No, my “paste” function didn’t get stuck on repeat. The fact is that marketing your home is the most critical factor that will determine whether, when, and for how much you sell your home. It should be steps 1, 2, and 3 when you’re listing a home for sale. (REALTOR.com periodically posts “Hot Topics” for REALTORS® to blog about. This week’s was about marketing.)
Question: As a real estate agent, how do you market your listings?
a) Newspaper ad
b) Single listing site
c) Featured home on my website
d) Other
Answer: All of the above!
Just as successful businesses don’t use one single marketing strategy to the exclusion of all others, so is it with real estate. Successful real estate agents use a number of marketing tools to market their clients’ homes.
That said, some are more popular than others.
Listing online
Once the mainstay of real estate marketing, newspaper ads have become dramatically less popular. With the rise of searchable home listing sites like REALTOR.com, Zillow.com, Trulia.com, and others, flipping through the pages of a physical newspaper is, for most buyers, so 1999.
And that’s the key in successfully marketing your home to sell – going where the buyers are. Sure, you can get a killer deal on a 1/4 page ad in the newspaper, but if very few buyers read it, what’s the point?
Another benefit of advertising listing online is the ease of measurability. You can easily measure the number of impressions your ad or listing received (how many times it appeared on a page that a web visitor was looking at), the number of clicks on that ad or listing, and more. That way, you can see what’s working – and what isn’t – and make smart changes in response.
A picture is worth. . . well, you know
It’s so cliché I hate to say it, but a picture is worth a thousand words. And a video is worth a thousand pictures. That’s why I often create virtual home tours for my clients’ listings and then post those virtual tours online (on the same sites where I post the listing).
How often have you caught yourself whiling away the afternoon viewing virtual tours on the web? (Admit it!) Therein lies the success of this strategy.
It’s all (or partly at least) about who you know
They say that most real estate transactions are the result of connections. That’s why the best real estate agents have extensive networks of other buyers’ agents and sellers’ agents – across the country – who act as one big referral network. That way, I can target my clients’ listings to buyers’ agents who help buyers in that particular neighborhood, for example.
Market, then market some more
At the end of the day, marketing – online, offline, through connections, with a yard sign, whatever – is how you’ll get the word out about your home for sale.
When interviewing real estate agents to help you sell your home, ask about their marketing strategies. Ask how much they spend on advertising and where they advertise. (How much money a real estate agent spends on marketing is not nearly as important as how he spends it.) Ask what kind of innovate technologies they use to market your home. And perhaps most importantly, ask to see the proof.
What do you think? Click on the “Comments” link below and join the discussion!
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