I was too busy doing this last week to talk about it. This is me from Friday’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):
Passive marketing can swing sale
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.
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Richard Cook says:
“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.”
I agree with you entirely and at the risk of being labeled a “comment spammer” I would like to add that what I do is of the same philosophy. This is what I created the Knockbox to do, to free the content. A new category has come along.
Latest Pew research has found that 34% of internet users have logged on with a wireless internet connection either at home, at work, or someplace else. For home buyers I want that “someplace else” to be your listings.
“27% of adult internet users have logged onto the internet using a wireless device at some place other than their home or place of employment and 88% of laptop users have at one time logged on using a home wireless network.”
What do these numbers mean? They are interesting, but the next part of the research is really telling.
“One quarter (25%) of internet users say they have a cell phone that connects to the internet with a wireless connection. Among internet users with this capability on their cell phone, half (54%) have used it to get on the internet either at home, work, or someplace other than home or work.
One in eight (13%) internet users have a PDA that can connect to the internet using a wireless network. Of these, most (82%) have used it to connect at home, work, or someplace other than home or work.”
What I read here is that people would rather use their laptops and when they own a PDA they are much more comfortable connecting with it instead a cell phone. But this can’t last, even curmudgeon John C. Dvorak would agree. Wifi will end up in many cell phones and the screen sizes will be more friendly.
“The MLS listing, the flier and an interactive floor plan will all be available on the weblog, along with any other documentation.”
This same information can be hosted by a Knockbox becoming a mirror of all that content. This gives you a little deeper knee bend to swing the market that much further in your direction.
March 13, 2007 — 2:56 pm