Real Estate Listing Marketing 101

You found a new lead and through your incredible work ethic and charisma, managed to get the listing. Now is your trial by fire as a real estate agent. Extensive marketing is required for your brand new listing. For each listing you obtain, you will have to put in a tremendous amount of hard work to ensure that the property gets sold quickly and you are able to also meet your client's asking price for their home.

The main issue here is not the lack of buyers. Irrespective of the market scenario, there are always going to be people who intend to purchase a home. 

The problem is getting your listing in their view. The market today has been split into multiple verticals. You have people going for the traditional open house, people looking for homes on real estate portals, buyers seeking property details on social media, and many more.   We are going to start off with some modern aspects of real estate listing. These will help you gain from the virtual space by attracting potential buyers to your new listing, as well as certain key factors you could follow to maximize your success rate.

High Resolutions Photographs Is A Must

We are visually driven creatures, who have become more so, thanks to the abundance of photo-based social media culture. There are high odds that after reading the zip code, a prospective buyer's eyes are going to directly move down to the photographs of the home, without even reading the description or details about the amenities. 

So, make sure to hire a professional real estate listings photographer. Look through their portfolio, discuss with them what you envision for the property. Remember, most prospective buyers are going to quickly glance over the photographs; therefore, you need to make sure that all the photos are in high resolution. They should be able to see all the vibrant and rich details. Ensure that when your photographs go from Multiple Listing Services (MLS) to other property portals, they do so in proper resolution. If you feel that the quality of the photos has become degraded, re-upload the photographs on the new property listing sites as well.

Video Tour

Along with high-resolution photographs, you could consider a professional shot video tour of the home. Most property portals permit you to upload videos along with your listings.    A video gives a much better understanding of the size of the home, how spacious it is, how bright and sunny it is, would it be suitable for a family with specific needs, etc. A video helps a prospective buyer visualize himself/herself in that home. This is a crucial component when it comes to marketing your listings. 

You do not want the people to view the property as a mere house; you want them to see this as a home, possibly their future home. And in this regard, a well-shot and properly edited video tour plays a big role

Focused Description On Multiple Listing Services

Most real estate agents go for the tried and tested route of describing the house in standard terms. They generally mention the number of rooms/baths, garage space, availability of natural sunlight, etc. Now although there is nothing wrong with this approach. However, do take a moment and consider the sheer number of listings a potential buyer is going to be reading through. Beyond a point, it all blurs into this monotonous spiel of real estate adjectives.

So what should you do? Highlight the living value aspect of your listing. Have a conversation with the homeowners and ask them to tell you what was the best part of living in that home? Maybe the school district is amazing? Does the neighborhood have great parks and recreational facilities? Is the home close to vibrant city life? The thumb rule here is that when you put up a listing, 50% should be the physical description of the house, and the remaining 50% description should be what's not included in the photographs but will add value to the new homeowner's life.   This kind of nuanced description will add a touch of uniqueness and higher recall value to your MLS descriptions.

Build A Website/Blog

A good real estate agent is expected to have his website or at least an engaging and relevant blog. Write a clear, informative, and detail-rich blog about the new listing for your real estate website or blog. If necessary, hire a good student writer to give a beautiful human interest aspect to the write-up.

Instead of the run-of-the-mill one-dimensional description of the house and its amenities, you can consider writing something that connects with the readers more. You could ask the homeowners for photographs of their family growing up in the house. If it is a home that has been in the family for generations, then some vintage photographs of their grandparents could be included. You could always get these digitally touched up for extra appeal. 

If running and maintaining a website/blog seems too cumbersome, then you could create a profile on any leading real estate lead generation platforms, such as Dorrmat. Dorrmat provides an excellent virtual meeting place for home buyers/ home sellers and real estate agents. It has a quick and hassle-free procedure to sign up for a profile. You can mention your credentials, achievements, and most importantly post details regarding your new listings. 

As the people on Dorrmat are either fellow real estate agents or home buyers, you are automatically increasing your odds of finding the perfect buyer for your new listings.

Social Media

One simply cannot ignore the power and reach of social media, when it comes to marketing your new listings. As a real estate agent, it is a must that you should have both active profiles and a constant presence on most major social media platforms in order to leverage the reach of these new-age media. Some popular and high reach platforms wherein you should post about your new listings are:

Facebook — The largest and one of the most used social media giants, Facebook provides you with ample resources for both paid and free methods of promotion. Ranging from posting on your professional real estate agent page to creating groups and letting people know about the new property, there is a lot that can be achieved.

