When you’re working without a real estate agent you don’t have the luxury of someone regularly showing or recommending your property to potential buyers or posting on social media. That being said with ease of property searches online most home searches are done by the buyers themselves anyway. So when you’re selling your home yourself it’s important to know some of the best ways to market your property in order to get the most eye traffic and the largest number of competitive offers possible. So what are some of the most effective ways to get your property in front of the most amount of prospective buyers?

Take Amazing Home Photos

“A picture is worth a thousand words”, a phrase we’ve heard our entire lives but could never be more true. Considering that the first impression your property makes will most likely be an online listing the photos you take of your home are crucial. When you list your property with an agent you are relying on and putting your most valuable investment into the hands of a person who likely has almost ZERO experience in photography. You can always hire a professional photographer and it is by no means a bad idea but can eat into a bit of your profit. With the vast improvement in camera phone technology you can take extremely high quality photos directly from your phone. Just take your time to make sure your home is clean and inviting both inside and out. There is plenty of free software out there where you can make adjustments if needed. There are also plenty of tips and tricks that you can research to make your real estate photos look their best. Take a look at this article “How to Take Great Real Estate Photos”.

Construct an Engaging Listing.

We know that photos say a lot about your property. But the thing that makes something worth remembering is a great story. Stories captivate our imagination, it helps us envision ourselves being in a particular place or doing a particular thing. Every home has a story to tell. Give an accurate but compelling reason why someone imagines themselves with their family in “their” future home. Describe the location and the history of the neighborhood or the town. Talk about the babbling brook and beautiful autumn trees glistening in the sun. Be descriptive using terms like “spacious” eat-in kitchen, “custom” built cabinets or  “newly” remodeled master bath. We want to paint a picture of what their life would be like living in that home. Photos may be worth a thousand words but a great story creates a legacy.

Promote on Social Media

This is an obvious no-brainer. Social media is the easiest way to promote your property within your community. But the platform you use and how you use it can make a huge difference in the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Facebook still seems to be King when it comes to buying or selling online. You can even list your property directly to the platform and promote it there. One of the issues with listing on Facebook is that their algorithms have changed over the years and certain things get more traffic than others and their traffic on personal posts in general has taken a drastic decline. For example, posting to your own personal or business page will only reach somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of your followers… that’s right! So if you only have 500 friends on Facebook only 50 people are going to see it which typically results in about 10% engagement which means, “like”, “share”, or “comment”. That means only 5 people will engage with your post at all. So if your real estate agent is posting it on their page once or twice this is getting absolutely NO TRAFFIC! It’s useless. A way to combat this is to post numerous times, multiple times per day. An even better strategy is to get accepted by a “For-Sale-by” group within your county or community. Groups tend to get more traction, engagement and you have people there who are intentionally there looking to buy. An even better option is using a site like PurchaseHomeSales.com (yes, this is a shameless plug for our site) but you can not only create a great looking, engaging listing but it gets promoted every day on multiple platforms for FREE! We also tend to forget that not everyone is on social media and having your home on a listing site is very beneficial. Why again you should check out purchasehomesales.com (oops, I did it again).  Definitely a great option when looking to maximize your potential offers. 

Distribute Signs & Ads

An old fashioned open house is still a great idea for people to see your home in person and can allow you to field offers that same day. That being said, you have to let people know about the event. Again, posting on social media is great but also buy creative signage, distribute flyers door to door in your neighborhood and hopefully they will share the info with their friends or people they know. You can put up a brochure at the beauty shop, laundromat or put a listing in the local paper. All of these are classical ways of getting the word out and in many ways giving out something tangible can make a bigger impact because they have to hold it and are less likely to forget about it or just scroll on by or miss it altogether because of an algorithm change. 

So, can you successfully market your property to sell?

When you’re trying to sell your property, especially without an agent you have to market your home. This includes: taking great photos, creating an accurate and compelling description, promoting your property on social media and listing sites as well as handout hard flyers while putting up signs and holding open houses. The more traction you can generate for your property the more legitimate competitive offers you will get. It can be a lot of work but with modern technology you should have no problems creating a professional engaging listing and be able to maximize every bit of profit you can get.