Curb appeal weighs heavily in the impression a potential buyer has on a house upon arrival. You may assume that if curb appeal has such pull, it may be the first experience a buyer has with that property. But the truth is, the physical curb appeal impression is often not the first time a buyer is seeing a house. As a matter of fact, by the time someone gets around to actually driving to the property, they’ve probably viewed it online multiple times, scrolled through slide shows, watched virtual tours, and read property descriptions and features. If your house for sale isn’t drawing the foot traffic you’d imagined, maybe that’s because you’re losing the curb appeal before the buyers ever reach your physical address. Here’s what you need to know about marketing your house for sale.
Property Description
There are many factors that pull traffic from the world wide web into the awareness of your house for sale. One of those things is the property description of your house that’s on the Internet. You know, “Quaint three bedroom, two bath home with charming dining area, spacious yard, close to schools.” But if you were to take out the fluff words like quaint, charming, spacious, then what’s left? “Quaint” does not sell houses. Features do. How about, “Red, brick three-bedroom, two bath home with open floor plan on a 1.5 acre lot.”
When a user searches the Internet for a search term such as three bedroom, two bath, your property description may come up on a page with nine other homes that match that criteria. The way your meta-description, your meta-data, your summary is written determines whether searchers click your link to view your property, or someone else’s.
Mind your P’s and Q’s, literally. Dot your I’s. Cross your T’s. Technology is too smart and too convenient to have unnecessary spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors throughout your text. Granted, the world is not comprised of English majors and there are rules unknown as well as those meant to be broken, but when it comes to your marketing materials, make sure your presentation is top-notch. It’s a refection of your work.
Property Images
No one will argue that today’s smart phones and hand-held devices have wicked cool cameras with amazing photo-taking capabilities. But no matter how you slice that apple, it’s still a smart phone and lacks the human factor. It’s not a high-quality, professional camera with years of experience in providing photographic evidence of the beauty of a home. When you’re preparing to show pictures of your house for sale online, you’d be best represented by high-quality, professional photographs.
There are tricks of the photography trade when it comes to photographing residential properties – ways of making lots appear large, rooms seem spacious, and add an element of elegance to your marketing endeavors for your property. There are ways to use lights and angles to create the perception best presented in digital format. It’s more than a smartphone digital camera snapshot.
Virtual Tour
People love the video tours. They love to feel like they’re standing on the outside, then walking to the inside where they can become a part of the scenery. From the comfort of their laptop, desktop, smartphone, shoppers can attend an open house viewing of your home without ever having to put on their shoes. And if they don’t like what they don’t see, you’ll never see that buyer as a potential shopper on your property to measure curb appeal. You’ll have lost them before you got them there.
Your real estate agent may be a marketing genius when it comes to selling residential real estate, but not if you prevent them from success by restricting their capabilities. You may feel like you’re saving a few hundred bucks by skimping out on a quality photographer, but that couple hundred bucks could have ultimately earned you thousands had it attracted the right buyer to your front door.
Conclusion
Don’t think for a minute that when a potential buyer pulls up in front of your house for sale, that it’s the first time they’re exposing themselves to your property. On the contrary, they’ve already researched descriptions, viewed images, watched tours, and probably did some digging about the neighborhood resources, schools, parks, shops, and more.
Your real estate agent is the best source of information about the local community and real estate topics. Give Antares International a call today at 561-249-3460 to learn more about local areas, discuss selling a house, or tour available homes for sale.
