Online Real Estate Marketing (continued)

Online Listings

Online listings are the most effective ways to market a home. Online listings work because they make sense for the buyer. A potential buyer looking for a three bedroom house with a two car garage and a deck in the Maple Leaf neighborhood of Seattle can pull up a variety of listings with only a few clicks. When this house is listed in a printed publication the buyer might flip through hundreds of listings before he finds even a single home.
Even a technically unsophisticated agent can list homes on free services and target very specific geographic areas online. Craigslist and Zillow both offer free listing services and the king of the Internet – Google - has gone into the same market. Google should not be overlooked even though they are new to the real estate market. An amazing 56% of online searches for the term “real estate” go through Google according to the company’s own published statistics. Both realtor.com and homes.com are capable of connecting buyer and seller but the most exciting and cost effective web traffic may be through Google Adwords. Managing an Adwords programs requires a greater understanding of the inner workings of the online market but the learning curve is a great time investment. Why? Adwords targets buyers at the very beginning of their search, before they even get to other agent listings and Adwords appear on the front page of the Google search engine at the same level as sites like realtor.com or homes.com. Best of all you only pay for the traffic that you use. You pay if and only if an online user is redirected to your listing.

Virtual Tours

So once you bring a customer to your site how do you sell them a home? Outside of actually walking a potential buyer through a home the virtual tour may be the most dynamic way to present your home. A virtual tour allows you to present your property in the best possible light. This multimedia presentation is like a miniature movie, produced for the sole purpose of connecting a home with an eager buyer. The agent uploads their images, creates a script and hits a button to put the presentation on the Internet. Virtual tours are time consuming to build but they can be used for multiple purposes. A beautiful virtual tour running at an open house can create the type of professional presentation that will sell the house.

Email Blasts

After spending the time, effort and money to gain a prospect keep the lines of communication open. A new home is not an “impulse buy.” Top Real estate agents understand that long term communication can turn into long term success. Building a real estate business really means maintaining a real estate business. Email is a cost effective and easy way to communicate with clients. Many companies offer HTML email, a type of email that is displayed like a flyer - complete with images and decorative fonts. Email can be a two-edged sword. If done correctly you can hold your customers attention for months or even years but if done incorrectly, your email will alienate your customers.

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