Marketing Your Home

What should you to spend to promote the sale of your property?

We at Clark Brothers Ray White Nundah, say that you do need to spend marketing monies in order to reach as many potential buyers as possible.

What we also believe is that the marketing dollars that you are asked to pay should not be excessive and should be used to sell your home and not sell the agent.

Agents regularly ask for, and are granted, large amounts of seller funds to advertise their property. So what, in reality, are these funds used for and do they really help a property to sell?

Agents may explain that these funds will go towards the following: property ads in the newspaper, a more prominent listing (on page 1) with larger images on realestate.com.au, huge pictures of your house on your For Sale sign. But our question remains, is it necessary to have these things to get your house sold?

In the days before properties were listed online and before the property section in a newspaper was larger than the news section itself how on earth did houses sell?

In reality, you put up a For Sale sign and you listed it at a realistic price, relevant to the area and the market and it would sell. Magic! And without all the bells and whistles that are accessible today.

Yes there is more competition now-a-days but just because newspapers and the internet were invented it does not mean that you need to invest in a mammoth campaign to get your house sold.

Agencies are saying that people look for houses in the paper, but in reality the majority of people search for things online whether they live in the area they want to buy or not. And online all of the houses in any area they are interested in will be listed in the same place for them to see.

So, do you therefore need to invest in the premium listed ad online with the large pictures to get your house sold? No.

Once you type in your search area, yes you will see the homes with the biggest images and the premium listings first. But the minute you sort that list according to price, newest to oldest or anything else, those large imaged, premium listings will be sorted along with everything else and they will no longer appear at the top of the first page.

So in reality, every listing becomes equal in the eyes of the buyer. Would you skip a house just because its image on the listing page was smaller than the house above or below? No. You’ll look at anything you think relevant to you regardless and once you enter the house listing, low and behold; all pictures are the same size!

If you have enough trust and a strong relationship with your agent, then you will have confidence that together you have priced the property well enough to sell in your desired time frame.

If you want to sell a property – stick up a for sale sign, list it on a directory and price it to the market. Your agent will then use tried and true techniques ie. Start high and come down’ to negotiate you a result that reflects the highest possible price the market is willing to pay.

So yes, at Clark Brothers Ray White Nundah we do recommend your property be advertised on realestate.com.au. 99% of buyers will look here first and from there they will contact the listing agent.

Realestate.com.au is Australia’s number 1 property site, attracting an average of 18.6 million visitors each month[1]. The site can be accessed via computer and various mobile devices and we strongly advise that your property appears here but there is no need to spend additional dollars on an agency building profile or advertising campaign.

As long as your agent writes a great property description and the imagery show the best attributes of your property, your realestate.com.au listing will do the job of finding most of the people who would want to buy your property.

Beyond this, if your agent places advertising in local and metro papers with listed homes, don’t feel as though you are required to fund this. You won’t miss out on getting your property sold without it as this is more a campaign to advertise the agent than your property. However, if you are required to contribute to a marketing fund, ask for a breakdown of what’s included and be comfortable with it.

At Clark Brothers Ray White Nundah we do market your property but we go so far as to give your marketing funds back if we don’t expend it… we also don’t ask for the big amounts in the first place!

Just a little something to think about!

[1] Source: realestate.com.au – Nielsen Online Market Intelligence, Total Traffic, 3 month average for Nov 2012- Jan 2013.

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Clark Brothers Ray White Nundah

Serving Your Community

raywhitenundah.com.au

+61 7 3266 2055