CataList Homes offers a fresh, new professional approach to saving thousands of dollars for home sellers, achieving maximum equity on the sale of their most valuable investment—their homes.
CataList Homes is very different than conventional real estate firms because:
We will never delay the marketing of your home to "double-end" the commission.
We will never advise you to accept an offer before the home has been submitted to the local Multiple Listing Service (unless extraordinary circumstances exist).
Our entire company is built to expose your home to the greatest number of buyers.
Our agents are employees who are compensated with a salary and a team bonus. They do not compete with each other for new business, and work in a unique team environment. Our company promotes YOUR home, not our agents.
Our agents provide pricing advice and purchase negotiations on your behalf that is NOT driven by commission.
We are the only firm that offers full disclosure of all buyers’ inquiries on your home. We provide written documentation of all of our marketing efforts in the form of a four-page status report (available on the web or in print form).
Homes have doubled in value since 1999. Thus a 5% commission today is equal to 10% in 1999. You would not agree to pay 10% in 1999, so why pay 5% or more today?
We charge a fee (3%) that is representative of the TRUE cost to market and manage a home sale. We split our fees evenly with cooperating buyer agents. We preserve the equity typically lost to excessive transaction costs.
CataList Homes has one mission for home sellers: To maximize your equity (profit) when selling a home.
Our agents are not independent contractors on full commission. We pay our agents like most professional sales organizations (eg., IBM, Xerox, etc.) with a base salary and team-based bonus.
Our agents are not dependent on the sale of your home for financial survival.
Our agents will not be tempted to get you to accept conditions which are not in your interest just to earn a quick fee.
The single biggest asset our people possess is our negotiating savvy. This is all we do. Our agents are trained in how to negotiate all the deal terms, contingency periods, and inspection report credits. We are well-prepared to properly and professionally manage multiple offer situations to achieve the highest price, while minimizing buyer frustration.
Our agents are not financially dependent on any single home sale and thus are free to negotiate the best deal for all our clients. For our sellers, CataList Homes inserts a proprietary legal addendum to our contracts that give the seller an additional layer of legal protection beyond the standard California Association of Realtor forms. Strong negotiating emphasis is one reason CataList Homes achieved the highest sold price to listed price average (99.2% in 2004) in the market four straight years.
Why hire an agent when you can hire a home marketing team?
The biggest weakness of the conventional agent is that most brokerage companies require their independent contractors to pay for and create the marketing and advertising artwork and content. This can:
Economically incentivize the agent to provide the bare minimum marketing when the homeowner should demand maximum advertising.
Create the agent self promotion phenomenon seen in many display ads which feature the agent more than the home.
Lead to unprofessionally prepared marketing materials.
CataList Agents do not pay for any home marketing costs, the company does. CataList Agents do not prepare the marketing materials, our in-house professional graphic design studio does. This leads to more money spent on your behalf and higher quality collateral materials, maximizing the opportunity to achieve the highest price.
Catalist in-house design team will design a custom full-color property flyer for your home.
Multiple Listing Service
CataList Homes is a proud member or the Greater South Bay, Orange County, Combine Westside and LA (CLAW), Glendale/Pasadena, San Fernando Valley, and Orange Coast Boards of Realtors and will promptly submit your home to the Multiple Listing Service ("MLS") complete with additional digital photos. CataList offers one half of our fee (1.5%) as buyer agent compensation. CataList will allow a customer to offer more, but it is never necessary. Since 2001, 90% of CataList Homes transactions involved an cooperating buyer agent from another firm.
According to the 2004 National Association of Realtors Profile of Buyers and Sellers, 76% of web enabled buyers use the Internet to assist them in their home search. If your home is not online with virtual tours, additional digital photos, and address disclosure, your home is not being effectively marketed to all potential buyers.
The local MLS operators automatically upload property data to various web sites such as Realtor.com. In addition, CataList allows our competitors to display our listings in order to ensure maximum Internet presence. Some companies do not allow their listing to appear on other brokers' sites, which limit the owners' online exposure.
CataList Homes pays thousands of dollars to enhance our listings on Realtor.com. See examples below of our homes verses the typical Realtor home listing online.
CataList Homes proactively makes its listings available to the following sites:
CataList offers a compete virtual tour on every home. Reduce foot traffic with this wonderful tour offering a 24 hour a day open house.
Click here to view a sample virtual tour.
Broker Open House
CataList will hold a broker open house usually the first week the property is listed for buyer agents to preview the home.
Public Open House
Public open houses can be a huge inconvenience for a seller and generally invite excessive foot traffic from neighbors and “lookie loo” buyers. They can be good tools for conventional real estate agents to mine for new buyer clients. CataList is happy to host public open houses at the owner’s request.
Home Staging
Home staging is the art of using interior design techniques to transform a property from a lived-in home to a home that is positioned to sell. CataList Homes has partnered with LA and Orange County’s hottest home designers to add the ‘wow’ factor to your home and capture the imagination of the home buyer. Home staging ranges from simply rearranging and accenting your furniture with accessories, lighting, and window treatments to add a sense of vision and warmth, to the complete furnishing of a vacant home (similar to a model home created by a home builder). Either way staging is a proven method of getting top dollar for your home by maximizing its potential to the home shopper.
Most Agents do not attach a written marketing plan to the listing contract. This is a big seller mistake. Our marketing guarantee allows you to cancel the listing agreement within 72 hours if we fail to live up to our end of the bargin.
We understand that many people may be nervous about listing their home with a firm that charges a 3% commission. Keep in mind the following:
We get the highest price
99% sold price to listed price in Orange County 2004 versus 98% market (MLS) average
No. 1 Ranked firm in "% of Listed Price Achieved" at 99% (2002-2003-2004 Greater South Bay (LA) Board of Realtors Rankings).
We have a proven track record with hundreds of successful sales in LA and Orange County. (Results)
We enjoy a 95% customer satisfaction rate. (Testimonials)
Our Management team and investor/advisor team is second to none in this industry. (Executive Team)
We guarantee the strongest marketing plan in the business today. (Our Guarantee)
In most of our markets home prices have doubled since 1999. A 3% commission today is equivalent to a 6% commission in 1999. CataList Homes is a full service brokerage simply charging the same dollar amount as most agents a few short years ago.
