Mar. 9, 2007: Passive marketing can swing the balance in your favor in the Phoenix real estate market

How much time and effort should you expend to sell your house? The answer is simple: whatever it takes.

Last week, we talked about pricing, repairs and staging. Let's talk now about passive marketing.

You'll have a sign in your yard. Is it effective? There's a flier box out there. Are any fliers in it? You have a listing in the MLS systems. Six photos are permitted. How many will you have? Is your listing on Realtor.com? Other Internet listing sites?

On Realtor.com, buyers often skip listings that don't have a virtual tour. Does yours have one? Does it have its own Web site? A video podcast? A floor plan?

Your house is in great repair, it looks fabulous, and it's priced right. This is where passive marketing can succeed or fail.

Here are some ideas we have been exploring:
  • We're building custom, full-color signs for our listings. The point? Stopping traffic.
  • We do full-color fliers, but we also do a full-color, business-card-size flier we hope will be retained.
  • We build a custom weblog for every home we list, with dozens of photos. We do one or more virtual tours of the home and neighborhood, and we're planning to do video podcasts of listings. The MLS listing, the flier and an interactive floor plan will all be available on the weblog, along with any other documentation.
  • We make everything we can available on the MLS system, on Realtor.com and other listing sites.
Why go to all this trouble? If someone is interested in the house, we want to answer every conceivable question. And the more time buyers spend exploring the listing, the less time they will have available for other homes.

You can call this "aggressive passive" marketing if you want, but this is the kind of effort that can swing the balance in your favor in this real estate market.

Greg Swann is the designated broker for BloodhoundRealty.com, a full-service Metropolitan Phoenix real estate brokerage. This article originally appeared in the West Valley regional sections of the Arizona Republic.

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<a href="http://www.bloodhoundrealty.com/" target="_blank">
Phoenix Realtor Greg Swann</a> suggested I share this with you:
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