How to Increase Your Homes Market Exposure

The first step to marketing your home is having it staged and professionally photographed. Once it has been professionally photographed you are ready to plan your marketing and start to pull together all of the different marketing materials. There are many different tools that I will use to market a property. Depending on the home and the target market I will pick and choose the right combination of tools. Some approaches work great for selling a home in Summerhill but is the completely wrong approach for selling a loft in Leslieville. Some of the tools that need to be used include: Feature Sheets, Newspaper ads, MLS listings, personal agent websites, company websites, affiliated corporate sites, syndicated sites, custom property websites, Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing. This is by no means a complete list, it is just the start.

Developing an extensive Feature Sheet is a true art form that requires a lot of time, but it is time very well spent. A flimsy black and white photocopy of a one page info sheet printed off of Realtor.ca just doesn’t cut it anymore. A proper feature sheet should answer every question a purchaser might come up with. It is drawn up and presented to the seller for approval before it goes to print.

In a high quality feature sheet there should be a room by room written description that catalogues the intimate details of the home. There should also be professional photographs, a property survey, a list of the average annual costs for utilities, a customised schedule B that protects the sellers interests, a neighbourhood summary, a list of exclusions and inclusions, and the appropriate contact information if they have any further questions.

It is very important to have an attractive, unique, detailed feature sheet because quite often this is the piece of marketing that makes the largest impact on the purchasing decision. It will hang around on the seller’s coffee table or dining room while they are comparing and contrasting the different homes they have seen.

Once the final approval for the feature sheet has been given an Agent should develop a Customized Web-Site with its own unique domain name and should reflect the information in the feature sheet. Property specific web sites are great for so many reasons. Through the use of analytic software you are able to understand exactly how users interact with your site. This will tell you a lot about what different aspects of the home are the most important to the average buyer. This knowledge can then be applied to the other aspects of the marketing mix. If the picture of the master bedroom gets clicked on 10 times more than the picture of the front of the house than you know which picture should be on the cover of your next direct mail piece.

You can also use the site to generate leads through creative calls to action. This platform also allows you to also share your home with the world. Someone locating to Toronto from the other side of the world will have an elaborate, interactive feature sheet right at their fingertips.

There are other really cool tools that can be added to the site that can increase the perceived value of the home. Some of these applications include designer software that allows a potential purchaser to manipulate photographs of the home. This lets them see what it would look like if they changed the clay tiles in the front hall to dark hardwood or change the kitchen counter from red Corian to black granite.

Other great online marketing approaches include Search Engine Optimization (SEO) so that the home’s website positions well for search terms related to the property. Another tactic that I typically use is Google Pay Per Click, this generates traffic faster than SEO. I will also usually integrate into my digital marketing mix videos and virtual tours.
The opportunities to effectively market a property online are tremendous. It seems that each day there is a new cool trick used in other industries that can be applied effectively to real estate. It is truly exciting being in this business at this time.

Agents must have a clear and defined plan for how the property will be displayed and marketed online. If they don’t than there is a tremendous amount of opportunity lost. Missing that opportunity comes at a steep cost to the client. A great stat from the National Association of Realtors states that 86% of home buyers are using the internet to search for their home. This was in 2008, this is certainly a figure that won’t plunge any time soon. Be sure to ask all prospective Agent how they would market your listing online.