Where are the Buyers?
by Amanda Cornelius

According to the recent study conducted by the National Association of Realtors®, 84% of homebuyers now use the internet to search for homes. Although getting your properties online can be a daunting and somewhat time consuming venture, now more than ever, you need to have a comprehensive online marketing plan. A free posting on CRAIGSLIST.org will go a long way towards showing your clients and prospects that you know where the buyers are.
 
Another good idea is to get a Google Adwords account. Here you can bid on search terms also known as “keywords”. If a prospect enters one of your “keywords” into the Google search box, your listing will appear in the sponsored search results. The higher the bid, the better the placement.  The key to success in this arena is to make sure to target your keywords. Don’t bid on keywords such as “Los Angeles Real Estate.” Terms like these are too broad and can cost you a small fortune in unwanted traffic. For best results, use terms like “3 bedroom home in North Hollywood”. If someone on Google types in a variation of that search term, your website is likely to appear. Tactics like this can also help you on your listing presentations. Showing your prospects that your listings are easy to find on Google is likely to impress any seller.
 
Creating a next generation virtual tour like the HDZoom tour offered by RealBiz360 enables you to showcase your listing in a beautiful full screen format and lets viewers Zoom in to see the incredible detail of high resolution images.
 
Do your listings have their own website? Building a single property website (425MapleAve.com) for each of your listings is one of the simplest things you can do to keep sellers happy and keep buyers interested. ListingDomains.com, the leading property website provider, will automatically feed your listing data to several property portals like Trulia and Zillow, and they include a tool that allows for easy posting to CRAIGSLIST.
 
What Buyers value most
86%    Photos
84%    Detailed Property Information
68%    Virtual Tours
45%    Agents Contact Information
44%    Community Information
 
Educate your clients
Next time your clients push you to get an expensive newspaper ad, make sure they know that only 3% of buyers found their home in the newspaper. Juxtapose this with the fact that 29% found their home online*. Then ask them where they think you should be concentrating your marketing budget. By educating your sellers you can save thousands in fruitless advertising expenses.
 
*The 2008 National Association of REALTORS® profile of home buyers and sellers.