Would you rather be selling fish aquarium toilets?

By Sean Cutright
Delta Media Group

The winter, and this winter in particular, has seemed to light a flare under the “real estate recession” talks we’ve all been too fond of hearing for the past couple years.

While it’s true during this period that home sales have declined, foreclosures have increased, home construction has decreased, and many agents are leaving the industry, it is also true that there are plenty of ways to overcome the current market.

The Wall Street Journal ran a front age story Dec. 19 on Todd Brabender, a former media employee who spends his days eMarketing newspapers around the country with press releases on peculiar products. One such product is the Fish n’ Flush, a $299 toilet/fish aquarium. The makers have sold 1,000 of them without spending a penny on advertising--only the fee Brabender charges to eMarket the product.

Another product Brabender took on was the Toilet Tattoo, which is a $9.95 toilet-seat applique. The creator claims Brabender brought her around $5 million in web sales on the product.

When consumers are ordering toilet stickers and fish bowls by the hundreds and thousands, one would assume the confidence to sell real estate. Granted, maybe the media would let you believe that the toilet accessory market is doing better than the real estate market is. I would argue that it all comes down to marketing.

Bradender is no specialist on toilet accessories. Instead, he’s an expert at marketing. He utilizes eMarketing to gain an audience in the media, and the media publishes his press releases because they find a unique value in them on otherwise slow news days. This style of marketing may not necessarily follow the same track of success in real estate, but unique interactive property search maps probably won’t sell toilet appliques either.

As agents, you likely already have the first component that helped Brabender sell the products he marketed: a Web site. The second is Brabender’s marketing.

Develop your marketing style to improve real estate sales. A slowing market only means you need to get more creative. But it also means the most creative brokers and agents will likely come out on top.

Take advantage of assets you have. Real estate web developer Delta Media Group builds unique URLs into their web systems for each listing from the MLS. Many agents using Delta Media Group Web sites cater their print ads to this, creating a “call to action” from their print ads to the Web page of each listing. This offers a more unique approach to finding a house because it allows the consumer to glance through a magazine, then go online directly to the listing they want without searching through 40,000 listings to find it.
    
When searching for homes in real estate magazines, agents utilizing this feature stand out, because they allow the consumer to quickly and effortlessly find the listing they want online, while other real estate agents and brokerages struggle to even find where to put the URL to their office Web site.

Another tool that will make you unique during listing presentations is Seller Reports. Sellers know the real estate market has trailed off over the past two years, and, now more than ever, want feedback as to the status of inquiries toward the sale of their house. Delta Media Group has developed an automated way of doing this online. Their system E-mails sellers once a week displaying the statistics of how many times their home has been viewed on the listing company’s Web site each week, and how many times it has been viewed on other sites throughout the nation that Delta Media Group markets it on.

Delta Media Group’s Seller Reports provide a competitive advantage when showing sellers why you are the agent to list their property. They also give some often much-needed feedback that the market is not always exactly how the media portrays it, and that Web sites are driving a considerable amount of traffic to listings.