Several years ago, I was of the opinion that the more information I provided regarding my listings the more activity would be generated for my sellers. I painstakingly wrote lengthy descriptions, took flattering photos and hired professional videographers to capture every nook and cranny of my subject listings, and while all of this was impressive to my sellers, my listings were not receiving the sort of traffic that was expected and DOM for my listings exceeded the averages despite competitive pricing.
Good Lessons From an Interesting Economy
I have a hard time labelling anything as being "bad" or "good," so we'll just say that the economy from which we are emerging was certainly interesting. As closings were diminished, I think that we all have had to make adjustments to our businesses in order to survive. Those of us who have made it have learned valuable lessons in streamlining the way we go to market, and one decision that I made was to eliminate the virtual tour from my listing package. By doing so, I thought that I would risk a further reduction in traffic in a market that craved buyers, but I just could not afford to spend in the same manner. I was concerned about losing listing opportunities to competitors and I wondered whether the belt-tightening would make me another industry statistic of underemployed REALTORS.
None of that happened. What actually occurred, was that the buyer traffic in my new listings exceeded that of my virtual tour listings, and as an experiment, I decided to take down the videos of my older listings and I noticed an improvement in buyer visits.
Now this isn't scientific data, but I am led to believe that by providing too much information about a property, buyers are satisfied with what they see on-line and form their opinions without asking for a showing. Similarly, I believe that buyers may be more inclined to put a property on a must see list if the available listing information creates intrigue by not revealing every detail.
I'm very interested in hearing your opinion!
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