Real Estate Market

We are living in the age of the internet. Maybe we should call it the age of Google, since Google dominates up to 80% of search engine traffic worldwide.

The facts of life include learning how to use the internet to your advantage in selling your property. The internet can be your best friend in trying to make a sale if you learn how to use it properly, or hire somebody who is an expert in marketing real estate online.

If you ignore the way that the internet can be used to help sell real estate then you will miss out on the lion’s share of the buyer market that might be interested in your particular piece of property.

Secret #1

The most important thing you must do to use the internet is to make your property visible to as many potential buyers as possible. If you do everything else right but fail to get visibility, you will get no buyers interested in your property.

Visibility can be achieved by marketing the property website throughout the world wide web. This is not possible if your property can be found only on Realtor websites or FSBO websites.

Visibility can also be achieved by very targeted advertisements on Google and other search engines. Be sure to seek out help to set up an ad campaign for your property so you don’t waste money.

Secret #2

To get internet traffic to see your property, you must create a unique customized website which has information about your property and nothing else. A standalone website can have beautiful photographs and virtual tours. You can optimize the website for Google searches, and get many visitors who are searching for homes like yours in your area.

Another advantage of a custom website that is marketed globally is you can put in place a system to capture the contact information of all people who visit your property’s website. One of the most important rules of marketing is to followup with your leads. This is the way to make sales on the internet.

If you want to sell your home by yourself without a Realtor, then you may be getting a lot of advice from different places. There are many things to do and think about to accomplish a FSBO sale of your home.

FSBO Advice

The most common advice you will receive is to make your house look great by cleaning and repairing everything and improving curb appeal.

After that you will be told to take lots of photographs and have a virtual tour. You will also be told to advertise your home for sale, and create flyers and signs. You will also be told to get an appraisal who will tell you what your house will sell for now, in your neighborhood. You will be told to get a website to attract internet buyers who are searching for homes on Google.

All of these things are true. None of them guarantee a sale. At best some things (like internet marketing and a custom website) will guarantee you a certain amount of traffic as buyers find your home online

FSBO Secrets

There are two things you can do that practically guarantee a quick sale. Either one of these is powerful by itself, but when combined together they create a very powerful advantage for you when compared to all other homes on the market.

Secret #1

Most home buyers know this but it doesn’t really sink in, or they don’t admit it. You can guarantee finding a buyer for your home if you price it below market value. Sometimes setting your price low will attract multiple buyer offers and they will end up bidding against each other to raise your ultimate selling price.

Secret #2

Offering seller financing. This is something very few sellers think of, and therefore would give you a huge advantage. This may find you a quick buyer even without lowering your asking price. Once you have it sold, you are the note holder. The note you hold can be sold for cash, but at a discount. Your net cash received may be the same as if you’d used a Realtor and paid commissions, but this way you’ll find a buyer much quicker.

You still need to advertise your home and use internet marketing to get traffic to look at your home.

To sell your house now using good marketing methods and seller financing the first thing you need to do is to create your marketing theme. What is a marketing theme? It is the creation and use of a good theme or headline that will be repeated in all of your marketing communications. The second part of that theme is already created which is the fact that you are offering your house for sale using seller financing which will vastly increase the number of prospective buyers you will have.

The first part of your theme or headline you will have to create yourself. You create your headline by taking the most telling feature of your house and describing it in word pictures. Is your house beautiful, cute, lovely, charming, cozy, or very nice? Whatever your house is most this is what you should lead your headline off with, something that will make your prospective buyers want to come home to.

Next, describe the most telling architectural feature of your house. Is your house a Split level, Victorian, Colonial, Bungalow, or Ranch? Whatever your house is this is what you will use in your headline. You should then include in your headline the fact that you are offering your house for sale with seller financing for example: Lovely Colonial/Seller Financing. This would make a great headline if this is what your house is.

