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Michael Ackerman

Coldwell Banker

Michael Ackerman been in real estate with Coldwell Banker since 1993 and he’s a five star real estate agent, which is an award for best client satisfaction, every year since 2004. He’s one of the ten most dependable real estate professionals in Seattle. He’s a senior ranked leading realtor at his company and a nationally certified residential specialist.

JULIE: Tell everyone about your principles as far as connecting with your clients and your sellers.

MICHAEL: When I first started in the business I kind of hesitated getting into real estate because I, like a lot of the public I think, envisioned the industry being a lot of pushy sales people and that’s not who I am at all and I don’t want to be that guy. So I hesitated getting in and then once I finally took the plunge I realized very quickly that there is room for all different personality types and all different kinds of people in this industry. And I quickly learned from myself because I don’t respond well to pushy sales people that that’s not who I was, that was not my role, my role is really a team member with my buyers or sellers as an advocate to assist people through the process so when they get to the other end – either purchasing a home or selling a home – they’re educated or empowered with the knowledge of how that happened. And if they’re buying a home I want to get them a home that financially fits their needs, emotionally fits their needs and is also going to be great for resale, and if I’m helping a seller, obviously getting them really good value with the price of their home.

But obviously beyond that I want the experience that they buyers feel when they work with me to be spectacular. I am really good at communicating and I just tailor-make each transaction to benefit whoever I’m working with and to make it as much fun and educational as possible. So that’s kind of my vibe, it’s all about connecting with people on a very real basis and that’s how I’ve become very successful.

JULIE: What’s the biggest mistake you see sellers making these days?

MICHAEL: Well Seattle is a really hot market right now, it’s definitely a seller’s market, which means there are more buyers moving to Seattle looking for homes than there are sellers putting their homes on the market. I’ve never seen a gap in lack of inventory as we see now. That being said, sellers still feel like they can put their home on the market in kind of any condition they like at any price and they assume that it will sell and that is probably the biggest mistake that I see. I always tell sellers that you have two things that you can control in a real estate transaction when you are a seller; preparation and price. How does your home look right when it comes on the market and how is it perceived by the public as far as the value that you bring it on at? If those two things are on you will do extremely well, and I’ve got a couple of stories I can go into later, but if you present it properly and price it properly you’re good to go in any market so concentrating on those two things is paramount to being successful as a seller.

JULIE: So I had a chance to look at some of the photos on your website and I was really impressed. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do such a good job with cinematic property videos so I was wondering if you want to talk a little bit about that process that you do for your clients.

MICHAEL: Absolutely. So my marketing strategy with any home that I list, and this is a personal decision that every agent makes on his or her own, so for any listing that I bring on the market I want it to be as emotionally appealing as possible. So I work really, really closely with my sellers in preparing their home for market. Part of that strategy is employed because the first impression that anyone a buyer has on any listing that comes on the market is not when they walk through the front door, it’s when they’re sitting in their pajamas at 11 o clock at night surfing the internet, looking at homes. And I want the photos and the video, so I’ll talk about that in a minute, of my listings to pop. I want those to be so emotionally appealing that people want to come see the home. That’s how you get people to come into the home; that is the purpose of marketing, it’s getting people excited about the product you are selling.

So we’re very careful with the sellers and I myself decided that I would pay to have all of my listings professionally photographed and now I have all my listings, I have cinematic property videos shot of each home as well. So I work with a company is Seattle who is amazing and they shoot all of my listings, photos and video, and get the home prepared for market. And we going in probably a week before I list the home and we shoot the photos and the videos. Photos are done in high definition so they really are crisp, clear and they pop. And the company that I use has a process that they shoot without the camera and they will shoot the same shot of the same room with different aperture openings. And then when they go back and they run it through their software program it actually brings the best of each of those photos as far as the amount of light, shadows – it amalgamates the ten photos into one really crisp clean photo – so it shows the home off at its best advantage.

