Selling Your Home
Silicon Valley Real Estate | JLee Realty

My Pledge to You:

I will give as much attention, thought and effort to the sale of your home as I would to the sale of my own home. My goal is to have each sale be just one step in a life long relationship. I want each of my clients to recommend me to others and to turn to me first if they need help or advice.

My Goals:

1. Maximize your profit on the sale of your home.
2. Sell your home quickly without making sacrifices.
3. Minimize the inconveniences you face while selling your home.

Yes, my goals are the same as yours! I want you to receive more when selling your home. The difference is I've been both thinking about how to do it, and doing it constantly for 30+ years. I have an experienced unique team working with me providing both expertise and the manpower to take care of all aspects of your sale.

Key Home For Sale Marketing Items

1. Detailed multi-page promotion of your home posted on JulianaLee.com
2. Neighborhood attractions map, centered on your home, posted on JulianaLee.com
3. Virtual tour posted on JulianaLee.com using high resolution, high dynamic range, photos
4. Unbranded virtual tour posted on custom city website (appears in property alerts sent by agents)
5. Cinematic virtual tour (movie) posted on 1.) JulianaLee.com, 2.) Vimeo, and 3.) 3-D website)
6. 3-D virtual tour (Matterport) posted on 1.) JulianaLee.com and 2.) custom 3-D website
7. Begin posting your home to Juliana Lee owned websites (700+ custom websites)
8. Include your home in monthly newsletter sent to 25,000+ subscribers
9. Post agent online viewing sign-up and schedule, on JulianaLee.com
10. Post buyer visit request on JulianaLee.com
11. Post disclosures on JulianaLeeRealty.com
12. Post your home and all virtual tours on the MLS
13. Place enticement fact sheets on the "Home For Sale" sign in your front yard (650-857-1000 & JulianaLee.com)
14. Provide detailed, multi-page, property booklet at your home
15. Provide poster, showing neighborhood attractions, at your home
16. Post/edit details on Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Realbird, Tourfactory, and additional 3rd party portals
17. Juliana Lee Team hosts weekly open house for your home
18. Information about your home provided at other JLee Realty open houses
19. Promote your home at Realtor Association meetings
20. Post teasers (items of special interest) to Pinterest and other social media sites
21. Begin newspaper advertisements
22. Buyer team showings
23. Email local real estate offices
24. Mine the MLS data records for "nuggets of gold" and email agents likely to have interested buyers
25. Create single-property website (if requested or appropriate, in addition to 3-D single-property website)
26. Google pay per click advertisements (custom landing page)

Juliana Lee's Marketing Steps

The sale of each home has many things in common with previous sales yet each sale is unique. Creatively adapting to changing market conditions and the strengths and weaknesses of each home is part of what makes real estate sales always interesting and challenging to my team of passionate, top, professionals. The basic framework I use for selling a home follows below.

My team includes unique skills that are important when marketing your home in our digital world, but which other teams neither have nor can they afford to perform using a hired professional. My team includes a top buyer agent team which only 25% of the top Silicon Valley teams have, giving us more intimate knowledge of Silicon Valley home buyers. My decades of success has marketing tools already in place and that are unavailable to others.

1.) Preparing Your Home.

One of the first steps for preparing your home, is to have property inspections performed by licensed inspectors. Having a licensed inspector create inspection reports for you to give to potential buyers, provides an independent expert opinion about your home, eliminating many of the doubts and fears inherent in a major purchase. It also provides a degree of insurance that if a buyer discovers a new issue, the inspector may be held responsible for it rather than you. Our team reads hundreds of inspection reports, and has worked with many different companies, every year. We know which inspection companies are best.

Our listing team visits your home, looking for special features to accentuate, any esthetic issues, and looks for any other special issues.

Our listing team reviews the inspection reports and judges the cost vs. value of each repair or maintenance item. A general guideline is that repairs necessary for a buyer to get a mortgage, should be done. Other repairs need to be judged item by item.

Using both the inspection reports, and items identified by our listing team, a plan for presenting your home is created, that will net the most profit for you.

2.) Performing Repairs and Enhancements

It should be noted that most home remodeling/improvements do not return 100% of their cost. Our constant market involvement, decades of experience, and attention to improvements, enables my team to target work that makes your home more desirable and yields net positive returns. In general, spending more will almost always get a higher sales price but frequently reduces your net profit.

The Juliana Lee Team has seen the work of many contractors over many years. We can provide knowledgeable and experienced guidance. As with inspections, it is important that independent licensed professionals be used. Potential buyers need to trust that any work was done professionally, without taking shortcuts.

