How to sell a house? Five reasons to auction it.

2. You can track the marketing results

Rick Bowmer/AP/File
This Feb. 23 file photo shows an auction sign in front of a home in Salem, Ore. A good auction company works with clients on a marketing plan.

You want to know how your money’s being spent and what the marketing is designed to deliver. Smart, targeted marketing is the hallmark of a great auction company. The firm should let you approve your marketing plan in advance of listing, obtain periodic progress reports, as well as track phone calls, Web traffic, open house attendees, social media conversations, newspaper ads, signs, and articles generated for your property.

The auction itself is the ultimate marketing event, and a good auction company should be able to stream that auction online, so people can bid interactively and remotely in real time. Our Auction Network, online bidders win 29 percent of the time. This competition between live and remote bidders drives our average home sales price up by 9 to 11 percent.

In March, the average number of days on market for homes listed through the traditional method was 190. Auctioned homes are marketed and sold in 30 days. Auction commissions vary by company but are comparable to real estate agent commissions.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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