So you have made the decision to sell your home. Now you must decide how you are going to reach that goal. How are you going to attract the highest number of qualified buyers to view your home, make an acceptable market value offer and close the deal without any undue hardship or expense to yourself? The majority of sellers choose a professional Realtor®. The question then becomes: “Is my agent doing enough to market my home?”
The fact is most sellers don’t really see the effective marketing that is really going on for their home. They want to see newspaper ads, yard signs, flyers and open houses. None of these things are “bad” marketing techniques, but they are not “good” marketing techniques either. These are what we call “vanity” marketing. They make the client feel good. The sellers see something tangible and assume that it is working for them. When in reality it does little good or actually works against them.
Let’s look at some of the techniques and what they really do.
Newspaper Ads: Although newspaper ads were a strong marketing tool years ago, they currently do little for us. The fact is that most home buyers shop the internet for their homes. The National Association of Realtors has placed the internet as the number one shopping tool for homebuyers. In fact NAR estimates that over 76% of all homebuyers start their search on the internet and take their findings to an agent. Whereas only 4% of homebuyers search the local papers. In most cases I would estimate that the “newspaper” shopper is also the “bargain hunter”. The shopper is looking for a seller who, in their eyes, is in trouble and truly cannot afford the expense of a professional agent.
Yard Signs: Yard signs are still a staple in Real Estate Marketing. The yard sign is the key indicator to neighbors and friends that your home is for sale. Yard signs do drive some traffic to the listing agent or their office for the “drive by” customer. It can peak a potential customers interest to get more information about the home. The yard sign can be very effective, if it is left to do its work. A yard sign needs to be simple, meet state regulatory guidelines and get the buyer to call for more information and to schedule a showing. The down fall of the yard sign is often the flyer box associated with it.
Flyers: If you are going to use flyers they should be left inside the home. Flyers are good reminders to potential buyers of the homes they have been in to see. It can remind them of the important facts and special features of a home. The problem is that most sellers believe that you need to put flyers outside on the for sale sign. When you place flyers outside for anyone to pick up as they drive by, you eliminate more buyers than you attract. Regardless of how good the flyer is, when someone picks it up and reads it, they know all they think they need to know. They often discard the flyer and never give the home another look. This is an expensive waste of resources. A high quality flyer can cost you fifty cents a copy, and a flyer box can eat fifty to a hundred flyers a week and generate few, if any, telephone calls.
Any good salesman will tell you, the best way to sell a product is to get it in the consumers hand. If you want someone to buy a car, let them drive it, take it home for the weekend and fall in love with it. If you want to sell pots and pan, put them on display and let the consumer pick them up, feel them, inspect them. You want them to the buyer to become attached. As a seller of your home, you want the buyer to come inside, feel the home and feel at home. You want the buyer to feel that this is their home, not yours. (That is another article in itself.) If all they do is look at the flyer, they don’t get attached, they don’t want more. They don’t “feel” the home, they just move on to the next flyer box.
Finally, Open houses. The purpose of an open house is to get the most buyers into your home at one time and to get one of them to buy it on the spot!!!! Well that sounds good, and in a strong sellers market where there are lots of buyers and very few homes that might work. I have heard the stories of agents in California who used to rent minibuses on the weekends and drive multiple buyers around and make deals right there on the bus. In todays market they might be better off driving the sellers around to buyers to pitch their homes.
Don’t get me wrong. Open houses are good things and they do occasionally bring buyers to a home to make an offer. The open house actually works to the listing agents advantage. The open house often brings buyers, just not for that specific home, that the listing agent can work other deals with. It also brings other listing clients for the agent holding the home open. Kind of an impromptu job interview. “See what I did for Sally and John. . . I can do this for you too!”
The question begs to be asked. So what is a good marketing technique and how do I get my home sold, quickly and at a good, fair and equitable price?
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