Now, before we get going here we'll mention that you won't find one salespitch for us anywhere on the site. Or for anything else. Not one. No popup to make you eat cookies or give us your email address. No silly links to click on to get us Amazonbucks either. What you will find, though, is a personal challenge to learn how to effectively market a residential property.
What we're going to do here is give away the store. We, Shelly&David, have a marketing method we do for folks who are selling and moving elsewhere. There are 2 to 3 million properties sold each year in the US and we can't possibly do them all so we will show you how to do yours.
Listing Realtors® as well as sellers yourselves, you can do this. We did, when we were Realtors®, and our sellers loved it. We will eventually give you everything, right down to the very code and methods we use to create these pages. No charge! Consider it a valuable effort in personal mastery and continuous improvement of your digital marketing activities to make your sellers (and you) memorable and top of mind. You only have to apply yourselves and do the work.
Sellers, we're completely serious here, you can do all of this too, if instead you want to do it for yourselves...Part of the idea for developing this came from owners in another state who did something similar with a Bed & Breakfast they were selling and "listing" on Craigslist. They provided a link to a website they created to describe what was for sale. It was a great idea and we stole it! So now you can steal it from us.
If you just bought your new home you have plenty of time to learn the stuff needed to sell it when it comes to move-time in a few years. Your residential property is likely the highest value thing you own, and you'll want to intelligently use (and hopefully keep) the value you add to it, through the years that you own it. What you learn here and on your own can help you do this.
We'll be describing long copy marketing (search David Ogilvy) using the Internet for display. Simply words on a page with photos. The Internet is now over 40 years old. Many of you homeowners are around that age, plus or minus, and maybe at one point in your education you made a simple page or two that could be displayed by a browser. It wouldn't be too hard for you to do it again. Queue Steely Dan... If there's a 4th grader in your family, they might be able to do the Internet bit for you and learn something for their future.
What qualifies us to teach you how to do stuff? Well, in addition to 10 years as Realtors® in the early aughts and teens, we've owned three houses, and sold a few too. We come from a number of fascinating positions in industries with high-end customers in pro audio, consumer audio, automotive audio, health, medical equipment, bedroom equipment and Real Estate. We've moved six times, locally three times and cross-country another three. We got so good at it that for the last two cross-countries we packed and contracted the whole move ourselves. The marketing method was developed organically in work at those various positions, in change agent mode to drive buy-in and realize continuous organizational improvement. We showed others how to do our jobs so we could go do something else.
You are likely here because you've seen one of our sites like this one for an upcoming listing. Now an active listing. Go ahead and click on the photo...
Your house isn't as large as this one is? Scroll down and find the little white farmhouse, below. That was our house a few years ago. Our method works for houses, period.
MINDSET. Everything you do with your house during the time after you decide to sell is entirely for the benefit of the next owner, your buyer(s). Now some of the most important people in your life - because they have the money you need to move on with...
A qualifying buyer is your gatekeeper. Don't disappoint them!
At this point, it is only a house - one you must move away from, but you want to make it an attractive home for your buyer to move into. Chances are, you are now a buyer yourself, looking for your next home, so unless you are looking for a wreck to fix up, the things you look for may be similar to what your house's next owner will want to see themselves.
While people are looking for their next home, they are looking to fall in love with the one that captures their hearts and imaginations. They may not describe it as such, but there is an emotional connection buyers want to make with their choice for the home they are going to elevate their new life in.
What is residential property marketing?
Captivating and conversational commentary describing values, features, and benefits, capturing imagination, and making an emotional and memorable connection with a buyer. Easily found wherever buyers are searching on the Internet. Capturing hearts and minds.
According to the National Association of Realtors®, that location is via the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) listing, easily found by anyone looking for their next home - on the Internet. Realtor.com, Trulia, Zillow and many others are fed their displayed listings because the MLS feeds all listings to them. More than 80% of buyers found their home at one of these Internet sites, either they found it themselves, or an agent sent it to them. Eighty percent. And when you don't have relatives, friends, and neighbors who want to buy your house, that 80% statistic for your situation is significantly higher.
Realtors® will say that the MLS is "marketing." The MLS describes what is on a market, but it is not marketing when all listings look essentially the same. When a $10 million estate gets the very same MLS listing format to display as a doublewide, then it is only an announcement of availability. Maybe it has more and better photos and a longer block of text as "description," but that is not compelling enough to capture imagination and establish emotional connection.
But it could have a url-link at the beginning of that description. "For the full story on this home please go to TheHomesURL.com." That link takes a buyer out to another place on the Internet where an unbranded page like a WordsEyeTour can guide the emotional connection to begin. Attractive and sincere messaging and imagery are key to strengthening this connection. Stimulating the inquiry and imagination of your buyer is what Residential Property Marketing accomplishes.
Scroll below and click on the home photos to see additional examples of the WordsEyeTour.
Pricing your house to sell
This is seldom an easy topic for sellers, but it is one you need to spend quality time researching. There are many online sources to help you understand all that goes into this, and before you talk to any "expert", learn this stuff well so that your questions will be very well informed. Open Door, Bankrate, and Rocket Mortgage are three of many sources for this information.
Zillow and others like it are fun to look at while living there, but their valuations are not reliable enough to count on at sale time. Sites available through subscription are now available though that provide the current property data used in doing comparative market analysis (CMA). Astute owners could train themselves to do this and we will look into methods to help them learn ever the next few months. The one thing that Realtors® have going for them is a current "feel for the market" that only they have. But only a few out of the many really have accurate "feel," so how do you find the right one?
