As housing market wavers, brokers strategize to get buyers

NEW YORK >> The persistently slow housing market has Debra Goodwin creating cooking videos to try to sell a house. Glenn Phillips finds himself explaining to sellers the reasons why they might have to take a loss on their homes.

Real estate agents have developed new strategies as they contend with a housing market that still hasn’t fully recovered from the crash that began in 2006. For many, revenue is flat because of a shortage of homes in the low-to-middle market, while higher-priced homes languish because they’re too expensive for many buyers.

Goodwin, who sells houses in Westchester County, north of New York City, creates videos to show off a home’s strongest selling points to pique potential buyers’ interest.

“If a house has a great kitchen I might cook in the kitchen. Maybe they have a beautiful wine cellar or storage unit then I would feature that,” says Goodwin, who’s based in Irvington, New York.

Sales of already occupied homes rose 2.5% in May after two months of declines but were down more than 1% from a year earlier and 4.5% from two years ago, according to the National Association of Realtors. Even with the recent pickup, sales are weak because the number of homes on the market has fallen in recent years — many foreclosed homes were bought by investors and turned into rental properties, while prices for many homes haven’t returned to pre-recession levels, discouraging owners from selling.

Prices have risen enough, however, to outpace the modest gains in Americans’ incomes; prices rose 4.5% last year while incomes grew 3.2%, according to figures from the government and CoreLogic, a provider of business information.

Goodwin, whose revenue has been flat over the past year, has to be more proactive than in the past, when a posting on the real estate website Multiple Listing Service was standard operating procedure. Besides using videos that she posts on her website, she’ll seek publicity on a local TV station for some higherend homes.

“You can’t just post on MLS and hope someone finds it,” Goodwin says.

Phillips and the agents at his company, Lake Homes Realty, have learned that to sell a highend property, they may need to be brutally honest with homeowners whose asking price is way above what the market will bring. That’s a tactic brokers didn’t need to use before the housing crash.

“We started over a year ago, when we anticipated a slowdown. We started aggressively training agents to negotiate listing prices,” says Phillips, whose

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