5 Marketing Musts for Realtors Selling a Home

Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay

When you are just getting started as a realtor, you tend to make a few mistakes. The mistakes, however, can cost you a big commission if you don’t make a sale in a reasonable amount of time. Here are a few pointers and five marketing musts for first-time realtors selling a home.

Stage the Home Effectively to Attract More Buyers

Your clients depend on you to attract as many buyers to the property as you can. A big part of that is staging a home effectively so that it is very attractive and creates interest. Buyers typically can’t see past the current owner’s decor choices, which sometimes hurts your ability to sell the home.

Choose to stage more than one room, too. Being able to see how a room can look and how it can really come together as a space buyer will love to be in helps boost interest and increase the number of offers that you and your clients receive.

If you are really new to this, make a lot of calls to furniture and interior design stores. Establish a working relationship with them where you borrow the items you need for staging, and they get the free advertising you provide by pointing out the items you borrowed for staging and telling buyers where to get those same items. Having more than one furniture and interior design store on hand to help with staging items will help you stage a home more effectively too.

Use a Professional Photographer

In this day and age when you can snap hundreds of photos with your smartphone, you might be tempted to save some money and take photos for property promotion yourself. Don’t do that. It’s a huge mistake because the photos almost never enhance a home in the way you want them to.

A professional photographer can take photos from multiple angles with better lighting and filters that capture just the right mood for a room. That is exactly the kind of thing you want to promote to buyers. The mood of a space is as important as the room and the house itself. Connecting to personal emotion helps buyers connect to a property on a personal level, which in turn gets them excited about making an offer or taking a tour.

Use a Multimedia Approach to Promote a Property

A real estate website and a single listing are not enough to sell a house these days. Instead, you have to promote property through many social media platforms, multiple open house dates, brochures, direct mailings, and email. If you have a bunch of buyers come to you asking you to send them information when a property comes on the market, use direct marketing to stay in touch and keep them up to date.

Real estate postcards are probably the least expensive method for your budding business. Wise Pelican (wisepelican.com) specializes in direct mail for realtors by creating postcards for you. You can have a stack of postcards imprinted with your professionally taken photos of a house on the front and contact info and a short message on the back. Mail out your entire stack of postcards and repeat. You should get a few “bites” from interested buyers this way using direct mail for realtors.

Social media is important too. No doubt you already have a business page set up for yourself. This is the ideal spot to promote each and every house you are attempting to sell. Make sure you are loaded and ready on all of the biggest social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.. It’s also smart to utilize YouTube for virtual tours of the properties you are selling in case people live too far away or they still have concerns about the recent pandemic and social distancing.

Have at least one open house a month, and run it all day. Plan in advance so that you can get your home staging partners on board. Have food or snacks for those that come to take a tour.

Email anyone that shows interest and leaves their contact information with you. If you don’t get a response, try again in a few days to a week. After three or four attempts with no response, stop. You don’t want to be too pushy or send a ton of emails to people who don’t respond with interest in the property they saw or asked about.

Understand How Low a Bid Can Go and Don’t Drop It Lower

Realtors make a commission on every home they sell. They have to know how low a bid on a house can go before they (the realtors) won’t make any money. You do have the ability to advise clients where to set the asking price, and it’s generally a good idea to set the price a little higher than what your clients want or would expect so that you make a profit.

Even if the buyers make a lowball offer, the higher than usual starting price still leaves everyone in a comfortable position to accept or decline.

Utilize Drone Photography

Drone photography can be your best friend or your worst enemy. However, the purpose for utilizing this marketing approach is to show buyers where the house is and what the neighborhood is like. A lot of buyers want to know what the houses surrounding the one for sale look like, where the nearest stores are, etc.. Drone photography provides them with a bird’s eye view of the house for sale and everything surrounding it.

Thank Your Clients and Your Buyers

Nothing sets the stage for future business-like gratitude for the business you have just completed. In this case, thank your clients with a gift for hiring you and having you sell their home. They will be pleasantly surprised and remember to hire you in the future when they are looking for another home, a vacation property, or anything else they want to buy involving real estate.

Thank the buyers too. If they hadn’t bought the property you sold them, you wouldn’t have made a commission nor made your clients happy. Usually, a housewarming gift basket is a way to go, but you can make the gift whatever you like as long as you keep it professional. They will be pleased and remember you when they need something else down the line too.

If nothing else, they (and your clients) will refer you to their friends and family for home sales and buying. That’s repeat business you can’t afford to miss out on when it just costs a little extra in the form of a thank you gift!