Now you need to add the various details about your house. For example, number of bedrooms, and bathrooms, cozy fire place, wooded lot, quite neighborhood, finished basement, new kitchen, two car garage, close to shopping, and so on. Once you have created your headline and added the details you are ready to start marketing your property. Here are the steps to take:

1. Prepare all of your marketing communications or have them prepared for you using your headline and house details. These communications will include such things as classified ads, flyers, post cards, and yard signs. And if you are going to use the internet as you should you will also need good photographs which are a must.

2. Implement your marketing efforts by running your classified ads in the Sunday edition of your main daily newspaper, and weekly newspapers that focus on the area your house is located in. Also distribute your flyers in your area, put your house on the internet. And start mailing your post cards out and get that phone to ringing.

3. Set up a phone message center, with a good voice mail message, to handle all of the calls you will get. However, do not use your home phone or your regular cell phone for this. Instead get an inexpensive $30 cell phone and put this number in your marketing communications.

4. Effectively handle all of the calls that you will get but do not try to take these calls as they come in because this is disorganized and impossible. Instead you should set aside specific time where you will return all of your calls at once or twice a day depending on your call volume.

5. Arrange your house showing appointments with your prospective buyers, it is usually best to do this on Saturday and Sunday, and this is what most people expect since they are working during the week. Then show your house, negotiate the sale and close the transaction.

Using good marketing methods and a good theme will most surely help you to sell your house now even in a down market. And by repeating your basic marketing theme throughout all of your marketing efforts this will give your marketing efforts consistency and unity which will bring your house to the attention of those who are interested in just what you have to offer, in the right way. Build it and they will come! Once they are there all you have to do is not so much sell them but simply help them to buy by showing them why what you are proposing is in their best interests.

Trying to list FSBO’s? Here’s what your marketing needs to stress.
You know why home sellers are trying to sell without your help. They think they’re going to save a lot of money. And to be absolutely honest, those who know what they’re doing, have nerves of steel, and who don’t need to go to a job every day can come close to doing what you can do.

As for the rest of them… your marketing needs to gently point out that they simply don’t know what they’re getting into!

No, you can’t say that. Making a would-be client look or feel foolish is definitely not the way to earn their business. So you need to be gentle in your presentation.

You need to offer some help in the form of tips, or perhaps clue them in about the various disclosure forms they’ll need. You might offer some advice about how to steel themselves against the insults they’ll hear as buyers try to push the price downward. (I used to laugh to myself about the comments buyers made to me. Sometimes I wanted to ask why they wanted to buy the house since they hated it so much.)

And of course, you need to remind them that buyers will try to point out that they’re not paying a Realtor so naturally they can sell the house for less.

Before embarking on do-it-yourself home selling, homeowners should ask themselves:

• Do I know how to determine their home’s value in today’s market?
• Am willing to work with and pay a buyer’s agent?
• Do I know how to market my home and get it in front of enough buyers?
• Can I deal in a civil manner with people who severely criticize my home?
• Am I willing to demand that buyers reveal their financial situation before I take my home off the market to negotiate with them?

You should touch on all these points when you’re talking with FSBO sellers, and you can incorporate them into a special report or a series of real estate letters to mail to them. If you enjoy writing and have a few extra hours you can create letters that are uniquely yours.

If you don’t enjoy writing or don’t have extra hours, you can buy pre-written real estate letters and just get busy sending them.

Either way, real estate letters written in this manner are a soft-sell technique that will position you as a non-pushy, non-threatening agent who knows how to sell homes. With each letter you’ll become more of a trusted adviser, so that when they do decide they need help they’ll naturally turn to you.

But how do you first contact these people?

One way is to offer the special report on your website. Visitors opt in to get the report and their addresses are automatically entered into your auto responder to receive the letters.

You could write down addresses and try to locate the names to go with them, or (Please, no!) write to Dear Homeowner. I personally think you should use an opt-in on your site even if you take the hands-on approach… which is to get out there and meet the people.

I know – that can be a little bit scary. But if you decide what you’re going to say ahead of time, and practice it, it will get easier.

