marketing Your Home
Every Home Deserves some TLC
Every home, from a small 1 studio apartment to a multi-million luxury estate deserves a special marketing plan to give it the widest possible exposure. We are here to work with you to develop a strategy to reach the most buyers.
To create a strategy we must do two things:
- Know the strength and weaknesses of your home and how it relates to the local market and develop a tailored script
- Understand the current buyers, their psychology, and their behavior in your local market.
Tailored Script for your Home
An effective marketing strategy hinges on the ability to create an image in the mid of buyers of them living in your home. The home is still a cornerstone of American culture and the centerpiece of the American dream.
We might have different political viewpoints and different cultures and backgrounds but the idea of the home is universal. From gatherings of family and friends, putting your feet up and watching Netflix, to barbecuing and playing football (or soccer) in the backyard, owning a home is a dream that nearly everyone believes in.
That’s why we’ll use the dream of a home and match it to the particularities and uniqueness of your home to create an image of the “American Dream”.
Now close your eyes for a moment and picture what you love about your home. Those things that you pictured in your mind, are the chapters of the script that you are about to write. The script should flow like a movie. It starts from the neighborhood, driving down a happy street with kids on bikes, and lemonade stands on green lawns. You pull up to a perfectly landscaped home with flower beds and a tree with a swing. You walk up to the main door which is black and solid with a unique knocker and a foot announcing “Welcome Home”.
You see a home isn’t the sum of the 4x4s, bricks, and nails it was built with. Every home has a story. To sell a home, we must craft the right narrative that will grab the attention of buyers. Painting a picture of your home in the eyes of buyers is what will create that emotional bond and the need to buy it. It’s not simply a listing description and a few pictures that are going to sell your home. It is creating a visually appealing scene that highlights the features and uniqueness of your home. The warmth and comfort of a home can be staged like a scene in a movie letting buyers not just imagine themselves in it but walking through it like it was theirs already. Prepping and staging your home before putting it on the market with a marketing script is very important.
Sometimes the script cover needs to be adjusted to reflect readers’ tastes and grab their attention. We do this by prepping the home. From minor repairs and painting to major renovation, each home is unique. We will help you determine what is necessary and what is optional and make sense. Some things might not make the cut as they wouldn’t have a good return. Working together we will weigh the pros and cons and create a checklist. The following are a few items that could make the list:
- Deep Clean and Declutter: This is one of the simplest ways to increase your home value. Making a home clean and spacious to potential buyers can increase the perceived value of your home.
- Curb Appeal and Garden: The first thing prospective homebuyers will see is your front yard and front façade. Have the grass cut, put down some mulch, trim the bushes, fix the gutters, plant some flowers, put in a black door (homes with black doors statistically sell for up to $6,000 more than with a door of another color). First impressions count.
- Property Repairs: Simple repairs and upgrades can instantly bring value to your home. Stopping a door from creaking, repairing or replacing handles and knobs, a fresh coat of paint, new carpeting, and lighting can change the look and feel of a room. Lighting is especially important. From changing light bulb color/intensity to new fixtures, a home can turn instantly brighter and warmer to buyers and is relatively inexpensive.
First, we must prep the home. The prepping can be as small as a few minor fixes to major renovations depending on the condition of your home. After that is done we declutter the home to make it welcoming and do a deep clean to make it spotless.
Next comes staging. Staging creates the atmosphere helping buyers imagine having coffee in the morning in the breakfast nook reading the paper, relaxing under a blanket watching Netflix, playing catch with the kids in the backyard. It’s the art of subtle ‘implicit priming’ psychology whereby senses are stimulated to influence purchasing behavior.
Depending on the type of buyers that are more likely to purchase a home in your area we can tailor the staging to their lifestyles. If it is a single-family home or townhouse then most likely family-oriented buyers looking for more room and school districts will be your target audience. If more of an urban area, then a modern or industrial look would appeal to younger professionals looking for simplicity and glamorous city life.
Depending on your home and location we will create a carefully crafted script that will be tailored to the most likely buyer but broad enough to attract all buyers. But first who are your buyers and what are they looking for a new home?
Understanding Buyers
Nearly all home buyers begin their house hunt online today. It’s unquestionable that the internet has changed the home selling/buying process. Buyers are now mostly online able to browse through hundreds of listings.
From Millenials to Baby Boomers, buyers are turning to the internet to search and more importantly narrow the potential list of homes they will consider.
If homebuyers are using the internet, how are they using it? What are they look at? How are they selecting homes?
