Are you doing enough to promote real estate listings online?
An estimated 93% of buyers use the internet to search for a home. If online promotion isn’t a critical component of your current marketing plan, you’re leaving money on the table and doing your sellers a disservice.
Promoting listings online is about more than entering them in the MLS for syndication to home search websites. Sure, it’s a first step, but there’s so much more you can be doing!
Here are ten ways to promote real estate listings online.
1. Invest in Professional Photos
Your listing photos give your prospective buyers their first impression of your listing. Poorly lit, ill-composed photos don’t do your listing justice, especially in the highly-competitive online space where buyers are giving listings only a few seconds before adding them to favorites or dismissing them entirely. That’s why homes with professional listing photos sell 32% faster than those without!
Even if professional photos aren’t standard at mid-range price points in your market, give them a try. It may cost you a little money out-of-pocket, but it can also give you a serious competitive advantage in your listing presentation!
2. Write a Compelling Listing Description
Like your listing photos, your listing description gives your prospective buyers an introduction to your listing, and these first impressions matter when there are so many listings to be seen online.
Make the most of your listing description by selling the lifestyle the home provides instead of just selling the property. Instead of This home offers a gourmet kitchen with new appliances and ample counter space, try You’ll enjoy preparing healthy, delicious meals in this gourmet kitchen with all new appliances and plenty of counter space. Get people to imagine living their best life in this home.
3. Do a Personal Video Tour
As wonderful as professional photos and engaging descriptions are, they don’t bring a property to life like a video tour. Video is a hot way to promote real estate listings online in today’s market. In fact, video is projected to represent 82% of all online traffic by 2021.
Video tours don’t need to be complicated or expensive to produce. Simply take your smartphone and walk viewers through the home. You could even mount your phone to your car’s dashboard and drive through the neighborhood to give a quick neighborhood tour.
4. Add a 360-Degree Photo to Google Street View
With the Google Street View app, you can create your own 360-degree photo of the ground floor of your listing and upload it instantly.
This gives Google more content to index for this property address, so when someone Googles the address, this 360 view will be viewable on Google
Images and Google Maps. It’s a small detail, but the more information you can give buyers in the digital world, the more likely they are to take action in the real world
5. Take Advantage of Digital Catalogs
Digital catalogs take the fun and excitement of the old home-hunter listing booklets and bring that feeling into the modern age.
You can subscribe your client base to receive a monthly digital catalog via email, full of your attention-grabbing listing photos, articles of local interest, and promotions for your real estate brokerage. Even cooler, the catalogs are branded to your businesses, so your imaging is immediately visible right on the cover.
These catalogs also make a great listing presentation tool: your prospective sellers will be impressed with the professional quality and will want to have their home featured in such a polished publication. And they’re a great way to stay top of mind with your client base year-round!
6. Post to Your Social Media Accounts
Social media is a natural place to promote real estate listings online. 47% of Realtors® note that social media brings in the highest quality leads compared to other sources! But, for goodness’ sake, don’t just post a link to the listing and call it a day!
Social media is all about engagement. To make the most of your post, find a way to get people involved. Ask for feedback (ie. If you were to buy this house
, would you keep the classic kitchen fixtures or upgrade to something more modern?); everyone loves to share their opinion! And the more comments you get, the more exposure you’ve generated for your listing.
7. Boost Your Posts
To get your social posts seen by a wider group, consider boosting your posts for just a few dollars. It’s an inexpensive way to get more eyeballs to your listing. Depending on the social platform, you may even be able to choose certain demographics (like location) to get your post in front of people who are most likely to like, comment, and share your post.
Adding Tag a friend you think would love this home can be an effective way to get more comments and shares as well! And encourage the agents in your brokerage to support each other on social media. Sometimes it takes a few comments to get the ball rolling.
8. Share Your Posts to Groups
Over the last several years, groups have become popular on social platforms. Even Pinterest has group boards that several people contribute too and potentially thousands of people follow. You can join groups relevant to your local a
rea and share your listing posts to these groups for additional exposure.
When choosing groups, it might be best to avoid real estate specific groups, which are generally comprised of industry insiders instead of buyers and sellers. Try neighborhood information groups and local interest groups instead.
9. Create a Property Landing Page on Your Website
If you really want to wow your prospective sellers at the listing presentation, offer to promote real estate listings on a unique property landing page of your website. With many of today’s website providers, creating and publishing landing pages is a fairly quick and easy process. There are professionally designed templates available, so you just have to upload your listing photos, copy-and-paste your listing description, and click publish!
If you run your site on Wordpress, most premium real estate design themes offer property page templates. Providers like Easy Agent Pro, Unbounce, and LeadPages also offer easy-to-use property landing pages for the tech-challenged agent.
10. Consider Promoting on Aggregator Sites
A final option to promote real estate listings online is to sponsor your listings on aggregator sites like Zillow, Trulia, and Redfin. By paying a fee, you can get your listing featured more prominently than other search results. Like it or not, these home search sites are the first place most buyers go. You can take a stand against them by refusing to pay into their business model. Or you can embrace them and use them to promote your listings. It’s your decision.
Because this is one of the more expensive options, you need to make sure it pays off. Check your analytics regularly to see how many clicks you’re getting on these sites and if they’re actually converting from leads to clients and closings.
With so many prospective buyers online, you can’t afford not to promote real estate listings online! Treat this list of ideas as a checklist for your next listing and watch how quickly it sells.