Write a script that sounds natural to you. Something along the lines of “Hi, my name is Sally Jones from ABC Realty. I see you’re offering your home for sale by owner and I stopped by to ask if you were willing to let buyer agents show it to their customers.”

If you say it all at once, they won’t have a chance to say “I’m not listing” and slam the door on you.

Some of them may not have thought about the fact that some buyers want agent representation, so at this point you may need to explain the procedure. If you have a buyer list you mail to, you could mention it. If you use a one-time / one-party listing agreement, do mention that as well.

If they say yes, they’re willing to work with buyer’s agents, do ask for a tour and do take notes. You could even snap a picture to go with the notes.

The important thing is that you don’t ask for the listing at that time. (Not unless they throw themselves at your feet and beg you to take over this horrible job they got themselves into. In that case you must be a good samaritan and help them. )

If they say they don’t want to work with buyer agents, be polite and friendly and say “OK, I’ll let the others in my office know so they won’t bother you.” You might also throw in something complimentary about the house and tell them that if they change their minds to let you know, because you’d sure like to show it. Give them your card, of course.

Before you leave, tell them that you have a special report with tips for owner-sellers and you’d like to send it to them. That gives you the opportunity to ask for their names. You probably should also ask if the house address is their mailing address, since some people do prefer post office boxes to home delivery. Mail the special report as soon as you get back to the office, and enclose a nice little handwritten note thanking them for talking with you. If you can come up with something more personal to add, do it. For instance, if they were about to leave for a child’s soccer game, say you hope their team won. That’s just to show that to you they are more than just a house address – you noticed who they really are.

Be sure to enclose another card just in case they tossed the first one the minute you left.

Then, every few days send along a new real estate letter with a new bit of advice that will be useful to them. Do end each letter with an offer to help should they decide against doing this on their own.

Millions of cash-strapped and equity-poor homeowners are looking to save money by selling their homes themselves. In fact, some statistics show that the majority of people listing homes for sale now are doing so because they cannot afford their monthly mortgage payments.

With property values projected to be flat for a long time, these homeowners want to cut their losses, minimize damage to their credit ratings, and move on to start over. So they figure that saving 3% to 6% of the sales price by not paying Realtor commissions will make the difference between walking away with cash in their pockets or walking away empty-handed.

I have found that many people want to do a FSBO sale but are afraid of doing something wrong and creating problems for themselves.

Many others want to do a FSBO sale but don’t think they can market their home as well as a Realtor will do for them. The truth is that these obstacles can easily be overcome. In fact, I have discovered that there are some benefits to listing a home FSBO that most people are not aware of.

The main thing it does is make you responsible for your own home sale. This is the way it should be. Too many people mistakenly assume a Realtor will automatically sell their home for them.

Realtors do not clean your home, paint your walls, caulk your windows, make home repairs, clear away clutter or beautify your lawn and garden. They do not practice law and cannot give legal advice or make changes to the standard real estate contract forms. They do not stage your home, appraise your home, inspect your home or create a customized home-for-sale website optimized for Google searches.

These are all things you must do yourself or hire a non-Realtor to do for extra money (over and above the Realtor commission). At least when you are selling a home FSBO you have no illusions that someone else is responsible for making sure all of these things are done properly.

More and more Canadian homebuyers are making purchases of home properties through professional mortgage brokers. In the recent market study conducted by the CMHC, 23 percent of the approved mortgages were arranged by homeowners through the services of professional mortgage brokers. Canadian homeowners are following the common practice by their American counterparts, who are not inclined to take on their mortgage applications without a mortgage broker. In a related industry survey, about 70 percent of mortgages in the US were made through real estate mortgage brokers.

If we are going to follow the US experience, then we should expect major changes and shifts in the way transactions will be undertaken in real estate markets in Canada. This is obviously the logical next step for most homebuyers as they try to explore their best options in the face of current difficulties and complications in real estate markets. With the perceived decline of investment prospects, most stakeholders would naturally seek out for ways to make significant financial gains by exploring alternatives that do not fall under the mainstream investment options.

