Three Blunders to Avoid in Marketing Your Home
Let’s assume you want to sell your home.
You may already know, roughly, what a listing agent should be doing to get your home sold.
But do you know – REALLY know – if your home is being properly marketed?
In the course of my daily wanderings through listings on the MLS (the Multiple Listing Service, aka that giant database from which Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia and a host of other sites derive their content), I see marketing blunders that make me cringe.
Here are three that, as a home seller, you should be aware of and be sure are in place for your home.
Blunder #1: Bad/Not Enough Pictures
You may be surprised to find pictures on my list of blunders, but there are listings on the active market that have one or, in some cases, zero images for a potential purchaser to view. The National Association of Realtors’ own website, Realtor.com, continues to clearly demonstrate that homes with more photos are more likely to be viewed online than are homes with fewer photos.
And, since from experience (and from common sense) we know that the more people who look at a home, the greater the chances of that home selling, we can draw a clear inference that having more pictures will literally increase the chances of your home selling.
Blunder #2: No Video
What is amazing to me, as both an agent and observer of technology trends in real estate, is that the adoption of the use of video by agents has not been nearly as rapid as I would have expected. From a post written at our franchising level comes this quote about the use of video for real estate:
73% of sellers are more likely to list their home with an agent using video, but only .8% (less than 1%) of all agents use video.
With 90%, or more, of buyers using the internet to find their next home, doesn’t it make sense to use video to provide that much more quality exposure for your home? As a seller, you need every edge you can get in this challenging, hyper-competitive market. Video allows the buyer to experience your home from their computer or smart phone.
Blunder #3: Weak Syndication
Time was, an agent could simply grab your homes information, enter it into a profile sheet and submit the information to the MLS and that was about all the ‘marketing’ that needed to be done. This is what *most* agents did, and, for the most part, it was sufficient given the time and the technology.
Forward thinking agents would also use newspaper ads and possibly even post flyers of your home for sale in many of your town’s social gathering spots.
Today, those social gathering spots are increasingly online. Further, newspapers (and all other forms of print media) are in decline, both in real estate effectiveness and readership. Your listing agent should be pushing the marketing for your home to all corners of the internet. Can you find your home online? Can you find your home on Google? How many links can Google find about your home?
Check out this example of syndication after only three days on market!
It Shouldn’t Be That Hard…
Frankly, these are three items that I often see missing in my daily sifting of listings for my buyers.
I would love for my buyers to tell me that they have to see the home at 123 Main Street because they saw an online video of the place.
Instead, I often hear my buyers tell me that we are not going to see a home because it only has one picture online (or, worse yet, no picture).
The bottom line: when you list YOUR home for sale with ANY Realtor, make sure you check out what they do to promote their listings. At a minimum, make sure they are not committing the three big blunders that I’ve described here…
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