Home Selling Tips: The "Coming Soon" Sign

Are you selling your home or not?

When a Vienna VA real estate client asked recently about putting a Coming Soon sign in her yard, I adamantly told her that this would be a huge mistake. In fact, such an act would squander her best marketing opportunity and alienate the exact people she needed to attract.

Don’t alienate home buyers

Giving home selling tips about properly marketing their home is a real estate agent’s key role in helping clients get the highest price in the shortest time. Have you ever sold your car or traded it in for another? Would anyone have paid you Blue Book value if it was dirty but had a Coming Soon sign in the window?

I bet not.

Any home seller hoping to hit the market is probably repainting, minimizing, and swapping out old carpet. Maybe even replacing the old kitchen appliances or outdated brass light fixtures. Staging your home properly involves a lot of hard work, and strategically placing a for sale sign in the yard when you are putting your absolute best product out there will result in a strong buyer making a good offer faster.

When home sellers put out a Coming Soon sign before they are ready for the market, those home buyers who call for information wind up getting the old run-around. And people love getting the run-around in 2011, not! As a matter of fact, your house will probably sell the one around the corner that really is on-the-market.

I see these signs every once and a while, and some are up for months. There was a yellow sign on Park Street in Vienna this year for three months with a Coming Soon sign rider. Seriously, I had a few people mention that it was pathetic.

The Best Home Selling Tips

Here are some core parts of my strategy for helping clients sell a home.

Understand that home buyers are comparison shopping.
Understand that they want a home to be clean, and move in ready.
Understand that “paint and carpet” isn’t too cliché for your home.
Understand that you have a first chance to make an impression (good or bad).
Understand the importance of the first few weeks of being a “new” listing.

It is my opinion that sticking a sign out front that says Coming Soon creates no excitement, no buzz, but just pissed off home buyers who would have seriously looked at your house. AND, when it is finally “show ready” they will have found a reason to exclude it, such as; it looks too small, but it is too close to that busy road, or that the roof looks bad, and we saw a cat in the window, or that there are always jets flying over that place.

My home selling tip: When the “FOR SALE” sign hits your front yard, you better be ready to play to win!