Understand that with even the best of information, your starting price could be too high and you should have a "quick hook" strategy to respond when no showings occur within a short period of time. Remember you are marketing to Internet search, so that your new price opens you up (via search criteria) to a significant new number of potential buyers. If you are lowering from $425,000, going down to $399,000 opens you up to all those buyers searching below $400K. It's not fun, but when you anguish ahead of time to be able to think fast like this when needed, you could be on your way elsewhere sooner.
Give a handful of Realtors® a chance at getting your listing by allowing them into your house for a listing presentation. Later on we will give you some straight-up advice on how to handle such events so you have some control during the presentation. Agents should provide you with a Comparative Market Analysis which will explain their analysis for reccomending home sale pricing. Several of these might give you some sound direction. And you might find a listing agent you want to work with if you decide you don't have time to do things yourself.
Trouble is, that no matter how you approach it, you'll never know if you hit it just right. It can be maddening. But if you get no showings or offers, you know you are too high for the market at that moment, regardless of what the CMA says. Lower your price significantly and show the market you mean business. The best thing that could happen would be if you opened on the market low enough to create a frenzy of competing offers. But sellers, you seldom seem to want to do this...
The time of year can have an impact on what kind of offers you'll get. If your house is on the market toward the end of the year, when fewer buyers are looking, you may see more lowball offers from people looking to capatilize on your frustation. Then when spring arrives and more folks are actively looking to get in before a new school year, the lowballs will fade and you might get a bidding war... Try to be of sound mind while this goes on.
Along the way down this page you'll see additional photos of houses we've done for sellers. As on the one above, the photos are also links out to the message part of the sites done for those homes, so click on one you want to see.
This first one was our house and was our proof test of all we had learned over the five years of creating WordsEyeTour for residential property marketing. We had to put our work aside and give up our home to move back to CA to take care
of the parental units who were not eating well enough and were turning gray.
We spent 6 months finishing up what we started on the house, and put it on the market two weeks before Christmas as a For Sale By Owner, because our licenses would lapse before the sale could close. That's right, two Realtors® sell as FSBOs. And it went quick. Very Quick. Less than one week. Three offers to choose from (yes, one was a lowballer...). Yep, go ahead and click the home's photo...
Thinking it through, here, one does not need to have a million dollar house to need good marketing or to be able to sell your house yourself. What we did with our little house saved us a bunch of bucks and time. Any well-prepared and educated homeowner could do what we did. All you need to do is learn some stuff, and none of it really difficult. You figure you will buy a home and live in it for a few years, probably longer than one spends at university. That time could be used wisely.
Begin with the end in mind
Here you have the very best advice you'll find on the site. If you don't want to throw away the value you've built into the largest investment most people are likely have in their life, the best time to begin on this is to start when you buy and move in. You now have years ahead of you to develop this competency. Plenty of time left!
So, when you move into your new house, buy yourself a gift. Buy the textbook used locally that people wanting to be real estate agents use to pass their agency exam. You don't need to learn the whole book, just the parts having to do with the property you just bought. Use the file you have from the sale of your house and learn about every line item and document in the file. Learn the stuff you will need to know to sell your house when you move in a few years.
After you've moved in you can begin to develop new friendships over time, beginning with the buyer's agent you worked with while buying your house. Think of this while you are in the process of choosing your buyer's agent. Look for one you might want to invite into your home. They will be happy to talk with you because you are an active lead and contact for them, and are showing interest in what they do. Pick their brain and share what you've learned with them.
Through them you can meet other Realtors® where there will be built-in conversation topics. You could give them leads from neighbors and friends who find they have to move and for some reason aren't doing what you are. After awhile you may feel confident enough in what you've learned about marketing residential property. And you know what? Maybe by then you've developed a viable side-hustle. Or, maybe you'll decide to be a Realtor® yourself...
So if you are a seller who's learned how to market you own house, what's in it for you? You essentially do not have to hire a listing Realtor®.
Instead, like we did above you would be able to list with a discount broker and save much of the 3% you'd pay a listing agent to sell your house for you. You could pay them a small fee to list your home on the MLS. Or you could list with an agent who will take 1% less on the commission because you are doing all of the marketing yourself.
These are but two of the potential solutions you would have and there are more we will talk about as time goes on. One thing we would encourage you to do is to always offer a buyers agent commission that is at or above the typical buyer's agent commission for your area. It is the buyers agent who is most likely to bring you a buyer - remember that 80% statistic we talked about earlier. It is buyer's agents who are the ones getting things done.
Again, the statistics of the MLS/Broker/Agent system: There is one (or several for a team) listing agent. There are probably hundreds of other agents, working for many Broker's agencies, who could/would be buyer's agents for your house, all sharing the same MLS displays the buyers are using to find houses. Statistically, it will be a buyer's agent who brings you a buyer. So you will want to motivate them, won't you?
We learned over the years we've used the Tours - that buyers were reading them well. On showing appointmemnts they would go through a house conversationally using the wording we used on the sites without our prompting. It was evident that not only were they reading, they were also learning well enough to commit the information important to them to memory. The sites easily provided value for the buyers. And they certainly provided value for our sellers. Win, win, win.
Without a presentation like a WordsEyeTour, the buyer's agent knows very little of your house's values, features and benefits and why they may be important for their buyer. They and their buyer walk into their tour houses knowing only what the MLS listing shows. The sellers get the buyer's presence for only a few minutes.
Is this enough to motivate your buyer to change their life in your former house? Think it through before answering yourself. Had they been more well informed before seeing the house, with a memorable presentation they've likely read several times because it was talking of values and characteristics and communicating with them over enough TIME to think things through.
A WordsEyeTour style site can do this for you. Ahead of time so the buyer can think it through. They might be far more suitably prepared ahead of time with information putting your house in front of any others they might see.
This is what a seller expects, isn't it? Capturing the hearts and minds of their buyer.
This might be why you are now here at WordsEyeTour.
Here's another one we did. 