Listings are our bread and butter, as they have always been. When I was active, I was a listing agent. I’ve drilled the importance of that into Tammy & Andy.
When I market their listings, I use both online and offline. The offline is there for future home sellers to see. I do not market for buyer calls and fully expect all buyers to have a buyers’ agent.
A very important source for offline marketing is print marketing with a full page of listings in the local newspaper. Every listing that I’ve seen in that newspaper, from other agents, has an address and a “price.”
I give the address of every home so buyers can drive by and see the home and the area. However, I never post a price. Never with print marketing, only online in a blog post.
Homeowners who have not listed yet will always keep our full page ad they receive in the mail every month. We see it on the table along with the postcards during our listing presentation.
As I continually state, we must think as the homeowner thinks, when we prepare our marketing pieces. When I see homes by other agents in the newspaper, I often see “Price Slashed” and “Price Reduced.” That works AGAINST the agent with potential sellers who are reading that newspaper. Homeowners will be questioning the ability of the agent to price properly; or may be thinking that agent “bought the listing” and was not honest with the pricing, just to secure the listing.
Homeowners see prices of other listings that are on the market and always think those homes are not as good as theirs. Then their thoughts become out of control, with illusions of grandeur about their home. Of course, we resolve all of those thoughts with our detailed Market Analysis.
We need to be mindful of how every marketing piece will be interpreted by the people we are targeting. We must ALWAYS think as they might be thinking.
That last statement holds true for online marketing, as well; and that’s the main reason for thinking about the comments you write on another agent’s blog post. Potential homeowners are reading those comments. Agents who are commenting on a listing online should state their thoughts in a manner that a homeowner would interpret properly to the agent’s advantage, when reading!!
Just a few thoughts for the moment….
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