So the photos are crisp, clean, high definition and those are used on the multiple listing service. I build a website for each home that I list, I use them on that, on the marketing flyers, on basically any advertising that I do for the home and then also the videos as well. And the video’s been amazing, many, many brokers or agents use photographs to advertise their listings but fewer have video. And there was a national study done a couple of years ago that homes that have videos attached get 85% more traffic driven to them than just photos. The public I think kind of expects photos now and if you’re going to do photos I think just make sure the photos are crisp, clean and the house is well presented so that you have something nice to shoot and the public is going to be emotionally drawn to it.

But video captures a whole other level of emotional experience, you really feel like you’ve walked the videos that I have shot shoot the entire home, usually starting from the outside, going in the front door, the main rooms, upper level rooms and then lower and then maybe the main yard. With a video you can’t Photoshop; the light is coming in, the way the rooms are attached, the scale of the rooms and the size of the rooms I feel is much more evident when you’re watching a video. And so the emotional response I’ve gotten from them has been astounding, I will be at an open house with a brand new listing and repeatedly people come in, single people/couples, saying, “Oh we saw the video of this home online and we really wanted to see it. I said, “Oh great, well how long have you been looking? How long have you been in the market?” And some of them will say, “We’re not even looking, we’re not going to be in the market for another two years but we wanted to come see it.”

I quickly realized that people who aren’t even in the market are coming to see because of the video, the people that are in the market are flooding to my listings because they want to see them as well so it’s working extremely well for the marketing aspects of getting of getting traffic through my listings – really, really well.

JULIE: Wow. And I love that statistic that you shared; it’s 85% more traffic if the video is attached to the listing, wow.

MICHAEL: Yes they will linger on it longer and you get more traffic.

JULIE: So there must be a lot of preparation to get the house ready for all this photography that you’re doing, so do you want to back up for a minute and talk about how you counsel your sellers to get ready?

MICHAEL: Yes you know I do a two-step listing presentation when I first go to meet the people and see the home; the first meeting I go to meet them I have them take me around the home and educate me on the home – any upgrades they’ve done, things love about the home – and I take notes and then I present them with my strategy for how I market homes. I talk about the professional photos, the video and the website that I build. I do something else that is also really, really cool; I have my sellers email me a list of the ten things they are going to miss most about the home. Five of them I like to be about the home itself; the light that comes through the southern floor window or a great backyard, and the other five are about the neighborhood or the area they live in – maybe they’re close to a coffee shop or a shopping center or a community center. I type it up, frame it and put it up in the home as a flyer so when people walk in they come in and they can read about the experience of living in the home because people aren’t just living in the walls and the roof, they are buying the experience of ‘what is my life going to feel like if I buy this home, on this street, in this neighborhood. So I tell the seller’s we’re going to do that, this is all about emotional marketing, everything we do is to evoke a positive emotional response from the buyers.

The second bit is to go back and do the market analysis, if they end up choosing me as a team member to help them market their home, I come back to them and I tell them on the first visit, “If you choose me I will come back and we will walk through the home together and we will make a list of the things that I feel need to be done to the home to make it market ready.” And we’ll go through the house room by rooms and we’ll both take copious notes and have the same list. I usually take it on my iPad in Evernote and then I will email it to them so that we’ll have a list. That list really depends on how much money the seller has to put into their home, there are some people that have a sufficient number of funds to cover the entire list, there are other people that don’t have as much money and so we tailor the list to ‘must do’, ‘would be nice to do’ and ‘don’t really have to do but it would be great if you could’. And for some people we tailor it down to just the things that…like painting I think is the number one way to make a home look fresh.

