This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link):
A custom weblog can be your home’s 24-hour real estate salesperson on the world-wide web
I have an unshakable faith in the three P’s of home marketing — Price, Preparation and Presentation.
If the home is priced above its value to the buyer it will not sell in this market — it probably won’t even show.
If it is not well-prepared — repaired, staged, cleaned — to the condition implied by the price, it will not sell even if it does show.
Presentation is your Realtor’s job — or yours if you’re trying to sell without representation. I don’t have space to go into a full-blown marketing plan, but here’s an idea that can make a big difference for very little cost:
Give your home a blog.
Every home for sale should have its own web site. What makes a weblog useful and practical is that weblogging software is so easy to use. And the price to get started? Nothing.
Sites like WordPress.com or Blogger.com will let you set up a blog on a subdomain — an address like 123MulberrySt.WordPress.com — for free. Or you can buy your own domain — 123MulberrySt.com — for less than ten bucks a year. You can host your own domain for a few dollars a month, but using your weblog provider’s hosted option will work just as well.
What do you want for content? Photos — and lots of them. Good pictures of clean, well-lit rooms sell houses. Your text should be just-the-facts, nothing overtly promotional. Not only can people see through hype, it turns them off.
With a weblog, you can document your house room by room — or by the benefits to be realized from the home’s features and amenities.
Best of all, you’ll have a 24-hour salesperson working for you on the internet. Put your blog’s address on your flyers, in any advertising you do, in your Craigslist open house notices, on Zillow.com and Trulia.com. The more you can promote your blog, the more traffic it will draw.
You still have to be priced right. You still have to be prepared right. But a custom weblog for your home could be a key element in your home’s presentation to the marketplace.
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