Homebuyers will gain significant benefits if they decide to work with a professional mortgage broker. Homeowners will significantly benefit from the expertise and experience of brokers. Most banks have in-house mortgage specialists who can assist homebuyers with their mortgage applications. However, their work orientation and main responsibility is to promote and protect the interest of banks.

On the other hand, a professional is a trained professional who has the formal training and experience in all aspects which are essential in mortgage applications. In fact, professional brokers may even have more experience and expertise than mortgage specialists of banks. In addition to this, a mortgage broker is an independent professional and is expected to serve the interest of their clients – the homebuyers. They are independent professionals who are not affiliated with any lending institution, but have access to options and rate information on a wider range of banks and other financial institutions. The primary concern of mortgage brokers is to provide their clients with the best mortgage options and rates.

You can have instant access to the banks and lending companies that offer the most competitive mortgage options if you will hire the services of a professional mortgage broker. It would normally take you at least a week to gather all the essential information if you do it on your own, since you have to conduct researches, individual inquiries and personal visits to come up with your range of mortgage alternatives. It is important that you have access to current mortgage alternatives, prevailing rates and payment schedule so that you can make a realistic assessment of your mortgage alternatives. Once you are able to cover all essential aspects of your mortgage application, then you can choose the best mortgage alternative that meets your requirements.

With the professional mortgage broker, you can expect a dedicated service. Mortgage brokers can assist and address your concerns anytime you need their assistance. This setup is more attractive for most homeowners as it offers greater flexibility in managing the schedule and pace of various tasks that are related to their mortgage application.

Homeowners enhance their leverage in getting better mortgage rates if they have access to timely and complete information and data related to mortgage rates and options by banks and other lending companies. A mere quarter-point downward adjustment of your mortgage rate can easily translate to thousands of dollars in savings. With the significant benefits that mortgage brokers offer, Canadian homeowners are expected to rely more on their expertise when applying for a mortgage loan.

Thousands of home sellers are already taking advantage of free internet advertising to find buyers for their properties. You should do this also to maximize the number of people who view your home’s online listing.

There are too many ways to get free advertising on the internet to discuss them all in one article. Also, there are just as many ways to get advertising that are not free but are very inexpensive.

The thing to keep in mind is that even free ads have a cost: the cost of the time it takes to post advertisements. This will be either your time or the time of someone you hire for the job.

The #1 way to receive the most traffic viewing your home’s website is to list your home in Craigslist.

Free Classifieds

There are hundreds of free classified ad sites online. You can get a lot of traffic to your home-for-sale website by posting ads on just the top ones, however.

The number one free classified site in the world is Craigslist, which has local pages in every major and mid-size city. If you choose just one free classified site to advertise your home for sale, this is the one.

By doing a FSBO sale you have an advantage on Craigslist since they do not like their free service to be used too much by commercial organizations like realty companies. Put in your ad that is is “for sale by owner” and it will be very well received.

How to Create a Home Listing on Craigslist

There is something of an art to this, so you want to seek out help or advice. You must first create your Craigslist account and give what they want. Then you simply write a compelling description just like you would for any other real estate listing. Stress the positive but don’t use extreme language. Just the facts, please.

You can upload four free photographs to your Craigslist home listing, so be sure to do that and pick four great ones.

You will need to post a new ad every two days to keep it fresh. This will get you the most traffic.

My experience tells me that free Craigslist ads, when combined with other internet marketing techniques, can yield a large number of interested buyers for your home-for-sale website. Be sure to make it part of our Total Web Marketing Strategy.

If you have a customized stand-alone website for your home-for-sale you can optimize for Google and other search engines. This means you can have them send interested buyers to your home’s website — possibly hundreds per month. Website optimizing for Google is a tricky undertaking. You will want to work with a real estate internet marketing expert to do this. The most important thing to do to get Google traffic to your home’s website is to connect the words on the website with the words that people search for in Google. (Internet marketers call these search terms Keywords.)