And the word that is use with all my sellers is when you’re preparing your home for market it doesn’t have to look brand new but it needs to look fresh. I think fresh is the most important work in any listing whether your home is two years old or a hundred years old, if it looks fresh when people walk in the emotional response is going to be really, really good. So if they do hire me then we walk through the home, and I’ve already set to them at the beginning of this walk-through that none of what we’ve talked about is at all any sort of judgment on the way that you live or your furnishings, I am coming from strictly from a marketing standpoint on ‘this home is going to be a product on the market, how do we engage enough buyers emotionally so that you get one, two, three, four, five, ten or twenty offers on this home?’ – That’s what went want to do. And I says the house will either work for the buyer or it won’t but I want everybody to leave that home saying that was a really good listing. That’s the goal, to make sure that everybody is emotionally enamored with the home.

And so some of the things that…you know it depends on the home, some need a lot less work than others. I’ve walked into homes before where literally it was like I could put a sign in the front yard and we’re good to go – those are rare. Usually decluttering or editing is something that everybody needs to do including myself when I sold my home. And that means removing things that aren’t going to add to the emotional appeal. So we all have a lot of photographs of ourselves or things on the refrigerator. I always says let’s take down 90% of the photographs in the home, we want the items in the home to add to the emotional appeal but we want people looking at the home and not your stuff, the stuff should just support the emotional appeal of the home. So anything that’s of value or anything that’s really personal I have them take away, rooms really need to look roomy, airy and not cluttered so that people can actually see the home. Decluttering or editing is great, painting I think is the least expensive and best way to freshen up your home. Refurbishing hardwood floors, having the moss removed from the roof – there are a lot of unfinished basements in Seattle, what I usually suggest – and we just did this on a home that I enlisted in Ballard – we usually actually have the basement spray painted either white or light gray if it’s unfinished. It all of a sudden makes it look like this really sexy space that people will want to be in rather than an old, dingy dark basement so that’s a great tip.

And basically getting rid of a lot of the stuff that they’re going to want to get rid of before beginning to move anyway; having a yard sale, giving some items away to charities as far as donations – really declutter the home and get ready for your move is a great way to prepare your home for market. But each home has its own individual story and so my suggestions completely depend on how many funds the seller has to complete these items the house actually needs.

JULIE: Wow those are all great tips. Very often I am coming into homes that need to be painted and they need those hardwood floors refinished. And also, sometimes we do suggest remodeling such as bathroom and kitchen remodeling if it’s too dated.

MICHAEL: Yes exactly, you just want to make it relevant to today’s buyer.

JULIE: And paint is the most effective change you can make for the least amount of money.

MICHAEL: Absolutely. Almost all of the homes I list we paint some rooms if not the entire home. And the sellers make their money back on that ten, twenty, thirty fold easily.

JULIE: So I know that you work with some home stagers and I know you have a little anecdote you want to tell us about a house that you recently listed that used staging.

MICHAEL: Yes so this is a great story. There’s a neighborhood called Ballard in Seattle which is a great neighborhood. It’s got a lot of hip restaurants and shops and it attracts every kind of age group; single people, families etc. – it’s a really great neighborhood. There was a three bedroom, two bathroom bungalow; it was 2100 square feet, on the market that sellers wanted to sell. They put it on the market last year for $479,000 and unfortunately it didn’t sell. And they were living in the home, their furnishings worked really well for them, they weren’t as emotionally appealing universally to the public. Their home didn’t end up selling and they ended up frustrated and so they took it off the market and then in the spring, interviewed a couple of different agents and hired me.

And I went into the home and I asked them what their timeline was to sell and they said, “Well we’re not really in any rush but we’d like to put it on in the spring. I said “great” and they said, “You know it didn’t sell last time.” And I said, “Why do you think it didn’t sell?” They said, “We don’t know; we got a lot of traffic, people gave us really good feedback but no one made an offer.” I said “Okay”. So after they chose to work with me I walked through the home with them and I said, “I would really suggest, we can market this in here but you are going to make a lot more money if you move out, get it down to what you need to, get rid of the stuff you’re not going to need in your new home, put the stuff that you want in storage. We’ll have a vacant canvas to work with in the home, I’d like to bring in a staging team to stage the home. They had beautiful hardwood floors that were very worn and I said, “I would like to suggest refinishing the floors, absolutely painting. We ended up doing a sewer scope here which is a general part of the buyers’ inspections. And we actually ended up doing a sewer scope, they found out they had a couple of holes in their sewer line so we had their sewer line repaired. I got them bids for all of this work to be done and the bids came to $20,000 so I sat down to meet with them one evening because I was a little bit nervous. I said I got them bids for the work to be done, they said, “Yes we’re interested in getting all that accomplished if we can afford it.”

