Property Marketing Tips For Real Estate Professionals

This is to help any real estate agents who want to make the most of the available technology when marketing and advertising listings. A key component in my Marketing Plan, as I'm sure it is in yours, is internet advertising. Here is an example of some of the key sites used to expose the home for sale in the first few days of my marketing blitz:

First, enter the property for sale on your MLS site and save the MLS number for use on the other sites. Read on to find out why that's important.

Next, of course, is your brokerage's website followed by:

New VHT Tour  http://www.vht.com/ 

and/or http://www.slideshare.net/MariaTheMagnificent/newsfeed  

Cute Little Bungalow For Sale  - Write a Blog Post on Active Rain 

Realbird   http://www.realbird.com/ 

Realtor  http://www.realtor.com/

Charming Bungalow in KCK. example of blog post. 

Before placing the property on any of these sites, you will need:

• Good photos
• Video footage or slideshow (video footage can be raw. Slideshows can be emailed easily)
• An MLS Number
• QR Code for the property

You can get a QR Code for the property at Realbird for free.   The reason I like the Realbird    QR Code is because of the way it comes up on your mobile phone. Three tabs come up when someone scans the code: one for photos, one for property details, and one for my contact info. The photos fill the phone's screen.

If you have a mobile website already set up, you can generate a QR code to direct people to that site instead. There are multiple QR code generators - just Google them. Test them on your smartphone to make sure they work then ask a local printer to make a large one for a sign in the front yard. 

A buyer can stand in front of the house, look at the photos, check the home's details, and then call me to request a showing appointment. Jim Frimmer wrote a blog post about how he uses QR Codes in some of his marketing. Last October, before leaving Active Rain to move to Zillow, Brad Andersohn wrote a post about creating customized QR Code images. QR Code Fun, a post written by Scott Silverstone, Luxury Realtor in Connecticut, gives a quick lesson on design around QR Codes. 

You'll want to include the MLS Number for each listing on the various websites to make it easy for people and bots to assimilate the information and tell you which listed home for sale they are referring to when they call.

Photos: I am a purist; I don't care for highly edited photos when it comes to advertising homes for sale. Show me the house in it's best light, but don't airbrush out the wrinkles, please. The home buyers are going to notice when they see the house in person. If they notice that you doctored the photos, they will wonder in what other ways you may be trying to mislead or fool them.

Videos: There are a number of video tools you can choose to use when marketing your listings. I like FlipVideo    because it's quick and easy to use.  YouTube is a no-brainer; over 2 BILLION people watch YouTube videos every day.    VHT is a good company  to use for Virtual Tours on MLS; there are others but this one is painless and within the budget. 

Advertising homes listed for sale on your brokerage's site as well as Realtor.com will assure the listings are picked up by tens of thousands of aggregator sites.(Some say it's actually more than 100,000 but I haven't time to visit that many websites to verify.) I also want to make sure my listings are on the sites most likely to be visited by buyers for that particular home. That requires a little thought and research to make sure the listing is where it needs to be.

Active Rain, as you know, is a must for marketing your listings. With over 200,000 registered members in the real estate profession, Active Rain reaches real estate agents and brokers around the world. Each active member, in turn, reaches hundreds and thousands of buyers who read their blog posts. The other great thing about Active Rain is that people from all over the world find and read your blog posts. I've had people call me from Russia, Australia and Brazil because they read one of my posts on AR while researching homes for sale in the Kansas City area. 

When you write a post on Active Rain, you can incorporate the YouTube    video for your listing, the slideshow, the QR Code, the MLS Number, any and all photos of the property and links to any other sites you wish. You can make the post funny, high-brow, 'just-the-facts' or any way you want it - whatever you determine is the right tone for the listing. Don't forget the Active Rain Listings feature. - And the Localism site on Active Rain. 3 for 1.

My Marketing Plan includes listing the property for sale on the most appropriate sites over the first week or two. By adding the listing to various sites over time, you are sending messages to the 'bots that this listing is important.  

In my email report to the home sellers, I can easily include links to the various sites so they can see for themselves how their home for sale is being marketed. 

During the next week or two, my marketing plan calls for making sure the property is advertised on sites like , , , , ,  ,  and,    . There are hundreds more; Oodles, JustListed, LandSearch, etc. Try to choose the ones which are most popular with home buyers in your region. The idea being to maintain fresh interest in the property from a 'bot's perspective. Your Local MLS is going to distribute the listed house to all the Real Estate Brokerage sites in your MLS area. The listing will also pull up on any other local real estate agent's independent website with IDX connection.

Use Social Networking sites to reach friends and business acquaintances.   , , and  are all good places to start. If the home owners are on any social sites, they can share your post so as to reach even more people.

Each new place on the web can be linked back to a previous advertisement or website so that people can notice the house is for sale and call you to buy it. (You never know who you know who knows someone who needs that house.)

By the 4th week, my marketing plan has the home advertised on thousands of websites (or tens of thousands). If the house is not yet sold, I will continue to tweak the main sites every few days to keep the property fresh in the virtual reality of the world wide web.

Open Houses can be advertsied on Craiglist    You can use Poslets to make the job easier.

...  * Don't forget to market the property IRL (in real life) in between your internet marketing work ...we all know that most homes will sell through an agent who is already working with a buyer. 

So, this is the basic internet part of my marketing plan when I list a house for sale here in the Kansas City area.

Is it similar to yours?

Do you have any property marketing tips that you'd like to share with your fellow real estate professionals?    

Please note that my marketing plan is constantly changing according to changes in technology so some of this information may be outdated in the future.