Rainmaker Properties - Improving Lives with Silicon Valley Real Estate

It’s always helpful to have people excited about your listing, whether it’s a rental or a home for sale. A bit of anticipation and a sense that there’s competition often serves to generate strong offers. I use a couple strategies to create buzz about properties.

One approach is putting a house on the MLS for a week or so, but not letting anyone see it until I hold an open house. Holding back on access to the listing creates a little extra eagerness and sometimes it even yields better offers. After all, when 20 people show up at an open house and they see others oohing and aahing about a property, it ends up creating a sense of competition. Truly interested buyers feel a sense of pressure because they don’t want to miss an opportunity. Most also see that lowball offers won’t fly.

The approach is especially effective when you have a unique offering. I had an Eichler located in Sunnyvale’s Cumberland Elementary school district and I knew they were pretty popular among buyers interested in mid-century modern houses. In fact, one had sold recently in Sunnyvale at $227,000 over the asking price. So I listed my Eichler on the MLS, applied my customized online marketing campaign,  and set a date for the first open house a week later. When I arrived 30 minutes before the scheduled open house time to prepare, I discovered 14 people standing in line!

With that property, I also listed it at $850,000–about $50,000 below what I though it would sell for. By undercutting the price a bit, the listing created even more buzz, especially among Eichler enthusiasts. The result: The house sold for $910,000– $60,000 over the asking price.

This delayed open house strategy also works for rental property. I use in when I’m serving as a property manager, and you can do it for apartments you manage on your own. Right now, there’s already some built-in competition for apartments because demand for them is so high now. So pulling in 15 or 20 prospective renters to an open house provides a just one more competitive edge helping to land the best tenants. When people see 15 or 20 others vying for a unit, prospective renters are more likely to submit an application and move quickly on an apartment they like.

Another benefit is that I save time by doing group open houses. Rather than running over to show an apartment seven separate times, I often find the perfect tenant—or buyer—during a two-hour, specified group open house.

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Modern architecture buffs will be familiar with the mid-century modern homes built by Joseph Eichler between 1949 and 1974. The properties, aimed at middle-class buyers of the time, have helped to define what’s known as California modern architecture.

The homes were especially unusual at the time because typical features included low or flat roofs, clean geometric lines, a somewhat spare sensibility, an open floor plan and lots of natural lighting that came from skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows. Another signature was a design that de-emphasized the delineation between the indoors and the outdoors. Views to the outdoors were always accessible and part of daily life.

I recently sold an Eichler house at 759 Pear Avenue in Sunnyvale near Cumberland Elementary School, and were pleased to see that Eichlers grab lots of attention when they go on the market. Even though there were about 11,000 Eichler homes built in Northern California and Southern California, they’re still considered a unique commodity and can command top dollar. The one I sold, in addition to being an Eichler, also was walking distance to the top rated Cumberland Elementary School in Sunnyvale. This Pear Avenue Eichler hadn’t been updated since the 70’s and definitely was a fixer-upper that needed a little TLC. We used our unique selling system to market the property, it generated multiple offers and sold for $60,000 above the asking price. And another Eichler, situated in Sunnyvale’s West Valley Elementary School district of Cupertino, recently sold for an eye-popping $227,000 over the asking price!

Later, I’ll talk more about the pricing strategy we used for the house and how the approach can help get more attention and offers if you do have a truly unusual property that you want to market.

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