3.) Pre-Listing Preparation - The Extended Team

We will provide both guidance and management for engaging the various service providers that will be required to sell your home. Services needed will include: escrow, property inspection, termite inspection, home warranty, etc. Our decades of experience and over a hundred sales a year, means we know who provides the most effective service. Whether you choose to be very involved or have us do it for you, we keep you informed and of course, you have the final say.

4.) Disclosures And Repairs

California law does not expect homeowners to be either construction experts nor attorneys. The laws simple require that you disclose problems you know about, and in order to eliminate the excuse "I didn't know" being applied to everything, they require you to disclose problems that you should have known about.

If your inspection report identified a problem which you had repaired, you will disclose the repair and by having a licensed contractor do the work, makes it so you are not expected to have any special expertise.

5.) Staging Your Home

Most potential home buyers look at many homes before deciding to make a purchase offer. Each time they visit another home, they refine their ideas of what is important. Besides presenting new ideas, staging should allow buyers to fit their existing ideas to your home. Buyers are not buying the furniture in your home nor a dream that is handed to them, they are buying their own dream, that they imagine.

The Juliana Lee Team works with many buyers. Our buyer agents are some of the most successful in Silicon Valley because they are very skilled at understanding the dreams of their buyers and helping their buyers find and buy their dreams.

Our unique team structure gathers the knowledge of both our buyer agent team and our listing team to understand how best to stage your home. We believe in accentuating positive features while allowing many different dreams to work together with those positive features. We use the real opinions and choices of actual Silicon Valley homebuyers when deciding how to stage your home.

We work with many top staging companies and know which can meet our desires and add value to our plans, forming more strength from more ideas. These companies compete with each other, with the top companies becoming truly expert at staging, and they bring value beyond just furniture to our own plans.

6.) Multiple Listing Service

We will enter your home on the Multiple Listing Service, making it available to all SF Bay Area real estate agents, and pushing "home for sale" information out on the MLS data feed to IDX websites and 3rd party real estate portals. Having the right information makes a difference in how effective this "free" marketing is. The Juliana Lee Team constantly studies online marketing. We have over 700 of our own custom designed websites.

7.) Real Estate Agents

We will deliver details about your property to local real estate agents within 24 hours of taking the listing. These agents are assisting and guiding buyers who are actively searching for their new home. Real estate agents are vital to selling your home.

Very, very, few people will buy a home without actually visiting the home, and also visiting comparable homes that are for sale. The most efficient way for a prospective home buyer to visit homes is with the assistance of a real estate agent. I have long recognized the importance other agents have, in getting potential buyers to your home. I have been building my network with other Silicon Valley real estate agents for decades.

8.) Lock Box + Online Agent Showing Sign Up Calendar

A Supra electronic lock box provides state-of-the-art security while ensuring your home is easily accessible to agents to show to their buyers. This electronic lock box also allows me to find out who accessed your home. Our team reaches out to agents to proactively answer any concerns they have and to get feedback on potential buyer reactions.

Agents need quick confirmation that they can show your home. I post an agent-sign-up-calendar online on JulianaLee.com which let's an agent choose which time works best for them. Agents can schedule a viewing time while they are on the phone talking to their clients. When they sign up, the Juliana Lee Team is immediately notified and a record created. We contact agents, after they show the property, to answer any questions and to find out their reactions to your home. We use their feedback to make constant improvements to marketing your home.

9.) For Sale Sign

A distinctive "Juliana Lee Home For Sale Sign" will be placed in a prominent location. Having my name and phone number in front of potential buyers makes it very easy for someone passing by to contact our Juliana Lee Team, the agents most motivated and knowledgeable to sell your home. An interested potential buyer only needs to remember "Juliana Lee" in order to easily find my 650-857-1000 phone number or to find a virtual tour of your home on JulianaLee.com.

10.) Custom-made Booklet and Fact Sheets

We will create a high quality "fact sheet" emphasizing the desirability of your home. The goal of the fact sheet is to make a quick, lasting impression so that prospective buyers will be interested in your home even after looking at many others. The fact sheet is designed to entice people to both look further for details about your property on my web site and to phone me.

We also prepare a multi-page booklet that emphasizes the desireable features your home has. This booklet helps build a lasting positive impression in the minds of interested buyers. The booklet reinforces that your home is what they are searching for.

11.) Neighborhood Posters Centered On Your Home

We create posters, which are placed in your home and answer many of the questions buyers might have about your home, the community, schools, and the surrounding area. These posters provide buyers with the accurate information, beneficial to making their decision to purchase your home.

