Redfin offers 7 tips to sell your home

There's a simple reason why the folks at Redfin started mining real-estate data for lessons on how to sell homes.

"We couldn't sell any homes," Glenn Kelman, the Seattle brokerage's chief executive, explained earlier this week. "Now that's an overstatement ... In the fall, we started to really struggle to sell our listings."

The Redfinites found that, although there's a lot of conventional wisdom -- "voodoo," Kelman calls it -- about the best way to sell a home, it's not necessarily backed up with numbers.

So Redfin's computer scientists started dissecting past real estate sales, and on Friday the company released the first seven conclusions from an ongoing autopsy, which included a review of existing research and fresh number crunching.

The primary determinant of how fast a home will sell, and for how much, is the home itself, the study says.

"But taken together, these tactics can, we believe, yield a small but significant improvement in a home seller's results," the study says.

Some of the research confirms the conventional wisdom -- such as starting with an overly ambitious price can lead sellers to fetch less than starting with a more realistic one. "One price reduction begets another," Kelman said. "It's a signal to buyers that they can bargain."

But other conclusions upend traditional ideas, such as when to list a home.

"It's an article of faith to debut a listing on a Thursday," Kelman said.

But Thursday's actually the worst day, while listings debuting on the best day, Friday, get an average of 7.7 percent more Web visitors in the first week, according to Redfin's analysis of 119,000 listings.

"People apparently come to work on Friday morning looking for brand-new properties to tour over the weekend," Kelman said.

Another conclusion: Don't set a price just above a common Internet search threshold. Being just above the upper limit for most buyers in a neighborhood cut a listing's traffic by as much as 7.1 percent, according to an analysis of Redfin Web traffic.

And listings on sites such as Craigslist, which don't get automatic feeds from multiple listing services, are viewed more than those just on listing-service sites.

Another finding based on outside studies is that sellers more involved in the process sell homes faster and for more.

"If you stay really engaged, you're going to get better service from the agent," Kelman said.

But some Redfin recommendations were greeted with a yawn by local real estate agents; others with raised eyebrows.

"I would say this is all pretty basic stuff," said Deborah Arends, a RE/MAX Northwest Realtors agent who was featured as a traditional agent opposite Kelman in a "60 Minutes" segment about online real estate earlier this year.

"It's nothing new," Michael Skahen, broker at Seattle's Lake Real Estate, echoed on Friday. "Don't overprice your property. We have been giving people handouts for 25 years telling them that."

Arends and Skahen also agreed with using Craigslist and other Web sites, and said it's best to set the price right at a threshold, so it's retrieved by searches that start and end that that number.

But Arends also cautioned against putting too much faith in such general recommendations.

"It's great to put information like this out there, but it doesn't apply to every situation," she said.

A teardown or fixer house, for instance, should not debut on a Friday because that would bring less attention from builders, she said, adding that her Web site gets the most hits in general on Mondays.

Skahen favored debuting listings on Thursdays, but was open to other ideas.

"I might even discuss it at our next office meeting to see what agents think," he said.

So why is Redfin sharing its newfound selling secrets?

Part of it is to have dialogue with the rest of the industry and part of it is to attract new clients, Kelman said. "And part of it is I've never been able to keep a secret."

The Redfin scientists also found homes with prices ending in 500 sold closer to list price than ones with prices ending in "000," but left that out of its recommendations because other research contradicted their study.

Redfin is continuing to look into this and other issues, such as the effect of re-listing a home after a pending sale falls through. And the company is taking suggestions.

"We got done probably a tenth of what we wanted to get done," Kelman said.

TACTICS FOR SELLING A HOME