLS and Realtor websites. I can't vouch for any of that... just found it to be opposite of what the book preaches. Maybe this will be incorporated into the 2007 edition.
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