12.) Newspaper Advertisements

Newspapers are going out of business because most sellers do not get adequate sales from newspaper advertisements. Do I still advertise in newspapers? Yes, newspapers are a way to reach people who aren't actively looking to buy a home. Newspapers are not an effective way to reach active home buyers, but they spread the visibility of your home to people who are just beginning to consider a new home or to people who share the information with people who are looking for a new home.

As a new listing, your home will be featured in the most appropriate newspapers, which usually includes Palo Alto Weekly, Mountain View Voice, Palo Alto Daily News, Los Altos Town Crier, San Jose Mercury News and Chinese World Journal. These have proven to generate the best buyer response. I advertise several properties almost continuously which results in phone inquiries giving us the opportunity to personally promote your home.

13.) Your Home Featured With Wider Presence on the Internet

We will advertise your home 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, world wide on my web sites. Unlike other forms of advertisements a web site is always available, and is generally the first place people turn to for information. It is not thrown in the trash after the first viewing. My many web sites will provide many high quality professional pictures of your home. My prime website, JulianaLee.com, attracts the attention of people because of the depth of information it provides for prospective buyers about real estate trends, laws, and more. JulianaLee.com ranks on the first page of Google search results for approximately 175 targeted search phrases. Very, very, few agent websites rank on the first page of search results for even one targeted search phrase other than their own name. Google has also associated JulianaLee.com with thousands of organic search words.

Starting in the late 1990's my team determined that real estate websites having a city's name in them often got the most attention in Google search results. Many real estate website design firms had instantly bought these names, enabling them to sell websites to real estate agents. However many real estate agents who purchased those websites didn't have the time and knowledge to build up and maintain the prominence of their website and abandoned the names. My team has spent well over a decade acquiring these briefly abandoned, desired names, and building up multiple websites. We currently own over 700 custom websites which we created, maintain, and actively use to promote the Juliana Lee Team properties and only the Juliana Lee Team properties.

Your home will also of course be featured on the web sites of the regional listing services and 3rd party real estate portals. These web sites will have links to the detailed information and the numerous pictures provided on my JulianaLee.com. We actively edit the information 3rd party real estate portals have about your home. Simply letting the 3rd party real estate sites such as Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, Realbird, Tourfactory, and others post data from the MLS feed yields average results. We edit what they have posted to achieve better than average results.

My decades long success has enabled me to build connections with many major companies. We are one of only a few Silicon Valley agents whose information is posted on Bank Of America's mortgage website.

14.) Virtual Tours

I post four different types of virtual tours which are very effective for promoting your home. I publish these four tours for almost every home I list for sale.

A link to the standard virtual tour is displayed on the MLS website. I host this tour on JulianaLee.com where prospective buyers and agents can quickly find additional information promoting your home. The MLS pushes out this virtual tour link on their data feed. It is included on many agent, broker, and 3rd party real estate portals. This link is also included in many property alerts sent to prospective buyers from their own agent. This virtual tour enables a buyer to easily and quickly see numerous pictures displaying both the interior and exterior of your home.

I also provide an unbranded virtual tour hosted on one of my city web sites. A link to this unbranded virtual tour is also included in the MLS data feed sent to agent, broker, and 3rd party portal websites. Some 3rd party real estate companies choose to only include unbranded virtual tours, not displaying any virtual tour, if the unbranded virtual tour is not provided. I always provide both a branded and unbranded virtual tour so that all websites and all property alerts which include any virtual tour, will include a virtual tour to your home. Many agents fail to do this.

I provide a cinematic virtual tour (a movie) for almost every home I list for sale. This cinematic virtual tour provides an opportunity to promote special features. Many home buyers use it to help build their impression of the home after they are interested in it. Some find watching the movie too time consuming to quickly view the features of the home, preferring to first view the standard virtual tour. This virtual tour is published on both JulianaLee.com and Vimeo.

I provide a 3-D virtual tour for almost every home I list for sale. This virtual tour requires the most effort and time on the part of a potential buyer, but for some buyers, it lets them understand the floor plan of your home. This virtual tour, because of its unique hosting needs, is published on a custom website created specifically for your property and contains additional promotional material. A link to this 3-D tour is prominently displayed on JulianaLee.com. (I also post a drawing of the floor plan on JulianaLee.com for potential buyers.)

15.) Brochure Box

I will place a brochure box on a "Home For Sale" sign post in front of your home whenever it is allowed. This gives the drive-by buyer enough information about your home to become interested and to call for more information.

16.) Broker Open House.

Soon after your home is listed, I will hold your home open for all real estate agents. Refreshments may be served or a cash drawing offered to entice more agents to stop by.

17.) Broker Meetings

I will personally brief hundreds of brokers and agents on the key features of your property at local broker meetings. I am an active member of various Silicon Valley Realtor associations.

