Recently, my mother who has lived in her home for 35 years decided it was finally time to sell. She lives in a smaller town in Colorado, the kind where pretty much everyone knows everyone. So because I have worked in this town previously, I told her I would help her find an agent.
I began my hunt, and although I had already had a short list of people I was going to call and have them come out to give a presentation, I went ahead and did some due diligence work on what these agents to see what they had been up too recently. Were they keeping up with the latest trends in internet marketing? Were they trying to think outside the box in terms of finding a buyer? etc. What I came to find out was that the 2 agents I was going to contact currently had a TON of listings. By a ton I mean...59 for one of them and 30 for the other! I was blown away by this number and the first thing that came to my mind is "how could they possibly handle that many listings and make sure they were giving quality time to each one?"
Now because it is a small town of about 200,000 people and currently there are about 2000 properties for sale on the MLS I still cannot understand how these 2 agents can handle this volume? Both of them do have a small 4 person team working with them but even so, I have always been told by agents that it takes alot of time, money and energy to list houses correctly and so I immediately assumed that both of them probably had a really strong internet prescense and were doing the majority of there marketing via the internet.....ummmm NO! They both do have the basic website from their brokers and both are on Realtor.com but that is about it. Other than that there is no Twitter, Facebook, Activerain, blogging, Craigslist....nothing!
Of course when I brought them to the house I immediately had a list of questions for them, top of the list is "how could they handle that volume and still be affective?" Both of their answers were similar and they both said they work alot. I asked why they were not currently marketing on Twitter, FB etc. and they both said that they just couldn't find the time and most likely they would have to hire someone to do all of that for them.
Yes, it is a small town and alot of the deals get done because of good ole fashion networking. However, the small town does not take away the affect that 80% of people start the search on the internet. The more places you are, the better chance they will find you and your listings. With 59 listings, it would seem to me you could most likely sell faster if you had a stronger web presence thus making you more affective overall.
I guess the moral of my story is that just because you are in a small town does not and should not give you an excuse to not keep up with the marketing trends of real estate. In fact, I would imagine that if you were to really put alot of time and effort into making yourself the leading guru of that town with internet marketing...Google would recognize you in the top 3 all the time!
I suppose...we all live and learn!
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