SellTheDamnListing.com: Chicago Listing Marketing Blog

Newly Improved Drag-and-Drop Furniture Planner!

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:44:33 -0500

Dear Active Rainers,

We are excited about the newly improved Drag-and-Drop Furniture Planner that's included with every Picture Plan. Here's a direct link so that you can play with it yourself: http://vis-home.floorplanner.com/v291685

Besides improving the look of the furniture planner, each Picture Plan now includes a 3D rendering like this one:

The furniture planner is included with every Picture Plan, like this one: www.vis-home.com/demo1

Each Picture Plan includes:

* An Unlimited number of Professional Photographs - giving you complete control over what your buyers see.

* A Drag-and-Drop Furniture Planner - builds a buyer's emotional connection with your listing by planning their own furniture inside your listing.

* An Improved 3-D Rendering of your Picture Plan - check it out here: http://www.vis-home.com/3d

* A Neighborhood Amenity Map - real world reviews of businesses surrounding your listing to help buyers envision their lives there.

* 3-Click Craigslist Posting - exposes a professional eflyer promoting you and your listings for free!

* Custom Description for every photo - drawing buyers attention to room details they would have missed otherwise.

Considering the unparallel value Picture Plans give you, the price can't be beat. You get unlimited photographs, a floorplan, and all the features listed above for less that $85 on a 1000 sq ft listing.

Our pricing is determined by square footage, and you can get access to special discounts by joining our Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chicago-IL/Vis-Home/88818617573?ref=ts

-Max

Max Eydelman

847.997.1535

www.vis-home.com

Which Markets are recovering - and why?

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 20:53:13 -0500

Recently, I was talking with a friend from New York about why real estate prices are falling nationwide. The conversation turned to a discussion about why some cities felt the pain more so than others.

He advanced the theory that it was all due to sub-prime mortgages - the higher the percentage of all mortgages in a given metro area, the higher the foreclosure/short sale rate and the greater the price decline.

I agreed that this factor impacts the number of properties entering the market, but the price is also largely impacted by the number of buyers. And buyer confidence, I think, can be well measured by the unemployment rate.

After I hung up, I thought more about it and did a bit of internet sleuthing the results of which are below. Which of these factors do you think is more important?

So, who's buying?

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 18:51:45 -0600

As more listings are input into the MLSs, the question remains - who will buy them?

The NAR predicts that this season's first-time buyers will comprise the largest share of total home buyers. According to the same study released in August 2008,

41% of all homes sold last season were bought by first-time buyers.

Furthermore, the average first-time buyer was 30 years old – 12 months younger than the first time buyers in 2007. In leiu of the recent dramatic downturn in the financial markets, this trend is sure to continue growing. These younger buyers have less invested in the market (through 401ks, etc.) and therefore rely less on their investments for income. They've remained relatively immune to the financial crisis and view the drop in housing prices as an opportunity to buy. In contrast, older buyers whose net assets have taken a significant hit in the past few months, are more skittish.

With this new younger market's buying power and importance increasing, how do you ensure that these buyers learn about your listings?

When asked where they first learned about the home purchased, 34% of all buyers from July 07 – June 08 said a real estate agent; 32% the Internet; 15% from yard signs; 7% from a friend, neighbor or relative; 7% from home builders; 3% a print or newspaper ad; 2% directly from the seller; and 1% a home book or magazine. 84% of all homebuyers begin their search online - but that already impressive percentage is even higher with first-time buyers.

Since the objective of listing marketing (MLS posting, newspaper advertisements, etc.) is always to get potential buyers to see the property in person, your marketing budget should reflect that reality. You should spend more money on exposing your listings to other brokers and advertising online and less on print ads in newspapers and magazines.

The best way to quantify the usefulness of any internet presentation is it’s “stickiness” – how long a visitor is likely to interact with it. This requires that the presentation not only contain relevant content, but be engaging enough to keep the visitor's attention. A typical online visitor spends 45 seconds to a minute looking at a traditional virtual tour, 2-3 minutes with an interactive floorplan and 4-5 minutes looking at a Picture Plan.

A Picture Plan includes a floorplan integrated with an unlimited number of professional photographs, a drag-and-drop furniture planner AND a neighborhood amenity map with real world reviews. You can check out a sample Picture Plan here:

www.vis-home.com/demo1

With tools like a 3-Click Craigslist e-Flyer (http://chicago.craigslist.org/search/rea?query=interactive+floorplan&minAsk=min&maxAsk=max&bedrooms=) and statistical analysis tools, Picture Plans are an incredible value at under $100 for an average condominium - you can learn more at chicagopictureplans.com.