18.) Top Real Estate Agents

Most top real estate agents spend nearly all of their time with sellers. Of the top 20 real estate agents/teams in Silicon Valley, I am one of only five whose buyer agent team sells more homes than I have listings. I pay a lot of attention to buyers and follow up on both agents and potential buyers who show interest in your home. Knowing what buyers are doing, and wanting to reach out to them, is very important when marketing your home and getting it sold.

19.) Open House

As often as possible, your home will be held open to the public to attract prospective buyers. I have my own team host the homes I have for sale. If I have more than one open house at the same time, I typically visit all of them. Visitors are told about my other open houses and often go visit one, if it matches what they are looking for. To see a few of my recent thoughts, please visit open house.

20.) Target Marketing

We mail information about our new listings to selected neighborhoods. Typically, move-up buyers purchase a home which costs 50% more than their current home. I will target information about your home to specific areas where qualified buyers are likely to reside. I also often target the neighborhood your home is in, so that neighbors will talk about it with people they know. I have been using database driven targeted marketing since 1990.

21.) Personal Contacts

Every month, I email information on real estate trends and sales to over 25,000 contacts who are subscribed to my report. I include short notifications of homes I have for sale. This information is often shared with their friends and coworkers.

Almost every month I present a webinar about real estate trends, laws, and more. It builds interest in both the information, and the homes for sale, posted on JulianaLee.com, which attendees often share.

The Juliana Lee Team includes buyer agents who are among the most successful in Silicon Valley. My unique team structure enables my buyer agents to concentrate on finding homes for buyers. My buyer agents work with many more prospective buyers than most Silicon Valley agents. The number of homes they sell puts them in the top 2% of all Silicon Valley agents. These buyer agents promote your home to the many active buyers they are working with.

22.) Agent Prospecting

We use the ample data available to us. We mine the MLS sales records to find which agents have shown houses in the same price range of your home within the last few weeks and email them information about your home, and remind them about its special features.

23.) Neighborhood Involvement

In roughly 10% of all home sales, the buyer knows someone who lives within two blocks of the house that he or she buys. I will create interest about your home in the surrounding neighborhood.

24.) Referral Networks

Many homes sold in Silicon Valley are purchased by someone coming from outside of the city your home is in. I have spent over three decades building my presence across Silicon Valley. We are very well positioned to seek out and sell your home to any prospective buyer, not just a buyer who lives in your city.

As a Certified Residential Specialist, I am listed in the Residential Sales Council Referral Directory. This is but one of the ways incoming buyers from all over the United States can be directed to your home. The CRS referral network includes agents from nearly all large brokerages nationwide seeking out-of-area-agents to refer buyers to.

25.) Special Promotions

I employ as many unique marketing methods as necessary to get a home sold. Examples might be cash drawings to inspire showings, or broker luncheons to capture more agent attention.

26.) Follow Up On Showings.

I will contact the agents who have shown your property to determine the level of buyer interest and to proactively provide additional information for the prospective buyers as required. I contact agents whether they phoned me, opened a supra lock box, or scheduled a viewing appointment on-line.

27.) Status Reports

I will give you regular emailed, written or verbal reports to include actions taken, actions needed, current and planned advertising, feedback on showings, and changes in the market conditions that may affect the sale of your home.

28.) Negotiations

Effective negotiations come from finding win-win solutions or solutions to issues the buyer has. Experience and passion for real estate sales is the best professor of negotiations. Over three decades of experience as a top agent has exposed me to an incredible number of sales challenges and market conditions.

Knowing the current real estate market is critical. Having both a strong buyer agent team and a strong listing team provides greater first hand knowledge. The unique skills my team has for analyzing sales data, and constantly uses to produce market trends, adds to our very strong position. Look at the thousands of charts we create and post every month (no one else comes close).

29.) Closing Escrow

Selling your home does not stop when a purchase offer is accepted. My decades long experience as a top agent and my passion for real estate sales enables me to apply creative, knowledgeable, experienced, solutions to problems arising during escrow.

The Juliana Lee Team is unique in handling buyers who come to us to buy a home to purchase a home we have listed for sale. We strongly protect your best interests and avoid a conflict of interest.

30.) Partnership

I believe selling your home is always a team effort. A key part of my job, but not the only part, is to market your home. I also interpret the market, work with service providers, work with buyer agents, drive a purchase through escrow to completion, and provide you with experienced advice and explanations. The key part of your job is to tell me your goals.

Near the top of this page I listed 26 home for sale marketing items which are professionally prepared using decades of experience and drawing upon expertise in many different fields. All of these items are custom created for almost every home we list for sale. Each home is unique. We always look for additional ways to market every home! We are passionate about real estate sales.