So I got them the bids, they were actually really excited because the bids that I brought them, I have really good service providers; painters, stagers, hardwood floor people that are much less expensive than a lot of the service providers you might find if you’re randomly checking. So that’s part of the value that I bring to the market. They were really happy with the pricing of a lot of the quotes because this is much less than we thought it was going to be. So they ended putting $20,000 just into preparing the home; we ended up painting the home, refinished the hardwood floors, re-landscaped the yard as far as just pulling out some old bushes, mulching fresh beds, putting in clumps of flowers and then staging the home. I work with a really great staging company in Seattle who is superb and her and her team ended up staging the home and we put it on the market.

Remember, last year it didn’t sell for $479,000 this year we put it on the market for $545,000. We ended up getting 24 offers, we waited a week before we reviewed offers so the home was on the market for the week. It looked perfect, we had all the lights on for the first week because when people walk in you want to spoon feed them this emotional experience, especially if it’s in the evening. We had 24 offers, it sold for $745,000 it sold for $200,000 over list price. And that would never have happened, it didn’t happen last year, because people weren’t emotionally enamored with the home. This year when it came on the market it was a gem and it was sparkling and it was ready to go. And really, the sellers spent $20,000, they made an extra $200,000, so it was a really good investment of their money. And so if people just believe, and they were nervous because they had such a negative experience the last time, I kept saying, “Trust me, this is going to work.” I didn’t even think it was going to go that high, I was pleasantly surprised. And this is another thing about pricing your home properly, if you price it properly and let the market take it where it’s supposed to go buyers may offer way more. If we’d put it on the market at $745,000 it would be sitting there, it wouldn’t sell, but we priced it properly and then the market took it up.

Now granted, again, Seattle is a seller’s makers but this is an extreme price even from my experience but the house showed so well. And the kitchen wasn’t remodeled, the kitchen was kind of like a seventies kitchen but it was a gem, it was a real gem and they were extremely thrilled with the outcome. So properly preparing your home could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in the right market and with the right product.

JULIE: So now we have the disclaimer, both of us have the disclaimer, “We can’t guarantee you these results.”

MICHAEL: Right, no, no, no, no this is not in every home. It always varies, each home has its own story but I just wanted to tell you that because I have a lot of stories that are like that but the point is preparing your home properly. And these people knew, the sellers knew, I said listen, “You’re going to make what you’re going to make.” We couldn’t have done anything more or anything better to prepare the home for market than we did except for remodeling the kitchen. But I said to them, “You don’t have to do that, if we do all these other things it’s going enough. The charm of the home is going to carry it over the threshold” and it absolutely did. So yes, we can’t guarantee that on every home but preparing any home for market is going to make you more money than you would get if you didn’t prepare it properly.

JULIE: So properly prepared homes sell for more money?

MICHAEL: Absolutely, and more quickly, yes.

JULIE: And so often I hear people being so reluctant to put money into the home because they are leaving. People are starting to come around to the fact, especially if the house hasn’t had upgrades for say fifteen years, that they need to do the work.

MICHAEL: Definitely. And that was the case with this Ballard home, the people had lived in there for twelve years and I said to them, “Think of it this way,” and he said, “we haven’t put any money on the whole time we’ve been here.” And I said, “Well now you’re putting all the money in at the very end as you probably would have or should have done all along so you’ve just kind of saved your money to the end” They said to me, “Our home has never looked this good.” I said, "That is how you want to your home to look when it’s on the market, it should never look better than what it does when you put it on the market." That’s the secret, you want it to look really, really good.