By identifying the right Keyword search terms that make your property stand out from others you will be able to get more free traffic from Google. Not only that, but these visitors to your website will all be very interested in your particular property. What makes your home unique? What features does it have that no other properties have?

Examples:

• A very large, fenced in yard good for dogs
• A large garden for flowers and vegetables
• Water views or water access
• Proximity to parks or other recreation
• An unusually large family or rec room
• An exercise space or home theater space
• A large number of old trees creating a shaded area
• Decks, screened porches, gazebos, wrap-around porches
• Location in a top school district

No matter what you choose as your unique features, you will be able to include the Keywords in your website content. Your internet marketing consultant will include the same words in web page meta tags, title tags and Keyword tags. The next step is to register your website with Google and have your consultant start a comprehensive internet marketing program.

The end result of this process will be to have Google start sending your website interested buyers looking specifically for properties like yours. After that, it’s up to you and your website designer to make sure your home looks attractive online so the maximum number of visitors will call you for a home showing.

If your home is listed for sale with a Realtor you have an online listing at the Realtor website or Realtor.com. If your home is listed on the internet as a “for sale by owner” then you have a web page on the FSBO website that shows your photographs and home details.

In both cases there are major problems with the way these online home listings benefit you. That is, they do not provide as much benefit to you as a home-for-sale website should provide you.

Just having a listing within a Realtor or FSBO site does not mean any prospective buyers will visit your home listing page. The home listing must be marketed on the internet like anything else that is being sold.

The #1 problem of all of these websites is that they do not focus just on your property for sale. Take a look at your property listing page and you’ll see what I mean.

The first thing that jumps out at you is that the web page seems to draw attention away from your property. In fact what is going on is that each page of the Realtor website is devoted to promoting the Realtor’s business.

Each page of the FSBO website is devoted to promoting the FSBO company’s business not just your home.

What you want is a website that focuses only on helping you sell your property as soon as possible.

These other sites have dozens of distractions which take the website visitors attention away from your home, such as:

• ads for other properties
• ads for other related businesses
• ads for the Realtor or FSBO business
• links to click on to leave the page and go elsewhere.

If you want a home-for-sale website to attract the maximum number of potential buyers you will have to set up your own website separate from the others.

When marketing property it can be very effective to combine “tried and true” methods from the past with cutting-edge methods from the present. All marketing methods and theories must be tested in the marketplace to determine how well they work.

Just within the last 12 months new marketing approaches have sprung up from the internet. Twitter is the most famous example, but there are others. For example, Google changed all its rules on local search engines last summer.

With the rise in blogs, internet directories, online forums and free classified advertising sites there are now literally dozens of websites where property can be advertised for no or little cost. You need to learn about these if you want to effectively market your property on the internet.

However the rise in the prominence of internet marketing does not mean to throw away all that has been learned from the past. Classic marketing methods still work very well, and can often be adapted to the internet.

You can combine classic marketing methods with the latest internet marketing techniques to create a very powerful marketing program for your home or other property. This is true whether you have a Realtor listing or not, because Realtors are not doing these kinds of marketing programs.

Perhaps the most effective technique in internet marketing is what can be called “automatic email marketing.” This is a way to make automatic the all-important follow-up process which is the key to making sales. If you don’t follow up on leads you won’t make sales, period.

What we have discovered is that the old traditional “two-step” marketing method works great with the new technology that allows automatic sales lead follow-up. You can use these methods to sell your property. Here is how it would work:

1. You get an interested buyer to visit your custom home-for-sale website.
2. You offer something of value if they leave you their name and email address (a prize or gift).
3. You automatic follow-up system kicks into gear and sends a “thank you” email to your site visitor.
4. The follow-up system sends the visitor an email every other day for a while, and later just once per week.
5. Eventually one of these website visitors buys your property, because after they came to your site you captured their information and followed up with them.

Most people wouldn’t think of combining these two great marketing methods to sell real estate. In fact, I don’t know of anyone else who is doing it. I just know it works. Try it for yourself and see.