Marketing
Whether you’re a home buyer or a seller, marketing is important to you. As a seller, you want a lot of marketing of your home, and you want it to be effective. It must expose your home to as many potential buyers as possible. It must present your home it its very best light, and attract buyers to want a showing.
As a buyer, marketing is important to you, as it’s how you’re able to find huge amounts of information about millions of homes. The Internet has made this far easier and faster than ever before. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make the marketing accurate or true to the real features of the property. Photos can be altered and enhanced. Descriptions can be misleading.
Marketing isn’t advertising. Advertising is a part of marketing, but marketing is a bigger picture, a plan to expose the broker, agent and their listings to the public. It’s a group and series of actions that build brand recognition and bring eyes to the print or Web marketing that will bring about home sales. And, it requires a plan.
An effective brokerage marketing plan will connect buyers and sellers, homes will sell, and buyers and sellers will have a happy outcome. Marketing is about creating a public presence and perception of the brokerage as reliable and very good at what they do. This benefits both buyers and sellers.
Print Marketing
Newspapers and home magazines are the primary venues for print real estate marketing. A brokerage exposes their listings in these media on a regular basis, usually by contracting space for a long period and running large ads on a regular basis.
Brokerage and Agent Websites
The broker, and many agents as well, will have their own websites. Listings will be displayed there, far better than they can be presented in print. More photos, video tours and a great amount of detail can be presented on a website.
Syndication
Brokerages and agents syndicate their listings and information across a great many sites on the Internet. There are specialty vendors who provide this service, replicating brokerage and listing information sometimes across hundreds of real estate sites.
Direct Mail
Whether it’s letters or post cards, direct mail has been an integral part of real estate marketing since the beginning. It’s effective and can be targeted to certain types of people or areas, called “farming.”
Those are the most widely-used marketing strategies for real estate. Discuss marketing with prospective agents and brokerages if you’re a home seller. If you’re a buyer, let an experienced agent help you to weed out the junk on the Web to get to the true material about homes for sale.