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21st Century Real Estate: Use a Blog to Sell Your Home Print
Saturday, 25th April 2009 (by J.D.)This article is about Hints and Tips, House and Home, Money Hacks
David Hobby at Strobist recently posted an interesting article describing how to use a blog to sell your house.
Hobby and his wife have outgrown their townhouse in Columbia, Maryland, and are looking to move on. But typical real-estate brochures and marketing are often woefully inadequate. (I was just mocking a real-estate flyer last night, in fact.) Hobby decided that he could enhance his marketing by using a free Blogger blog to create a nice on-line brochure.
He writes:
When your house gets listed in the Multiple Listing Service by your broker, (or you may have to buy into that somehow if you are attempting a FSBO) give them a good selection of most of your best photos.
Then request a link that says, “For more photos, go to [YOUR BLOG URL].” This will draw people from the visually restricted MLS format to your splashier, picture-heavy site.
You may wish to buy classifieds in the local newspaper, or perhaps on Craigslist. In that case, it may make sense to spring for that $10 dot-com URL to keep it neater.
Real-estate brochures often fail to highlight your home’s best features. They’re created by a rushed real-estate agent who has never lived in your house. By contrast, Hobby’s home-sale site is filled with great hyperlinked information (schools, nearby restaurants, a Google map, etc.). It offers more photos and text than you could find in other sources.
If, like me, you find this idea intriguing, go read how Hobby built the site.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:23 am
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!
April 25th, 2009 at 5:41 am
In addition to the above comment, you want to make sure you are dealing with qualified buyers.
This is one reason why it’s great to use a real estate agent and a listing service. Your realtor should be screening to make sure people or qualified.
Non-qualified buyers can waste a lot of time and also cause a lot of emotional stress. They can lead you on and potentially cause you to make decisions based on the fact that you thought they were serious buyers.
It’s not that this is a horrible idea, but you have to ensure you are prepared.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:41 am
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.
April 25th, 2009 at 9:12 am
That website is excellently done! The photographs are absolutely outstanding and really show off the townhouse nicely. If I were in the market I definitely would consider this place over any other - just beceause the website has SO much information that buyers want before they bother going to see it in person. That website MAKES me want to see it in person!!
April 25th, 2009 at 11:32 am
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.
April 25th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
i love it that two of my favorite blogs have collided!
i started reading strobist about a year ago (after a USA Today article) and Davids photography thoughts/tips are amazing!!
i forget how i stumbled upon GRS (Im a CPA and love some good personal finance reading) but keep up the good work!
April 25th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
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.
April 25th, 2009 at 4:24 pm
Wow, he did an amazing job. I’m not planning to sell my house anytime soon, but thanks for sharing. That was fun to see.
April 25th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
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
April 25th, 2009 at 6:50 pm
Great idea! I will mimic this for sure, my house is currenty on the market. My realtor is just okay, this is a great way for me to take some initiative that doesn’t step on her toes too badly. Thanks as always for great content!
April 25th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
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.
April 25th, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Great idea for how to sell your house.
@Manvsdebt: An idea for gaining qualified leads might be to print up some business cards with contact details and the blogger address to give to people who might be interested in your house.
You can set up a contact us page on Blogger using a free wufoo.com form that requires text, email, phone and name (more if you need it). This could help you to qualify potential buyers much more quickly through the filtering process.
@quinsy, you could use a custom template to give blogger a nice professional look within 10-20 minutes. I recently did this for my own blog, and am very happy with the results.
Interesting to see how people are becoming creative given the current economic climate.
April 25th, 2009 at 8:20 pm
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
April 26th, 2009 at 12:20 am
That’s a neat idea. It helps that the photography is great. The thing that puzzles me is the hand-sketched floor plan. After putting in all this effort to make the blog, it couldn’t be that hard to use some free design software (or just Paint) to make a nicer diagram. It’s better than nothing, though; I really like to see floor plans to visualize the space.
Anyway, I can see how this blog could improve their chances of selling their house, because this would really appeal to me as a buyer. I like to do preliminary research online, and I might skip over a listing with one or two blurry photos and little information.
April 26th, 2009 at 4:59 am
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.
April 26th, 2009 at 5:25 am
My friend met with some realtors but found them frustrating to work with and decided to sell on her own. She built a web site with some excellent photos, spread some flyers around town and listed her web site on Craiglist. She had an offer within a week! Check out the site if you’d like:
http://www.talltree.us/1300Livingston
April 26th, 2009 at 5:50 am
Very clever idea . . . but things being what they are creative selling ideas will bubble to the surface.
April 26th, 2009 at 9:05 am
Great idea BUT, our local MLS does not allow links within the MLS w/ Realtor information, so I personally would not be allowed to link to a site like that or any other site with Realtor advertising and if you have advertising up it has to have the Realtor information, or I as the Realtor can get in trouble. Great for other advertising options though.
April 26th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
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.
April 26th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
This is a great idea that is gaining much more traction as the market continues to shift and Sellers and Realtors are looking for ways to differentiate their properties from all of the competition.
Two thoughts - Tim and Daniel are right - it’s about price. *Everything* is about price in this market.
Second, a lot of MLS’ (such as mine( prevent these single-listing websites from being put into the MLS because they don’t want to have links to *anything* outside of the MLS.
Luckily, if you do the blog/site correctly, when the buyers google the address, your site should come up pretty high.
GThis is a post a client of mine wrote - step 7 in her research process is driving/walking by the house.
*I’m not posting the link for any reason other than I think it’s a great explanation of how an active buyer is using the web
April 26th, 2009 at 2:45 pm
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.
April 27th, 2009 at 4:49 am
This is really a great idea.
My husband and I did the same thing to sell all our stuff (including two cars) before we moved out of US in January this year. We just posted our blog URL on craigslist with the subject “Moving Sale” and listed a few major items in the details and saying “heavy discounts”. The blog had all the pictures, details and price information for each item (yes, even the very small things).
We were successfully able to sell most of the high value stuff within a couple of weeks - way earlier than we expected
April 27th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
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).
October 29th, 2009 at 10:55 am
Great idea!! I also use free flyer maker websites. There are alot out there which synchronized my published properties to other real estate websites. I sold a few homes within a week