If you are thinking about putting your home on the market, you may be wondering just what is it going to take to get your house sold during winter weather here in the Mid-West? The short answer is patience and perseverance, along with very close attention to the same three things that we realtors always coach clients about- Price that is right for the location and condition, condition and staging the home so buyers will want it, and consistent, effective marketing.
What is Effective Marketing?
In our last video newsletter, we started the conversation about how to successfully sell a home no matter what the season with an in-depth look at Pricing and Condition. If you missed it, contact us, or look in the archives of our Blog. This time we will discuss Marketing. Marketing is that part that sets Realtors apart from each other. Marketing is what helps put qualified buyers even find out about your home.
Shellie Nelson and I call ourselves the Home Access Team, but not all of our sellers have an accessible home to sell. We’ve developed some intensive creative ways to market unusual homes and offer that intense approach to all of our clients.
The key is targeted marketing combined with broad market advertising. We look at where the marketing for each home is most effective and concentrate on that. There is no one size fits all plan. We identify the probable market for the home and orient our advertising so that we hit that target, but we also advertise in a broad and general way too. Target marketing lends itself not only to marketing of accessible homes, but also to other aspects of a home, such as attractiveness to first time homebuyers, investors or others.
We recently listed a home that had a larger number of garages than the norm for the area and the garages were heated/cooled and very comfy. We sent specific flyers about the home featuring the home to contractors because we thought that contractor and other small business owners might be attracted to the garage space itself.
The Internet
The best avenue for advertising is the internet. Our brokers are always providing us statistics showing that in all age groups, most people start looking at homes on the internet before they contact a Realtor. As a realtor we use the internet not only to advertise our homes but also while searching for homes for our buyers. I can’t stress enough how important a good internet presence is.
One advantage our clients have working with Prudential Ambassador Real Estate is the expertise of the office staff to get our listings and any changes into the Multiple Listing Service really fast and a search tool people can use themselves to look at every listing in the greater Omaha area –www.paomaha.com. Being on the Prudential web site and in the Omaha area Multiple listing service also gives us access to listing on other important web sites like www.Realtor.com because the more internet exposure the better.
Prudential also has an exclusive arrangement with Yahoo! Homes are given a Yahoo! identifying number and preferential treatment in the Yahoo! real estate listings. Almost as valuable, is the search data that is generated with the Yahoo! relationship. We are able to send home sellers data that shows how many people view their home on the internet and then take the next step of getting more info. The graphs are a good way of double checking the attractiveness of our price and marketing and helps the home owner and us identify the time we need to freshen our approach.
Print Advertising
Though the internet is valuable, we don’t ignore print advertising. Research shows it isn’t as effective as the internet, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. We make sure listings are put into the real estate section of the local paper and into at least one of the local real estate papers. We also have access to a real estate listing show on TV for some clients.
One important step of our active market program is reaching out directly to other agents. Even though most people start on the internet, smart buyers realize that there is valuable information and resources they can have access to if they work with a Realtor. Realtors are also more likely to have coached their clients to prepare financially so our home sellers are better protected from un-qualified buyers if we expose them to buyers working with Realtors. We value our seller’s privacy and time. I want to make sure that they don’t waste their time with buyers who are more wishful thinkers than people really able to buy. So we reverse prospect looking for agents who are looking for homes similar to the one we are selling and we make our information about the home directly available for agents in a variety of ways.
Many people interviewing us prior to listing their homes, ask us about our open houses. They are influenced by TV shows that lead them to believe that open houses are effective sales tools. In reality, except for a few homes on well traveled streets and in a few rare cases where the features of the home itself will attract buyers, open houses are not that effective in our current market and actually present some risks for the home owners. Shellie and I recommend an open houses only in very rare circumstances when the benefit outweighs the risk.
A Team Approach
There are some other interesting marketing tools that Shellie and I use for clients. We will cover them with you when you chat with us about selling your home. One other thing I want to mention is that we stress a team approach with the home seller. Part of that is communication. We stay on top of results from the marketing and communicate with the home owner, keeping them posted on what is working and what we are changing to get their home in front of the buyers who will be most interested in it and able to buy it.
We hope you’ve found this segment and the previous segment helpful. Selling a home in any season is not a magic trick. A successful sale is based on the 3 basics of Price that is right for the location and condition, Condition and staging the home so buyers will want it, and consistent, effective marketing. If you have any questions, please get in touch with us. Shellie and I are looking forward to helping you sell your home.