What have you found to be the profile of the new buyer?

$85 Picture Plan Sale

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 10:12:28 -0600

We are very excited to announce the SellTheDamnListing.com $85 sale of our interactive Picture Plans: www.vis-home.com/demo1

Each Picture Plan includes an unlimited number of photographs, a drag-and-drop furniture planner and our new neighborhood amenity map - for only $85. Go to ChicagoPicturePlans.com or call 877.847.8077 to learn the details of this offer.

* An Unlimited number of Professional Photographs - giving you complete control over what your buyers see

* A Drag-and-Drop Furniture Planner - convinces your buyers online that their furniture fits your listing

* 3-Click Craigslist Posting Procedure - posts a professional eflyer promoting you and your listings for free!

* A Neighborhood Amenity Map to help your buyers envision their lives at your listing's neighborhood.

* Customized Description for every photo - drawing buyers attention to room details they would have missed otherwise

* A 3-D rendering of your Picture Plan - which traditionally would cost hundreds of dollars

Get complete information and claim your disount now by visiting ChicagoPicturePlans.com or calling 877.847.8077 now.

Our First Free Marketing Workshop - with a free Lunch!

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:26:26 -0500

Our First Free Marketing Workshop - with a free Lunch!

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:09:44 -0500

Good Afternoon,
SellTheDamnListing.com is proud to announce our first free luncheon workshop on marketing your listings.

SellTheDamnListing.com lets you discuss the tips, tricks and tools that Chicago's real estate experts use to sell their listings. In this workshop, we've teamed up with Real Support Inc and DB Designs to help you optimize your listing marketing. DB Design offers Smart StagingSM services in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs to help busy homeowners prepare their properties for sale. RealSupport Inc. offers Real Estate agents marketing and administrative support "virtually" and will talk about how to have a marketing team at your fingertips, not at your office. I will facilitate a discussion about how you can improve your internet marketing without spending more money out of pocket.

Besides a free lunch, the 10/15 workshop will include discussions on internet marketing and staging with two local experts in those fields. The event will be held 12 - 2 pm at 1 E. Superior St. Suite #604 and is free to all members of the Chicago Association of Realtors. To make sure there's enough food for everyone, please use the registration form below: www.smartfloorplan.com/orders/bin/workshop.php

-Max Eydelman, SellTheDamnListing.com

Our First Free Marketing Workshop - with a free Lunch!

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:07:11 -0500

Our First Free Marketing Workshop - with a free Lunch!

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:03:24 -0500

Open Houses - what's the deal?!

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:40:03 -0500

Hello all!

I apologize for not posting regularly the past month. I was on vacation seeing this great nation of ours and unable to post.

Port Aransas, Texas, Washington D.C., Traverse City, MI. whew! It’s good to be back!

Now, let’s get right into it

According to the NAR (National Association of Realtors), in 1995, 41% of buyers relied on open houses to sell their home. In 2000, that number dropped to 28%. As the market began to heat up in 2003, the number began rising. In 2005, the last year the NAR made this information available, that number was 51%.

In 2005, 51% of sellers were using open houses, even though they found its effectiveness questionable.
45% of seller felt open houses “somewhat useful”, while 12% didn’t consider them useful at all.

With this modern reality in mind, you should first consider putting your listing on MLS or realtor.com with some informative and flattering photos or a virtual tour (i.e, PicturePlans). This marketing effort should be in coordination with an email campaign targeted to other agents.

Online marketing has changed the game. Play it right.

So then, why should you hold an open house?

Benefits:
-Meet prospective clients
-Get feedback on the home
-Use the Open House as a part of a comprehensive marketing campaign
-Demonstrate to the seller what a great job you’re doing

More importantly, unless you properly prepare, coordinate and execute the open house, all efforts are for naught.

I will be posting a series of posts detailing the steps and reasons on how to prepare, coordinate and execute the most effective open house.

Do you guys still hold open houses? What kind of success have you had?

-E. Kim

Makin' Realtor.com Work For YOU

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:45:27 -0500

With the advent of Internet marketing & the prevalence of searches that begin online: how do you to grab attention amidst the crowd?

