[Best of 2017] Must-Have Pages for a Winning CMA

We're continuing an annual tradition of counting down our top 10 articles of the year. The following article was originally published in October and is #9 in our countdown. See #10 here.

You're probably used to taking a CMA to listing presentations or offering them to seller leads. But did you know that your CMA can be a powerful weapon for combating consumer misconceptions caused by inaccurate Zestimates?

That's one secret shared by top-producing Realtor Ray Fernandez of TNG Real Estate Consultants in a recent webinar. Ray's team is on track to close $40 million dollars in production this year, and CMAs are one of the best tools in their arsenal for winning listings and converting seller leads.

So what exactly is in Ray's CMA? He offered us a glimpse of the pages he includes in every CMA—including his Zillow-busting secret weapon. Here's the rundown:

1. Cover page with his team's logo.

2. Next, Ray provides 10 comps, with two comps per page. Each page sports one high-res photo for each property and brief statistics about each.

3. Here's where Ray's secret weapon for handling pricing issues comes in. "I'm sure we've all dealt with it," he says. "You go into a listing appointment and you tell them their house is worth $800K, and they swear that, 'No, it's worth $1,000,000 because that's what Zillow says.'"

To create his reports, Ray uses Cloud CMA, which offers a Zestimate Comparison page. This page analyzes Zillow's Zestimate by comparing it to actual property prices on real listings. The page displays closed listings at the top, what the home sold for, what its Zestimate value was at the time, and how far off the Zestimate was on pricing. The page then shows similar comparisons in a section for homes currently in escrow and a section for active listings. Realtors can use this to put the kibosh on sellers' over-inflated pricing expectations and to start a productive conversation.

When Ray first discovered the page, "I thought it was the coolest thing ever. So now it's added into every one of my reports."

4. Ray's next CMA component is titled "Property marketing done right." Here, he brags about everything his team does to market their listings, which includes creating Matterport 3D tours, staging, and beyond.

5. Finally, the CMA wraps up with a page that introduces homeowners to Ray's team. Ray says it's important that sellers to know that he's part of a team, and it's not always going to be him at the open house or inspections. This page helps set expectations up front.

There you have it—the simple CMA formula that has helped propel the Ray Fernandez Team to success! To learn more about Ray's secrets for winning more listings, watch our recent webinar.