21st Century Real Estate: Use a Blog to Sell Your Home

This is an excellent idea. I actually did something similar to sell a car once. By leveraging the blog’s features you can add pictures, virtual tours (doesn’t have to be a fancy 360-degree IPIX tour, just walk your house taking some video, upload to YouTube, and embed on your blog). One word of caution, if your home is still occupied, or is staged with expensive electronics, etc, try to avoid showing these off in your multimedia – could attract someone to your home interested in more than just looking!

Recently selling and buying a house makes this post relevant… my experiences:

This could be a good idea, but if you are going with an agent rather than a FSBO, they should be handling all of this for you. Most people are quite bad at photographing, staging and generally marketing their house (there are exceptions of course).
We just sold our house (2 days ago) and had a great experience due to an outstanding agent. A professional “stager” helped setup our house (remove lots of furniture and personal affects to temporary storage), a professional real estate photographer took the photos, and a good marketing campaign, all paid for by the agent – prior to it even going on the market. We also invested a few thousand dollars to update the house and make it more attractive.

That, plus correct pricing, helped us get our house under contract in 3 days in a bidding war between 2 parties that got us 5% more than we were expecting when we first thought about selling.

On the flip side, we bought a house that had it’s own website, but was staged and photographed poorly, overpriced originally – and therefore sat on the market for a year. We got a great deal and the seller sold for 65% of the original asking price.

Ask for recommendations of agents – don’t go with a friend or an acquaintance… It’s the biggest purchase you will make.

Hobby’s Blogger site is really nice.

We’re using also using Blogger and Twitter to help get the word out about our home in Bluffton, SC (between Hilton Head and Savannah).

Here’s the blog: http://1fairwaydrive.com

Here’s the Twitter: http://twitter.com/1fairwaydrive

We now have a renter in place for a year. With the price where it is and rates where they are, 1 Fairway Drive is a great buy.

Thanks for the tip, we’re currently selling our home by owner but I may try this out as well. I’m using zillow.com and craigslist right now for online presence.

When it comes to selling a home in today’s market, my feeling is that marketing only accounts for maybe 10% of your overall chances of getting the home sold. Anything beyond your listing agent takes a decent set of pictures (i.e. – not from a cameraphone), puts it on the local MLS, and puts up a yard sign most likely has severely diminishing returns.

I’d put another 10-20% or so on having the home in good condition (give it a fresh coat of paint, clean it up, maybe even stage it, etc.).

The remaining 70-80% of getting your home sold is price. No amount of marketing, through blog or otherwise is going to move a poorly-priced home. Period.

This real estate agent puts the concept into a succinct 2-minute video: http://realestatezebra.com/how-to-sell-your-home-in-black-and-white

that’s a smart idea. I would have just said make a simple website about your house – even people who don’t know how to make websites can save a Word document as a webpage if they know how to upload it.

but I am sure that a blog would do a better job if set up nicely because you can format them again without any knowledge of web design.

I sold my house on craigslist and it was great. I was really irritated that I had even spent the money to put an ad in the newspaper when my buyer came from a free ad. But then I patted myself on the back for not losing 10% of the value to a realtor.

Price is the driver. The folks behind us have had their property on the market for over a year. No offers. Not one. Zippo. Nada. Zilch. It’s listed at $350K over Zillow.

If you price a property correctly, it will sell. I don’t think you need to be a rocket scientist to figure that out.

Bozo

We sold our house 1.3 years ago. The agent was not the smartest but she had a professional take pictures and a 360 of all the rooms and outside the house. A marine in Iraq so the pictures and had his wife go by and see the house. She fell in love with the house. We got it sold just before the housing crash. We stayed out of the market all of last year (2007). When we started to look for a house, we only looked at places that had a lot of pictures. No pictures, no drive by or anything. So we will add this information to the databank. Thanks.

Very clever idea . . . but things being what they are creative selling ideas will bubble to the surface.

This shows how the web is becoming a mandatory marketing avenue. I think it also shows how realtors really aren’t worth the hefty costs they charge.

With a decent digital and a little time, you can create the optimal marketing brochure (blog) and market it through social networks and search engines. If your state allows FSBOs to upload to the MLS, then you will still get traffic that way.

I have used realtors and done the FSBO thing, and I prefer FSBO. Much cheaper and I was able to sit at a table with the buyer and negotiate face-to-face.

Of course, if you are moving to a new area, then I could see using a realtor to buy. Just remember, realtors only get paid if a deal is done. So they aren’t completely working in your best interests. The housing bubble confirms this fact.

J.D.,

Having a link to a website the homeowner has constructed can be a major enhancement to a listing. He can give a lot of inside info about the house and neighborhhod, along with a host of pictures. Still, for maximum benefit, it ought to be kept businesslike, without including too much personal emotion in it.

This is the town I live in – Columbia. I looked at a house near lake Elkhorn also. It’s a great area but with many houses for sale in Columbia, this family obviously set the pictures and descriptions ahead of the pack with this blog. I am always happy when someone highlights his/her home with additional descriptions and photos. It’s amazing how many people list their houses with:
-Bad photos
-few photos
-no responses to requests for photos (except “come on by”) – not realizing that photos are actually the way house-hunters prioritize their time

I recently visited a house located 1 block away on the same lake, and I would have missed that house listed if the rental agent didn’t mention the words “the view”: lakeside view from the deck.

I hope David Hobby sees my comment to see how well he did this. Congrats – I hope he sells soon.

Pictures, descriptions, sizes, maps, and nearby attractions are all important. (Conversely, homeowners who lie about features in ads will be met with angry home-hunters).