According to HitWise, below is a list of the top ten most popular real estate websites:

realtor.com
realtytrac.com
homegain.com
rent.com
remax.com
realestate.yahoo.com
zillow.com
apartments.com
ziprealty.com
move.com

Realtor.com leads the pack with a 8.8% share while the second place site, realtytrac.com (a site that deals exclusively with foreclosures) only has 3.7%.

Realtor.com's supremacy is no secret – a cursory google search reveals that sellers are well aware of this and many demand realtor.com exposure (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080705091014AALGGtf)

What makes Realtor.com especially attractive (and overwhelmingly popular) to online viewers is that they don’t have to sign up to look at the listing details. This feature also makes it tougher for you to track & capture the leads that your listing on Realtor.com has garnered – so, how do you overcome that?

Give the viewers what they want – Information.

You can do that by several different ways:

-A “Showcase” account which can be pricy (depending on which brokerage you’re working with) but allows for 25 photos and additional verbiage.

-Or for a $20 fee you can post a link in the virtual tour field – this gives you a practically unlimited canvas to grab the viewer’s eye.

Many realtor.com viewers filter their searches to include only those listings with Virtual Tours or additional photos. It’s important that the attention you attract is positive since some forms of exposure (http://www.visualtour.com/applets/flashviewer2/viewer.asp?t=1349114&sk=16) repel viewers instead of attract them.

The newest version of PicturePlans addresses this issue by including a custom text description (200 character limit) for every one of the unlimited photographs that’s included with each package.

How do you use Realtor.com to attract attention to your listings? What tools are the most effective on Realtor.com? Or, if you hate realtor.com, which websites have you found to be more useful?

Til nex time,

-E. Kim

Take A Picture. It'll Last Longer.

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:11:12 -0500

Take A Picture. It'll Last Longer.

I don’t need to convince you that Internet marketing is a key component to getting potential buyers to your listing. You’re reading this post on a social networking site specifically geared towards Realtors looking to gain more exposure online!

So, it won’t surprise you to hear: studies prove consumers are more likely to request a showing if they’ve already seen photos of that property. And, as previously mentioned, with 80% of all potential buyers beginning their search online, Internet marketing is par for the course now- if you want to be successful.

A photo of your listing helps people visualize their life in that house and form a positive impression of it before they see it.

    I can’t stress this enough- the need and proven benefit of posting additional photos and Internet presentations to the MLS, Realtor.com and your company’s website is paramount. I recently unearthed this Realty Times article that illustrates this point in better detail: http://realtytimes.com/rtapages/20050217_marketing.htm

    Now that every Tom, Dick and Harry is using Internet marketing and virtual tours laden with pictures, how do you stand above the crowd?

    The average virtual tour visit lasts 30-45 seconds (especially if it's a long video tour or a dizzying 360-degree video). This doesn’t afford your listing enough time to convince a viewer to become a potential buyer.

To make a bigger emotional and aesthetic impact- and ensure that viewers spend more time on your listing- consider PicturePlans.

Viewers spent an average of 2-3 minutes considering and interacting with a property featured with a PicturePlan.

And now, an exciting new development in prolonging view time has recently been introduced by PicturePlans. A new furniture planner feature, which encourages viewers to spend more time considering your property while actively engaging with the floorplan and envisioning their life in a new home. Now, with the additional 3-D/furniture planning feature, depending on if the viewer opens the new feature,

the average visit lasts 4-10 minutes.

How do you like the new feature? Are there any tactics you’ve used in your virtual tours or Internet marketing to prolong the time viewers spent considering your property? How successful have they been?

-E. Kim

Mktg. Dir., vis-home.com

PicturePlans featured in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel!

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:24:29 -0500

PicturePlans featured in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel!

The evolution of Virtual Tours away from "the dizzying 360-degree twirl" was featured in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel today!

The article features the lastest generation of PicturePlans, which includes a 3-D furniture planner that enables potential buyers to actively interact with your listing.

The article also features Kay Ripp, a Coldwell Banker agent based in Milwaukee, and the listing she chose to market using PicturePlans.

The Milwaukee-area was introduced to PicturePlans at the beginning of 2008 and the market has responded with great enthusiasm.

We promise not to let all the attention go to our heads!

So, what do you think of the article?

-Til next time,

E. Kim

Mktg. Dir.

