Selling Your Home with Steve Volkers Group at Five Star Real Estate

OUR APPROACH TO Seller'S REPRESENTATION

Selling a house on your own can be an overwhelming task. There's advertising to plan and budget for, open houses and private showings to arrange, purchase offers to negotiate, contract contingencies to worry about, and complicated paperwork to fill out. Make it easy on yourself by putting your home in the hands of seasoned professionals. We have extensive experience marketing properties and showing them to their best advantage.

Download our seller's guide PDF

The Listing Process

A systematic approach helps everything move along smoothly and effortlessly by keeping every detail in order. Which is why we have a system for each listing. The process involves you, your agent and the entire Steve Volkers Group at Five Star team.

How it works

An initial connection is made.
We generate all formal documents to be signed.
Information is uploaded onto proper channels.
We verify that all information is correct and that photos are up to brand standards.
Our marketing team pushes your listing through our website and social channels.
Follow-up correspondence will begin the Monday after your first open house.

Exposure in the Market

The goal when marketing your home is to gain as much exposure and engagement as possible, as quickly as possible. The way your home is marketed will impact the final sale price and how long it’s on the market. Unlike many agents we’ve got a dedicated marketing & design guru to make sure your home looks its best in all our marketing efforts.

Visual Marketing
Local Web Exposure
National Web Exposure
Social Reach
Open Houses
Showings & Feedback

Our Visual Marketing Philosophy

It’s well known that listing photos are one of the most important aspects of selling your home. After-all photos are the way most people will first see your home and first impressions are as true for houses as they are for people. That’s why we have partnered with a local professional photography company that specializes in real estate. But we don’t stop there, while most agents will simply send the photographer out to take photos...We send our marketing guru, Kevin, to each photo shoot to ensure that the photographer is capturing the unique essence of your home and creates the best possible first impression.

Local Website Exposure

In addition to your home being listed on grar.com, the local MLS website, your home will be searchable on our websites. We have two main sites that we have developed over the years, stevevolkersgroup.com and grdowntowncondos.com. The former being our site that focuses on single-family homes and the latter being our site that focuses on condominiums in Grand Rapids. Both sites have content regularly added that helps lead to traffic averages of over 1500 sessions per month for stevevolkersgroup.com and over 2200 average monthly sessions for grdowntowncondos.com

National Website Exposure

By placing your home on the Multiple Listings Service, or MLS, it syncs with Grand Rapids Association of REALTORS, Zillow, Trulia, and Realtor.com. These sites have a national reach and are searchable by all internet users.

ZILLOW.COM - Zillow has surpassed all other national websites with their incredible mapping and efficient mobile apps. Steve Volkers Group at Five Star gets the job done by highlighting our listings as well as featuring the Steve Volkers Group at Five Star as the neighborhood expert where your home is listed.
REALTOR.COM - Realtor.com is a national search site, which means your home is in the ranks with millions of others throughout the nation. We pay to go the extra mile to make sure that our listings are featured prominently in any category or search where your home qualifies.
TRULIA.COM - Trulia is ranked in the top five nationally as a home search engine. It allows us to put your listing in front of buyers’ eyes!

Social Reach

We know that social media is one of the most prevalent marketing tools out there and we have spent the last decade building our social presence and have a following that rivals any other real estate team in the area! We leverage current trends to make sure your home is featured in a way that increases engagement. For example, we understand that a video is more likely to create meaningful engagement vs pure text. That “stories” are one of the fastest-growing way to communicate.

Social Links

Open Houses

The buyer pool in today’s market has access to our many online resources making open houses a great way for buyers to “browse” in person. We will plan your home’s open house for the weekend after it is listed to maximize potential traffic. Open houses will also be held periodically throughout the listing timeline.

We create custom social media posts to promote your open house that go beyond just adding a photo gallery. Here's some examples of acutal Open House social media posts.

Showings & Feedback

We set up showings that work with your schedule, calendar and timeframe and we’ll give you direct feedback that we have heard from showings as well as open houses.

The Closing Process

Here's what you can expect the closing process to look like.

A title search will be ordered.
The title insurance underwriter will review the completed title search and contract.
The processor will collect the rest of your documents in preparation of your closing.
After the lender reviews and approves all of the closing documents, your loan documents will be sent to the office for signing.
CLOSING DAY! It’s the big day when the buyers and sellers will come into the office for their closing appointments.