JULIE: My father and I had a real estate brokerage together a long time ago and he always told me, “The house will sell when it’s ready.” So if there’s one more thing and one more thing it’s not going to sell until those things are done.

MICHAEL: Yes. And I think part of the challenge is that we as agents need to do a better job of educating the public. And I will say to people, “I am not just trying to get you to spend your money flippantly. I don’t want you to spend a dollar on this home that is not going to make you five dollars back. So everything that I suggest is only to prepare the home so that you get a better emotional response and a lot more money. Like these people said, “Should we remodel our kitchen?” I said, “No you don’t need to; it’s clean, it’s fresh, all cabinets wiped.” It wasn’t sexy but it was simple and fresh and I said, “It’s good enough, let’s just doll up the rest of the home and then if anybody who wants to remodel the kitchen themselves and let them pick out how they want to remodel it.

I think that it’s our job and our position as agents to really help educate the public in a very sincere and honest way to say if you do these things the outcome is going to be a lot better for you. I have another story for you if you’d like me to tell you. There’s a neighborhood in Seattle called Denny-Blaine, it’s one of the upper end neighborhoods, the homes all start at like $1.5 million and go up. And there was a beautiful 1910 craftsman that had been on the market for a year and didn’t sell. People had bought it ten years ago and had it restored to its original condition. It was stunning; hardwood floors, beautiful woodwork everywhere, box beam ceilings in the dining room. And it had been on the market for a year and it didn’t sell and it was on the market for $1.2 million. It didn’t sell so they came to me in the fall, they said, “We’ve had our home on the market, we are taking it off the market and what should we do?” I said, “Number one, you should wait to the spring because everyone has seen it and it’s kind of shop worn and tired. So we need to give it a little bit of a fresh break and then we’ll come on in the spring.”

So during that time I went over to their home and I listened very carefully to what they said, they told me their agent didn’t use a lot of technology, they didn’t love the photos, she wasn’t tech savvy – so I told them I was going to have professional photos taken, have a professional video, build a website, really do a lot of marketing and have a lot of social media so they have my listing and so on and they loved all that. I said, “But I think we need to prepare your home for market.” They said, “Oh our home is beautiful.” I said, “Yes it is but I think there are some things that we can do to make it more appealing.” And one of the things the husband said to me was, “We keep getting older couple coming to the home, we’re not getting younger couples or single people or families coming into the home and we don’t know why” because there was living room, there was a main room for a family room, there was huge dining room and eat in kitchen. It was perfect for families of today but it wasn’t attracting them so when I went over to and looked through the home with them I walked through the home and I said to them, “We need to edit about 80% of what you have in this home.”

And when I was doing the market analysis I had shown them homes of similar era that hadn’t sold in the same neighborhood – they were built in the tens, twenties and thirties – and I said, “What do you see about these homes that are all similar?” and they couldn’t tell me. I said, “They all look like museums, they don’t look like comfortable, accessible, relevant homes – they all look like a museum you would walk through ninety or a hundred years ago. None of this, again, is a reflection of your taste, it’s beautiful.” They had sixteen oriental rugs in their home, we removed all of them, you couldn’t see the hardwood floors and they were stunning. They had artwork on the walls that was beautiful, they were art collectors, they had them all on these big, heavy, gold-gilded frames and then they had actually had each frame lit by a little light above it so they had an electrician come in and put a plug behind each of the paintings so each painting had its own lighting. So I said, “We need to get rid of 70% of the artwork in the home. It can’t work, it’s too heavy.”

