Rex was a huge, beautiful, cream and white striped cat with a white tip on his tail, and one day he just disappeared. I walked the alleys and drove around looking for him and contacted the local animal shelters, all to no avail.
In the meantime, I had a new listing in the neighborhood and send out Open House cards inviting the neighbors to the listing launch. The invite information was on one side of the card, and on the address-label side, I usually included a little call to action - like call me if you want to sell your house.
Well, this call to action was a little bit different. The heading?
"LOST CAT!"
And it had a description of Rex and asked people to please call me if they saw the big guy.
So my broker called me into her office while she was reviewing our mailings.
"This is fabulous!" she said. "How on earth do you come up with this stuff?"
"Um, I lost my cat?"
Well, calls started pouring in with Rex sightings. But do you have any idea how many creamy-orangy - stripey cats there are running around? Rex was nowhere to be found, but over the next month I listed four more houses, and each seller started the conversation asking if I'd found Rex.
This marketing piece got the biggest response of any that I've ever sent out, before or since I mailed it. Today it might be thought of as an example of thinking outside the box, although at the time I was just hoping to find the cat!
But looking back on it, I think this mailing made me look human to the recipients. It wasn't sales-y. And while it did help me get a bunch of great listings, I never found Rex. I always imagined he found his way into a yard where the people took him inside and decided to make him an all-indoor cat, and that he led a happy, well-fed life on someone's lap.
. GREAT entry into the contest.
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