Top 10 Things to Market Your Listings
1. Double Check what you have put into your MLS- Send a copy to your sellers for review to have another set of eyes on the correct information on the house. Sell the lifestyle as well as the house if room in MLS. Make sure you have the correct parameters/fields/terms filled out in your MLS to make a consumer better to find your listing online.
2. Please! Please! Please! Pay for a professional photographer – Now, I am not saying to pay for a professional photographer on a $1200 lease (which I don’t-because not cost beneficial) but the photos taken from your smart phone that you have not even gotten out of the car to take….. PLEASE!!! Can you tell this is a pet peeve of mine?!? We live in a visual society so the old saying pictures are worth a thousands words…hmmmmm- just something to think about as you are wondering why your listing that has your photobombing the bathroom mirror is not selling! #justsayin
If I have a super type A client, I encourage them if they want to stay for the photos! I had a seller that thought she was a “professional photographer” and complained about every photo my photographer had taken. So I had to pay for another round of photos but I insisted the seller be in attendance so she could be comfortable with the angles that the photographer was using. Worked like a charm! Made my seller happy to have an opinion, so I have learned to ask clients if this is something they would like to do.
I also firmly believe that future seller prospects look at other listings in their market area online and they make opinions about the listing agents. It’s a marketing tool for your sellers but also for yourself!
3. Give the room feeling with descriptions – Now, I am a professional REALTOR and I even wonder what room is/could be used for based on pictures alone. Tell me and the consumer on line what the room is, ambience to a room, if its a flex space, or the reference point of where the photo was taken in the house.
4. Update photos on your listings – If your listing photos have snow on the ground in the winter, it’s now April with flowers blooming, it is definitely time to update photos! Christmas/Halloween decoration showing on a listing in February gives the online consumer an idea very quickly of how long the house has been on the market. No bueno for your seller!
If your seller has updated paint colors or other items in the house based on feedback on showings, then get new photos done and replace them in your MLS as well as any online portals that listing is on. Same goes for if a tenant occupied the house when photos were taken and its now vacant, then update it. 9 out of 10 times it will look better than the tenant occupied photos. Safety Alert – check with your sellers if they are ok with photos showing the house is vacant!
5. Update your listings on Trulia, Zillow and Realtor.com- You can normally add or change things based on how consumers search those portals to better enhance that the online consumer can find your seller’s listing. Depending on what you are trying to achieve it may be free or with a premier package.
6. Share your listing on Social Media- Post your listing on all the Social Media sites you belong to that you think your friends/followers will like. I do a #comingsoon on Instagram to garner interest before it hits the market. That helped a lot on my listings this past summer when we were in a hot market.
Make sure you abide by NAR Social Media policy on correctly posting listings, as well as the Code of Ethics, local MLS policies and your Broker policies.
Encourage your client to share their home to their Social Media accounts. They love to show off their home and they help you market.
7. Just Listed Cards- I know! I know! Most of you know me as being paperless but this “old” school approach still works in a lot of markets. Think about who you are sending the Just Listed cards to. For example, if it is a listing that could be a “move-up” listing then target apartment dwellers or an area that would target that move up buyer.
Sending Just Listed cards to the neighbors of your listing is another great option. They may have a friend or family member that wants to move to that area. Bonus- you may get another listing out of it!!!
Resources for Just Listed cards:
https://quantumdigital.com/#!/triggermarketing
Plus tons of additional ones out there!
8. Host an Open House – A very tried and trued method! Send out invites to neighbors or knock on doors to the neighbors to invite them. Post in local paper, in MLS, Social Media sites, yard signs and word of mouth. Statistically, an attendee on an open house in most areas don’t normally sell the house, the marketing you do for it makes the sellers happy.
Side benefit is you may get some leads off it.
9. Follow up on feedback for Showings- A lot of agents don’t give feedback because they are normally putting out fires on other deals, so tell the seller to not get disheartened. If an showing agent is inquiring about the property, I keep an Evernote note on information that an agent would want, so I can quickly give it to them. I do that for prospects as well so I can quickly answer their questions in hopes to capture their interest in seeing the home with their agent.
10. Set up Google Alerts on Your Listing – Although this is not a marketing tool per se, it allows me to monitor what websites my listing may be going to.
Go to google.com/alerts and type in the whole address of your listing. Follow the instructions on when you want updates. I have found my listings on website I did not know they syndicated to , so I could pass that information on to sellers. It also allows me to see if my listings are getting scraped.
Visit RETI.us for more marketing ideas for your listings and for yourself.