Instagram — The visually-oriented photo sharing and displaying platform is the perfect vehicle to showcase your new listings. You can upload a selection of your professionally shot photographs and include a small descriptive right up, add a few relevant hashtags, and your listing is visible to a huge number of people.

You must without fail include all the necessary details for interested customers to be able to reach you. You can provide links to your website or real estate platform page. 

Pinterest — Another photo-sharing media platform, Pinterest differs from Instagram in the fact that it is purely for sharing and collecting beautiful, vibrant pictorial ideas. People have mood boards wherein they can pin their favorite photographs.   One of the common things that many users do is to keep looking for and collecting photos of their ideal home. This is your target audience.

Now that you have a fair idea about how to tap into the virtual resources, let us shift our focus to the more traditional approaches. Remember, you are selling a home. This is not going to be something that can be entirely dealt with and concluded within the virtual space. So, as a real estate agent, you must not overlook the more simple yet incredibly powerful and time-tested strategies.

Professionally Staged Homes

Whether for the photoshoots, video shoots or for conducting open houses, you need the house to be staged properly. Staging a home is not as simple as clearing up the clutter and removing the personal effects, such as family photographs, belongings, and other markers of this property being someone's home.

Although the deep clean and declutter is the first step, a professional home staging requires enhancing the appeal of the home to cater to the wide tastes and preferences of prospective buyers. The end goal is to make it look like an ideal home for most prospective buyers. 

Professional home stagers have vast experience in presenting the house in the best light with a few swift flourishes. They generally bring their own furniture and soft furnishing, if required.

For instance, they may bring in a Kitchenaid stand mixer and a few beautiful porcelain mixing bowls. This little addition immediately converts a simple kitchen perfect into sweet baking heaven in the mind of a prospective buyer.

Host Open Houses

Arranging for and conducting open houses is the best way to sell your listings, as well as widen your contact reach. Not everyone who may visit the open house might find this particular house perfect for themselves. However, they are surely going to take your contact details and may also call you or refer your services as a real estate agent to their friends and family. 

Those who are in the market looking to buy the kind of property you have listed will definitely appreciate an opportunity to walk through the home and ask questions about it.

One little tweak you can do to this method is to restrict the number of hours for the home tour and have the home tour open only for a limited number of days. This basically funnels all the prospective home buyers within the same three or four-hour slot. Looking at the crowd, the prospective buyers' estimate of the property will increase, and in many cases, they may feel the need to make an offer as they fear the property might not be available for long, given the crowd of interested buyers. 

An open house although a traditional approach is still something that has a high value in terms of getting your listing sold quickly.  

For Sale Sign

After seeking permission from the home seller, you can put up a for-sale sign in the front yard in a vantage point that is clearly visible to passers-by. Do remember to check the Homeowners Associations (HOA) rules regarding displaying such sign boards and abide by those rules.   This old-school approach is a good way to tap into the mind of people passing through that street; even if they do not wish to purchase a house, they may know someone who is in the market looking for a new house.

Similarly, this method is also useful in attracting slightly senior buyers who may not exactly be active on all the other mediums of listing marketing that you are utilizing.

Tap Into Your Contacts

As a real estate agent, you do not exist in a vacuum. You are an integral component of society at large. You are the person who helps people with one of the basic necessities of life — a home. 

So, every time you have a new listing in your roster, make sure to drop off a quick message about it to your social circles. These circles can be both your circles, such as family, friends, neighbors, etc, as well as your professional circles, which would have fellow agents, handymen, bankers, etc. 

Purchasing a home is not only a big decision but also a slow and social decision. People start off by telling their family and friends about their decision to purchase a new home before moving on to contacting a real estate agent.

Summary —

As a real estate agent, the key challenge is to adapt to the changing times. Your core objectives remain unchanged, get the house sold. However, the aspect that changes is your approach towards this end goal. You need to strike a fine balance between the traditional and the modern approach towards selling properties.   By following the above-mentioned road map for marketing your listings, you will ensure that you are successful in most of your endeavors. Plus having a plan that you follow for all your listings will ensure that no opportunity to market falls through the cracks. It also speeds up your work as you have a proper workflow established.