Simply put, our marketing consists of Internet and Television advertising! Did you know that most national real estate companies such as ReMax, Keller Williams, Century 21, or Weichert, provide their agents with little to no marketing budget to advertising your property?
It is no wonder that over 47% of homes listed to sell in 2011, ended up either cancelled or expired! This means that you have a little better than a 50/50 chance of selling your home! These large companies advertise and promote their brand name nationally but place no real emphasis on actually marketing individual properties like yours. They leave it up to their independent agents to fund their own marketing campaigns which is why so many homes take so long to sell or simply do not sell at all.
Online marketing doesn’t mean just placing your home on MLS. It means having contracts with all of the top real estate sites like, Realtor.com, Boston.com, Zillow.com, and even Trulia.com so that every buyer is able to view the home.
It also means adverting on the most popular real estate blogs like Active Rain. Since accessing information on the Internet is free, many sellers think that so is advertising on it, when in truth, it costs thousands upon thousands of dollars to correctly list your home on these sites. For us, this is not optional and the marketing dollars invested to sell your home will be recouped when your home sells. Unfortunately, most agents are unwilling and many times unable to invest the money needed for this type of exposure.
This year, our company took it a step further with online marketing when we hired a dedicated Internet marketing person who spends all day, posting, re-posting, and blogging about each listing on every real estate site available. The results have been remarkable!
How Buyers Search for Property in Today’s High-Tech Market:
1) Search on the Internet: Qualified buyers find their homes on the Internet! More and more buyers are searching for homes through Smartphone and tablet apps, which literally show homes in the neighborhoods that they’re driving in! If they aren’t using one of these applications they are relying on a laptop or a PC to receive automatic daily emails of homes that match their search criteria.
2) View the Property: Once the Buyer has identified the list of homes they want to view they will drive by the homes and see if the location works for them. They may drive by at different times of the day and different days of the week to check on traffic patterns and neighborhood activity. Remember to always keep your lights on at night as highlighted in our Staging Section under Traditional Home Sale.
3) Contact the Agent: Once their list has been narrowed down to a handful of homes, they will contact their buyer’s agent or the listing agent directly to schedule an appointment to see the home. At this point they will go through the home with a fine tooth comb, opening up cabinets, turning on lights, all the while trying to envision how things will look if they lived there. In most cases, when there is interest in the home they will come back a second time and sometimes even a third time before making an offer.
Today’s buyer is no different than any other consumer: they are time-starved and want everything when they want it.
This includes being able to schedule appointments with ease and view as much information at their fingertips as possible. As highlighted in our Traditional Home Sale section, high-tech features like Interactive Floor Plans and Professional Photos allow for more of a connection to the home which translates into more interested buyers viewing your home. When a buyer is able to pull up a floor plan and actually configure virtual furniture, you can imagine the impact that home has versus all the others. See an example of a virtual floor plan.
The Do’s and Don’ts of Marketing Your Home on the Internet:
1) Do Try Reverse Prospecting: Did you know there is a way to contact 500-1500 agents that have qualified buyers whose search criteria is a match for your home when it is posted on MLS? It is called Reverse Prospecting and most MLS’s have this functionality.
2) Don’t Post it Only on MLS: Most sites like Trulia.com and Zillow.com generate their revenue from charging agents to post their listings. Don’t be fooled into thinking putting the home on MLS will automatically get the home on all real estate sites.
3) Do Post As Many Pictures as Possible: We have found that most MLS’s allow up to 30 pictures while most homes barely have 10 posted. Study after study proves that more pictures produce more online views which mean more showings.
4) Don’t Make Errors in Listing: The Internet is very temperamental and with many of the most popular sites, the slightest error in room count, house style, or even zip code can eliminate or dramatically alter your online placement.
5) Do Go Social: Certain blogs are proving to be beneficial to driving buyers to view your home. This is a constant work in progress but social media is starting to play a larger role in real estate.
Obviously, the list goes on and on and we are always learning on how to best expose our homes online. This is a constantly changing industry and marketplace and to sell your home the Internet needs to be embraced and leveraged so your home doesn’t get left behind!
To view our video titled, “The importance of online marketing,” click below:
click below for full text:
The Importance of Online Marketing When Selling Your Home
The second part of our marketing strategy is television advertising. Each and every month, tens of millions of household impressions promoting our websites are broadcast into households in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The benefit to our sellers is it attracts thousands of buyers onto our websites to find homes and in many cases make offers on one of our listings. The benefit to buyers is it gives them immediate access to the hundreds of properties we are selling each and every month.Each year our brand continues to grow with more and more buyers and sellers contacting us looking for assistance. Below is our most recent television ad that can be seen on all four of the major networks:
From the minute we met Anthony we knew he was going to get our house sold, and sold fast. My family and I guessed we’d have 2 offers before the week was over, and I think we had three!! The house had been on the market for 3 months with a so called “local” agency, and had no offers and almost no interest. The team got us 11 showings in 5 days. John, Anthony and Sarah did exactly what they said they would do, and were there every step of the way. We can’t thank you all enough for your professionalism and all the following up you did. We always felt like we were in good hands.
-Elaine O., Randolph, Massachusetts
