The 5 Questions you should ask Seniors who need to sell their homes.
When a prospect’s family tells you that their family house must be sold before mom or dad can move into your community, what do you do next?
It’s an important question because how you handle a challenge that can account for over 50% of your prospects can mean the difference between forging a stronger connection or losing the connection altogether.
One way to lose it is to hand the prospective resident over to a real estate agent. Why? Because by doing so you are disengaging the prospect at a key point in your relationship. Seniors and their families who need to sell their homes are looking for immediate solutions, not long-term ones.
This is an opportunity to make that relationship stronger.
It begins by asking questions such as “How can we see this through together?” “What needs to happen and how we can help?”
The goal is to partner with families to remove as many roadblocks to the move-in as possible. They need the benefits of living in your community. And you need residents! Handing a prospect’s family over to a real estate agent meets neither need. In fact, it will add months to the move-in, if not derail it altogether.
Seniors who need to sell their homes want solutions that remove stress, not add to it.
The alternative is to take the enormous, stressful, and time-consuming process of selling a family home off the backs of your prospective resident. And it’s what we do at Mom’s House. Our specialists will purchase the family house for a solid, fair market price. Now your family avoids all the hassles of cleaning up decades worth of wear and tear, having to fix or update the decor, or spending thousands upgrading that 1970s kitchen.
Guide your prospect away from the urge to contact a real estate agent.
Here are 5 questions we have found helpful to steer families away from the reaction to using an agent and towards a win-win alternative:
- Are you planning to do any upgrades or fixes or would you prefer to avoid all of that and sell your home “as is”? Whether or not they know, it opens up the conversation and gets them thinking.
- Have you thought about doing a cost/value analysis to find out what cleaning, repairs, and upgrades will cost versus the added value to the sale? This is a good time to introduce them to costversusvalue.com, a website that lets them input various fixes and upgrades and calculates the return on those improvements.
- Are you thinking of using a real estate agent? This is a good opener to discuss their commissions and their penchant for wanting upgrades made to increase the sale.
- Would it be better for your mom’s/dad’s health to avoid the disruption of putting your house on the market? Helping the prospect realize the stress and disruption of selling a home helps open them up to other possibilities.
- Would it be better if you could make the transition more quickly? This is another opportunity to share some of the benefits of your community!
Now it’s time to present a real solution to them. Not a hand-off.
By partnering with Mom’s House, you achieve a smooth, quick transition from prospect to the resident. And it’s a clear win-win. Your new resident gains the benefits of living in your community, and you gain added months of revenue, as well as the satisfaction that you are making a difference in this industry.
A couple of ways to get in touch:
- If you are a senior living industry sales and marketing professional or placement agent and you want to work together, email us at seniorlivingpro@momshouse.com
- If you are looking to sell your home (or a family member’s home), send an email to us: info@momshouse.com