Selling Your Own Home In A Tough Real Estate Market - Five Tips
If you are in a tough real estate market and are looking to sell your home quickly, you might want to consider doing a For Sale By Owner. My wife and I recently bought a new house and after trying unsuccessfully to sell our existing house through a real estate agent for several months decided to try For Sale by Owner. We found a buyer within four days and closed on the house three weeks later. However, through our experience we discovered a few things. Here are a few tips if you are considering a FSBO in a less than ideal real estate market. 1. Consider paying to have your home placed in the MLS. There are several companies out there that will do this for a few hundred dollars. With sales down, real estate agents are desperate to earn a commission. By putting the house in the MLS you are agreeing that if an agent brings a buyer to you that you will pay the agent their part of the commission (you still save the listing agents commission). If you can sell the house on your own with no agent then you won’t have to pay an agent. However, in a tough market you want as many possible eyes on your property as possible. 2. Get the word out to as many places as possible about your house. One of the best places to do this is on the internet. There are dozens of free websites that will allow you to post your house for free. Consider starting with craigslist since it has so much traffic and then spread out to the other sites on the net. It will probably take you an entire evening to get the house posted on all the sites and you will want to keep a spreadsheet with your usernames and passwords so that you can go back later and remove the listing once the house sells. 3. Design a professional looking flyer and put out for sale by owner signs and a flyer box. If you aren’t the artistic type and don’t know that much about designing things like flyers consider a site like vflyer which will give you templates for designing a flyer. Take some good pictures of the house with your digital camera and put them on the flyer. If you use Vflyer or a program like it you can probably use the same template to post the house to craigslist and ebay (if you decide to pay for a listing). 4. Be creative. When we put our house on the market we ordered an eight foot full color printed banner to put on our fence. Our house backed to a major street and we were able to get some major exposure from the banner. I have heard of people offering free vacations, big screen tvs, cash bonus’ to the listing agent and even a free car. I have also heard of people giving away a cool prize at their open house. These things can help get your house noticed which is the first step to getting it sold. 5. Make sure that your price is competitive. Consider using the money that you are saving on real estate commissions to cut the price of your house so that it is more competitive. In tough markets it is going to be very important that your house isn’t priced too high or people will find another option. In our area there were a ton of houses on the market and most of the houses that were selling were 5% or more undervalued. If that is what it takes you might need to swallow hard and cut the price of your house. Of course all of these things are just suggestions. Still, when things get tough and you need to sell your house these could be an option for you. They worked for us.Jeff McRitchie is the director of marketing for MyBinding.com and lives in Hillsboro, Oregon. He writes extensively on topics related to Binding Machines, Binding Supplies, Report Covers, Binders, Index Tabs, Laminators, Laminating Pouches, Roll Film, Shredders, and Paper Handling Equipment.
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The Top 5 Reasons to Use Real Estate Flyer Templates
In difficult real estate markets (such as today’s market), it’s crucial for agents to lean out their marketing costs, yet at the same time, improve their brand identity and become efficient and well-known as an agent. One of the best ways to do this is by utilizing real estate flyer templates when creating marketing for their property listings. Real estate flyer templates are pre-designed marketing flyers, which agents open in an editing program like Microsoft Publisher or Adobe Photoshop, insert their property’s photos and description, then save and print for use in open houses and for various marketing efforts. Here are the top five advantages to using real estate flyer and brochure templates: 1. Unlimited Use — A successful top producing agent is constantly looking to promote their “just listed” or “just sold” listings.  What better way to create marketing material then to have your own flyer template? As soon as you list a property, just load up the template, drop in the photos and description text, and you’re set. Then, after you sell the property, simply load up the “just listed” template, change it to “just sold,” and change the price to the sale price. Now you have an excellent marketing flyer that you can distribute to your farm area to gain credibility and show off your latest sale. 2. Consistent Brand Image — A key characteristic of a top producing agent is familiarity.  All of the top agent’s marketing material has a consistent design theme, a certain “look” that differentiates them from other agents in the area. Agents that use plain flyers don’t create that signature brand image that the well known agents have. Consistently using a specific high-quality flyer template that is unique can help prospects in your area associate that look with you and allow you to cultivate a strong and recognizable brand image. 3.  Lower Marketing Cost — Many agents invest large amounts of money each month for marketing services and programs only to end up not using them because they are just too complicated or time consuming. Other agents end up hiring designers or marketing assistants to help them organize and implement their marketing campaigns, which is also very costly. Using flyer templates, agents pay a one time upfront fee for the templates (often less than the price of one hour or work by a designer) and are able to use that template for the rest of their real estate career without incurring anymore design fees. 4.  Easy Printing — Printing can be a major source of headaches for an agent, especially if they are trying to do it all themselves. Worrying about bleed lines, file formats, and document sizes is not an agent’s specialty. The good thing about professionally created real estate templates is that the printing specifications are built into the template and are, therefore, already taken care of. Simply update the template with new photos and text each time you use it, and send it off to your print shop (or your own printer). By using the same template each time you print, you can get any print discrepancies taken care of the first time you use that template, then just save it and re-use it over and over again. This helps you maintain consistent print settings which allows for easy and hassle free printing. 5. Fast Speed of Implementation — Another key characteristic of a top producer is speed. Agents that consistently get new listing are fast with everything they do. Many times these top producers have a team that they delegate marketing and administrative work to, which allows them to get more things done quicker. If you don’t have your own team to help you, you can still match these top producers in speed by creating your own efficient marketing system using pre-made flyer templates. Once you get a new listing, take the photos and load them into your brochure template, and get them printed. Having a routine down can allow you to focus your efforts where it matters most and using professionally designed real estate flyer templates is a key component in becoming a successful and efficient top producing agent. To download a professional real estate flyer template package, visit TurnKeyFlyers.comReuben Fine is the creator of TurnkeyFlyers.com, an online resource that helps real estate agents with their marketing by providing downloadable real estate flyer templates, easy-to-understand video tutorials, and useful sales and marketing articles.
Source: www.ArticlePros.com