I promised here recently to say a few words about expired listings. The market updates we’ve been working on lately have shown some pretty hefty increases in the number of listings that expire as a ratio of those that sell. In our most extreme example, Pollock Pines, we saw the ratio jump from 0% in November of 2004 to 91.7% in November of 2005. In other markets there’ve likewise been dramatic results, though none perhaps quite so glaring as this.

If you’re a seller, and your listing has expired, that’s the first thing you need to understand — you’re not alone. So you shouldn’t let the setback of an expired listing deter you.

When I was first learning how to work with sellers whose listings have expired, we were taught to ask this question: “Do you still want to sell?” Sellers should ask themselves that question as well, because in most cases, expired listings are fixable. I should say, if a seller wants to sell badly enough, all expired listings are fixable.

A great tool to use to help you if your listing is expired is one that we routinely use when working with these sellers, an expired listing analysis. What this consists of is going over your listing — in the first instance by looking at what appears in the MLS. We can often learn a lot just by looking at the listing itself. For example, we recently looked at a listing we found in the MLS that was on the market for a year, and it was a really tragic case, I think, because clearly it was not the seller’s fault at all that the listing had expired. In this case, the home was priced competitively when it was listed, so based on price alone (the most important factor), it should have sold. But there was no lockbox, making the property hard to show. What’s worse, the agent for the seller was from the Bay Area, and the home was in Placer County. So not only did you have to make an appointment with an agent, you had to make an appointment with an agent who was three hours away.

In our expired listing analysis, we use the same basic P.A.C.E. method that we outline in our seller’s library to systematically review your listing point by point.

In this market it’s crucial to have all four elements of that method — Price, Agent, Condition, Exposure — going for you if you want to make a sale. In the no-lockbox case above, the problem was mostly one of Exposure, and it was compounded to a terrible degree by having the wrong Agent. By wrong here, I mean at minimum not close enough to do the listing justice.

In other cases, the culprit is clearly price. In those cases, firing the agent may give the seller a certain I’ve-made-a-change warm fuzzy, but unless the seller is also willing to price their home correctly, the new agent may also fail. For example, our team prides itself on the Agent and the Exposure components of the method above — we’re local, full-time, experienced agents, and we expose your home well through both our Internet Network and our cross-MLS participation. But to be perfectly honest, if you have your home five or ten or 25% overpriced, I could own Google.com and still have a hard time getting your house sold.

Home Pricing Quiz

What is the bill below worth?

What is the bill below worth if you fire your banker, and another banker tells you he can get you six dollars for it?

We’ll have more to say on this bill in the future.

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