Contact Info:

eunji@vis-home.com

Get This - Survey Results - GlowDay.com

Ride the Latest Wave for Marketing Your Listing

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 20:31:02 -0500

A Conversation with Bill Bein on Marketing Trends for Listings.

Bill Bein has a 25-year corporate background in sales, training and development, and consulting.
He is currently a Realtor with Keller Williams Lincoln Park where he teaches seminars on the use of advanced technology for agents

STDL: Bill, what trends do you see developing in listing marketing?

BB: The Internet is constantly becoming a far more vital part of any marketing Realtors use; 80% of all buyers nationwide begin looking on the Internet and about 34% of all Chicago-area buyers first see the house they will buy online. The last number has easily doubled in the last five years. Now, think about that for a second.

In just the Chicago-area, 34% of all buyers see their home online before they even contact a Realtor.

And those viewers no longer come from just realtor.com - I think the emergence of craigslist.org in Chicago as a portal to look for homes has gone largely unnoticed. The pool of potential buyers is now as vast as the Internet itself!
As the Internet is becoming more important, Realtors are simulataneously moving away from traditional Virtual Tours--

360-degree movies can be distorted, make your listing look unattractive

and take too long to load (which means viewers move on).

You need to have compelling content to grab-and-hold viewer attention, especially now that Internet attention is becoming more and more important.

STDM: Now that you've told us about what trends are developing, we have to ask:

How are these trends affecting the way you market yourself and your listings?

BB: Well, to make myself more visible to buyers and sellers I've begun blogging. My blog, www.chicagoland2to4flats.info, offers tools and resources that potential buyers or investors need and will find pertinent and informative- a Property Search engine, Property Analysis Worksheet, 10-year Sales Growth Data, Census Bureau Demographic Data for any address in Chicago, an Online Loan Calculator AND information about upcoming seminars.

But frankly, I realize that a majority of my readers are actually other Realtors- which is still great. I consistently update my content and am growing my readership- and my website's rank on Google has been steadily improving. And by improving my Google rank I can be assured of more potential buyers becoming aware of my name and services.

STDM: Sounds like you've got just every base covered!

BB: Not quite. I've also changed the way I market my listings. We recently added Picture Plans to our office's marketing package because they hold a viewer's attention much longer - making us more competitive against agents that use traditional virtual tours. Their professional photographs ensure that my listing is shown in the most attractive manner AND they now offer a new craigslist.org posting feature which makes it easier to attract more attention for free!

STDM: You gotta like FREE.
Well, Bill, thanks so much for your time and insight. Much appreciated.

BB: Anytime. Thanks for giving me an opportunity to talk about something I feel so passionately about. Good luck on this blog!

Readers: How have you been using Internet to market your own listings?

Til next time, folks.

-E. Kim

Mktg. Dir., vis-home.com

Are you invisible to 80% of homebuyers?

Max Eydelman (Vis-Home) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:58:48 -0500

Whether they are looking for homes or a buyer's agent,

over 80& of all homebuyers begin their search via the Internet.

This entry intends to teach you how to grab the attention of these potential clients.

First, you'll need a destination to direct that attention: your website.

Most companies provide a profile page for their agents, which can serve as a personalized, professional website. Furthermore, these profile pages can be used as the content for your website. Some examples are:

http://www.ksgmac.com/people/Detail.cfm?UserID=18977

http://www.coldwellbankeronline.com/CustomModules/Agent/AgentProfile.aspx?AgentID=3193&StateID=19&RegionId=0

Now that you have the content of your website established, you need an address. Since neither you nor any potential buyer would want to type out the entire URL above- consider something like www.sellthedamnlisting.com. Isn't catchy? :)

A website address that conveys your personality and manages to grab and hold interest is an integral part of your website's success.

Remember: A website address is limited only by availiability and your creativity.

I've personally found Yahoo! to be the cheapest ($9.95 per year) and easiest to use -www.smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains

Voila! You've quickly and economically set up a professional and personalized website! Now, you're ready to reap the benefit of a more sophisticated Internet presence. A great way to improve the content of your site (and distinguish it from others) is to provide interactive visual information about your listings. Top agents have found PicturePlans to be an effective tool to attract and retain potential buyers attention.

What have you found to be most effective in attracting visitors to your website? Old-school fliers? e-mail blasts? or free donuts? :)

'til next time,

E. Kim

Marketing Dir., vis-home.com