So what they had to do is they had to re-drywall the walls. They had an electrician come in, recap the plugs for the lighting, re-drywall and repaint and we put a few of the paintings back up. But they edited about 70% of the stuff they had in the home and when it was done I had Shirin, who is a stager I work with in Seattle, bring in some contemporary pieces. We used their furnishings but we brought in a few contemporary pieces, they had sun room, we brought in a white leather lounge chair and some modern pieces on the dining room table to allow people to know that you can mix modern furniture with more conventional furniture in a classic home. We put it on the market; photos, video, website all hit the market on Monday. On Wednesday we got a full price, all cash offer from a family in Texas who had seen the video.

They then came out to do their inspection, and they had a week long period to do their inspection where they could have walked away, but the house was exactly what they had pictured it was going to be because the photos and the videos were so representative of what was there, they loved it. And so it sold the third day on the market for full price, all cash and we actually listed it at $200 000 higher than it had been on the year before. But it was just allowing people to imagine themselves in the home and it wasn’t overly cluttered, it was before and the stuff was beautiful but it didn’t feel relevant to today’s buyer. And so by transforming it, and as a matter of fact that couple bought another home and they actually loved the feeling of their home so much after they edited it that they did not overcrowd their new home at all. They said, “We love living this, we love living lighter.” So it was a very nice lifestyle change for them as well.

But it was nerve racking to me to tell them, “I think you need to do all this stuff.” They did it and I had the advantage of saying to them, “Look, you tried it this way for a year and it didn’t work, we need to try something else. We need to make a change, otherwise if we just put it back on the market in the same condition I think you’re going to have the same outcome at the end.” So it was just really me listening to them, listening to the reasons why they felt it didn’t sell and doing something about that was really important. And they were thrilled, they couldn’t believe it.

JULIE: That’s an amazing outcome and you know I talked to another realtor during my summit who also said not ever realtor wants to be that kind of a bad guy, it’s not really a bad guy, but the honest, truth telling agent because the honest, truth telling agent doesn’t always get the listing if the seller takes it personally. But I think the take away is people shouldn’t take it personally when their agent recommends changes to their home for marketing reasons.

MICHAEL: Absolutely. And do you know how you get around that? When I’m walking through the house with them for the first time the sellers always ask, “What do we need to do to repair the home for market?” And I always say, “If you end up choosing me I will come back and we’ll have special meeting and we’ll walk through the home together and we’ll discuss all of that. If you don’t choose me and you choose somebody else you should get that list from the person you chose because obviously the person you felt was the best choice for you and the best fit to give you advice on your home.” So I don’t even talk about any of that until after they hire me to be their agent because at that point there’s kind of a trust factor that’s been set. So I never go through that with them on the first or second visit, ever, I always say, “Listen, let’s do that later. There is plenty of time to do that, I am more than happy and we’ll have a meeting just about that because that’s how important preparation is.”

JULIE: I just really love that idea that they not going to have to listen to any negatives on the first meeting with you and they’re really just trying to meet the realtor they connect with. And then like you said, you’ve built that trust with them and now hopefully they’re going to go ahead and do the changes that you asked for. I love that. So Michael I see that you have a blog on your website and I wondered if you wanted to tell people how to connect with your website so they can read your blog.

MICHAEL: Well you can get all the information that you like on my website which is mackerman.com. My blog is a little bit different, I don’t do a written blog – I do video blogs. I am much better at talking than writing so I started video blogging in about 2009 and I’ve got a couple of hundred. I also had a YouTube channel, you can go on YouTube and just Google Michael Ackerman and my blogs will come up. But it’s just it’s 2-3 minute videos about real estate; my favorite new condo projects, how to prepare your home for market, what inspections you should do on a home, how important it is to pick your lender early – there are all sorts of subjects that I go over and it’s just a service to the public to dispel some of the mysteries of real estate and to lift the curtain so if people have a question they can just go on and use it as kind of a how to guide.

I don’t really ever ask people to use me as their agent, people who’ve liked my personality have gone on and have become regular viewers of my blog do often times call me and want to use me as their agent but that’s because they like my personality. But anybody can go on for free and listen all you’d like about anything about real estate. And if anybody has any questions they can always reach out to me, my email is on there as well.