As a full service virtual tour builder and real estate photographer in the Dayton & Cincinnati Ohio area I have been telling some of my clients that in todays tough market it pays to think outside the box. That's right folks the tricks that worked in years past are gone and if you want to remain competive you have to be willing to go the extra mile, stand out above the rest, and use todays tools to your advantage.
Many of you read everyday on active rain and other industry sources about the wealth of ideas and information that professional photographers and real estate marketing companies have to offer, yet quite often we're blown off or not taken as knowledgeable in the industry because many of us are not licensed agents or brokers and therefore we couldn't know anything about selling or marketing real estate. We not only give away many great ideas to our clients and those we would like to have as clients, but we also blog on this site and tell all of you about them, but many times we hear comments like "I don't like 360 virtual tours" or "My point and shoot digital camera is fine" & "I don't think that will work"
But the funny thing is, it's not about what you the agent likes, it's about what the consumer wants and we keep seeing the same old mistakes repeted over and over by agents who think they are doing their clients a bang up job by using poorly taken images and virtual tours and many other basic mistakes that turn off consumers, this means they click the big red X and move on. What many of you fail to understand is that we get to hear from the public and what they say behind your backs or about the listing agent they fired, because a progressive agent who thinks outside the box moved in and won the listing presentation or your expired listing, it's surprising some of the things we as service providers hear about you the real estate agent and how bad of a job many of you do at giving the end user (Mr & Mrs. John Q Public) what they want and like when searching for property. We service providers are not as clueless as many of you seem to think based on your posts and comments here and in the office.
What's the point you ask to this post? The point is this, I have a number of agent clients who refuse to even try some simple ideas that would only cost them their time and not any money, such as posting thier listings on http://www.craigslist.org/ and using postlets to make an ad that would stand out above every other ad posted there. It's really quite simple, not only will your listings show up in Google searches if you use the right keywords, you can drive a ton of traffic to your lisitings and it's FREE, but wait, theres more!
I have conducted my own test with a few of my clients to prove a point to them as well as the stuck in a rut old fashion thinking agents I know. And wouldn't you know it the numbers speak volumes about how right I was. Now before you all think I'm going to break my arm patting my own back, it was a high volume agent who gave me the idea I sort of stoled it from her for my own company's SEO benefit. The test went so well that one of my clients had four qualified buyers show up to her open house and told her they saw my test ad's on http://www.craigslist.org/ and we're not talking about a 25K crack shack, but a 269,900 listing and a 450K listing. You can see the numbers here http://www.realtourvision.com/hit_stats.php?utl=RE-0809-YEQZM7-01 and here http://www.realtourvision.com/hit_stats.php?utl=RE-1555-HK0OZS-01 You can see how agent kelly Morse posts her ads every Thrusday and the numbers spike on Friday, Saturday & Sundays.
If what I'm saying is not true then why do we see so many blog's like the following:
1. http://activerain.com/blogsview/408469/Let-your-photographer-wear
2. http://activerain.com/blogsview/404893/Why-don-t-realtors
3. http://activerain.com/blogsview/155103/Which-Camera-What-Angle
4. http://activerain.com/blogsview/414887/Real-Estate-Marketing-on
I could just keep linking all afternoon to blog after blog, there is a ton of info on this site all about this stuff us service providers and even your peers have been trying to say. In closing I would like to say in todays market you can follow the leaders or you can be a leader. And the leader in todays industry are thinking out side the box of standard real estate marketing and using it to their advantage because they know, today people are no longer looking for real estate on just realtor.com and those sites for which you pay a high price. You can beleive me or not, I'll let people like Karisma Olson who found out on their own tell you in their own words. (see link #4)
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