Most buyers are accessing major real estate sites like Zillow, Trulia, Redfin and performing searches of homes in their desired area. They scroll around and click on listings with homes with pictures. They stay longer in homes with high-quality pictures. If the pictures of the home are appealing to them then they would look more deeply at the information about the home. If there are still interested they would look at videos, 3D tours, and read the notes on the home from the listing agent or owner. The better the quality of the photography and the content the more the attention a home gets.
It all starts off with a single picture that grabs attention. So how are you going to make your home stand out? The search has already screen your home for the desired requirements (price range, bedrooms, bathroom, etc). You are now competing against other homes solely based on pictures. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. The right pictures even more. Bad pictures a lot less or none.
The lighting, angles, decor, narrative of the photos can change the entire feel of the home and catch the attention of buyers.
We work with our professional photographers to capture the feel and essence of your home and tell a story. We also do videos and presentations of your home.
This will give us the opportunity to draw buyers in with professional photos not just for MLS and real estate websites but also to use in social media, print media, flyers, mailers, and handouts. Having high-quality photography will be the foundation of the entire marketing effort and is essential to get them right. We already know that buyers skip listings with no pictures and quickly leave those with low quality ones. Investing in high-quality photography is essential that is why we do it for all of our sellers.
Buyers are also looking more at 3D tours and dollhouses. They have become more popular in the real estate industry in the last few years. Before a simple 2d floor plan sufficed. Today, the technology has become almost commonplace for luxury listings and is trickling down to lower price point homes.
3D architectural rendering gives buyers a better perspective of the size and layout of a home. It creates a more realistic view of your property than floor plans with the added bonus of photography and video all rolled up in one simple to use interactive solution.
According to Matterport, a leading provider of 3D virtual tour technologies, properties that were marketed with virtual tours generated:
- 40% more clicks
- 95% more phone inquiries
- 65% more email inquiries
- 49% more qualified leads
- 300-600% more time spent engaging
Another technology is aerial Drone photography and video, which can create a bird’s eye view of a property and a dramatic cinematic feel. Flying over a home and even into the home lets potential buyers get a sense of the size of the property not always possible with 2d photography or even ground video.
Buyers online are not just looking for a home but looking to be entertained. People have a short attention span. If you can create visuals that will center their attention on your home you are more likely to generate enough interest for them to see the home in person.
Buyers rarely make an offer until they’ve seen the house in person and buyers rarely bother to see a house they weren’t impressed by online.
The Editing Room
It’s like a movie production and all great movies have great editing. How we splice and put together scenes makes a great difference.
We will use our script, market insight, copywriters, use high-quality photography, 3D tours, drone photography, and more to design and create media tailored to buyers. We put it all together to create an MLS listing, single property website, an email marketing campaign and landing pages, videos, social media posts, flyers, brochures, handouts, and much more. It’s a complete movie production.
We will create a showcase single property page and multiple landing pages for social media advertising, emails, newsletters, and more to drive traffic to your home. We can gather data and perform analytics to get a better understanding of who is looking at your home and tailor the message to that target audience. It’s art and analytics rolled into one which I call “Artlytics”. We need to be visually stunning and attention grabbing while gathering data to generate insight on how best to to find buyers and accomplish our goal to sell your home at the best price.
Time to Get The Show On The Road
Your home is ready to have buyers view it and make offers. But even before the main show, we will generate buzz and interest and even a buyer before listing. By advertising it as a coming soon listing or as a pocket listing or an exclusive listing.
Many homes today are being sold even before they are officially on the market. Pocket listings or exclusive listings are properties that are not marketed on the MLS and are not visible to major sites like Zillow, Trulia, Redfin, and others. Unless your agent knows about them, you would never hear of them. This is more common for luxury homes with owners that require discretion and are not interested in many visitors, but the trend is expanding across the market. If you are looking to sell quickly and with the least amount of disruptions than pocket/exclusive listings are a great option.
We would also host broker open houses. These are special events with an invite-only guest list of brokers and agents that specialize in your home’s area. This is the real estate version of a prescreening. Before your house is listed, agents and brokers get a sneak peak of the home in order for them to advise other agents in their network and buyers. It’s a great way to get attention and word of mouth and even offers before officially listing the home. Remember the pie chart above? 31% of buyers find a home through an agents and networking with other agents is a key element.
Once listed publicly we will turn to traditional open houses and showing to generate buyer interest. This is the most known of the real estate processes. But behind the scene, we also have social media, weekly print and online advertising, newsletters, email marketing, and networking with other agents going on simultaneously. Just like a movie, regular advertising and marketing maintains high interest and buyers coming until the right one is found.
