Marketing Your Home On line
The days of marketing your home for sale in newspapers, magazines, radio and TV are slowly going by the way side. Sure you can still open up the Local Bellingham Sunday paper and one of the real estate magazines and find homes for sale, but that’s not where most buyers today spend their time looking for a home. The old ways of advertising your home with the media giants are slowly losing its appeal and advertising dollars instead to the speed, ease and comfort of the Internet.
When the market takes a down turn like were experiencing now in the local Bellingham WA housing market the natural tendencies are for sellers to expect more advertising dollars spent selling their home. So what usually happens, even today, is for sellers to look for their homes to be marketed in the Sunday newspaper, real estate magazines and do lots of open houses.
This might suffice the seller by seeing their home in a magazine, but to be honest, marketing dollars would be better spent if instead they went to marketing online. One month’s worth of advertising in a real estate magazine can easily cost from about $200 to $500 plus for one page. The sellers home is usually mixed in with 4-8 other homes on a single page where the real estate agent is showcasing the sellers property and of course that page competes for attention with 100 other pages easily.
As a seller, your far better off having your home on line where according to the National Association of Realtors, 78% of all buyers search for their next home. With the likes of of so many quality Realtor search engines on line, for searching real estate, it makes total sense to market your home on the medium of choice for most buyers today.
Think about the home search in the mind of today’s buyer. If you took two buyers and told one they could only use the Sunday paper, local real estate magazines and drive the neighborhoods where they wanted to live. The second buyer had total use of the Internet to surf anytime of the day, and had to forget about the print media. If I was a betting man, id say buyer two would have a clear advantage just because they would be right there when a brand new fresh listing hit the market. In many cases a listing will be marketed in print media and by the time it hits the news stands it’s already pending.
According to Mike Simonton, Senior Director at Fitch ratings he says, “it seems newspapers aren’t the vehicle of choice anymore. Instead, just as more buyers are doing their homework and researching for their next home online, sellers also are turning to the World Wide Web to get their home noticed.”
“There are some obvious benefits to some of the online search tools that are unavailable in a print product,” explains Simonton.
He says things such as being able to target geographic locations, target price range and the features they want make searching online for a home easier and faster. Ultimately, consumers can filter out homes they don’t want and search specifically for what they do want “in a much more sophisticated way than you’re able to do in a print product,” says Simonton.
Today your Realtor can put your home on their websites and feature the property with unlimited photos, detailed information, virtual tours, PDF files, and so much more. What an experienced Realtor can to today by utilizing the tools on line is really the way our market is moving.
When I first got into the real estate business back in the early 90’s, before the Internet, I remember all of our listings were in a thick MLS book and we always looked forward to that new copy once a week. I don’t think you can even find those big thick clunky books anymore at any of the state wide MLS boards.
This is the same slow death that the print media is experiencing today. Trust me, there are still some old timers out there, that would like to go back to the mls books, not this guy….smiling. Simonton has made some very interesting comments to think about when selling one’s home in today’s market and here are a few more:
The ink isn’t running dry in just the newspaper advertising world, “We’ve definitely seen an acceleration of advertising dollars toward the Internet and that’s going on across different mediums. The mediums that have been hurt the most are newspapers for sure, and then radio, broadcast television, Yellow Pages. Anything that’s traditional advertising has been hurt,” says Simonton.
However, real estate advertising in newspapers in some smaller local markets has not yet been affected but Simonton says the clock is ticking there as well.
“I think that as more people in these local markets use broadband some of the trends that we’re seeing in the larger markets will show up in the smaller markets in the future and it’s not so much that the smaller local markets are immune to these changes but these changes haven’t reached them yet,”
There is actually some lead time for newspapers and other mediums in the small markets. If they address the declining advertising revenues and start to move their content online they can help offset the loss in revenue by replacing it with a more real-time approach to advertising.
“Overtime they will need to have a very established online position in order to deal with the fact that most of the consumers in the market are using the Internet to get their information about what’s available in the local market,” explains Simonton.
For the price that’s currently being paid for print media in one month, a better solution is to build an on line presence instead where a sellers home could be on the Internet and virtually marketed 24/7 at much more affordable prices. It’s just my opinion and my two cents…
Market your home today with Bellingham Real Estate - Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group.