When a Toronto home owners decides that the time is right to sell their property, the process can become overwhelming. Using effective marketing techniques can mean the difference between a house hunter walking away or making an offer. Leveraging multiple marketing channels allows sellers to draw a larger group of potential buyers.
1. Building a Solid Foundation with Home Staging
The first step is using home staging to effectively showcase the property. A home staged to its full potential allows buyers to feel comfortable and connect with the space. They should be able to picture their family and friends enjoying the home. To achieve this goal, the seller ensure rooms are clean, free of clutter, and free of personal items. A professional home stager typically advises painting walls with neutral colors. Chunky over-sized furniture is removed to achieve more space. The remaining furniture is rearranged to create a natural flow. Window dressings, wall décor, and other details help create the right blend of color and texture to deliver a warm welcoming space.
2. Using Professional Photography to Impact Multi-media Markets
When the link between your property and a potential buyer relies on a photo, it should show the property at its best. Let’s be clear – essentially all of the marketing material used to support a home sale relies on photos. In order to deliver the highest positive impact, sellers should really use a professional photographer. Considering the modest cost, it just makes financial sense. Almost all buyers browse the MLS.ca website. A quality professional photo not only creates a solid first impression, but also has the potential to draw more showings. The reverse is true if your real estate agent decides to forego the cost and use low quality grainy photos for their marketing material.
3. Tapping into Technology to Appeal to a Large Audience
In addition to uploading their virtual tours and key property stats to MLS.ca, more and more real estate agents are also uploading their videos to YouTube and other similar sites such as Vimeo, in an attempt to reach a larger audience. This just makes sense, when you consider that YouTube is perhaps the second largest search engine, with over 201 billion videos viewed per month as of the end of 2011 – see here. Virtual tours on agent sites are still effective, but typically draw a limited number of views.
4. Spreading the Message through Social Networking
Facebook Fan pages are quickly becoming the norm for many professionals. Besides providing free exposure, social networks appeal to a huge audience. So, let’s talk huge. Facebook currently is approaching 1,000,000,000 users and Twitter has just surpassed 500,000,000 users.
5. Launching an Address-Specific Website to Attract Buyers
An increasing number of agents are launching listing-specific websites. In other words, this microsite has the URL of the home address and contains the virtual tour and other marketing material. While this can look fairly impressive, one shouldn’t expect to receive much traffic or many leads as a result of using this tactic. Given that it requires relatively little effort, it is a tactic that is employed among others.
Considering each of these marketing tactics will help sellers draw more potential buyers, and hopefully lead to a more successful sale.
