When it comes to listing your home, marketing matters. That’s why we create a strategic marketing plan for each home we’re entrusted to sell. Our approach is multilayered and personalized. We start with the property itself. We define the strengths and weaknesses of the property, keeping the viewpoint of a potential buyer in mind. Our recommended pre-market prep is different for each property, specifically designed to accentuate the strengths and address the weaknesses through subtle improvements, changes, cleaning and staging. Once we have the home ready for market we develop a communications plan to reach the potential buyers and build interest in the home that is unique to the situation at hand.
Here are some of the tools in our toolkit and how we’ve used them in customized ways to make a big impact for our past clients:
Staging
If a seller has already moved out of the property, staging (pictured below) can really help give buyers a feel for how to use the space. But even if sellers are remaining in residence until closing, partial staging can help enhance a home’s features.
In the case of our clients Kyla and Ben, their funky but elevated aesthetic really set their home apart. Rather than white-washing the home, we embraced their unique style. We recommended multiple light fixture upgrades, painting, decluttering, and re-arrangement of furniture to take their style even further. And it worked! Their home (pictured below) was featured in Apartment Therapy and went under contract in four days, for $18k over asking, after receiving six offers!
When full staging is the best option to sell a home, we work with our preferred staging partner with whom we have a very close relationship. We’re able to share our strategy and work with her to make sure that the furniture isn’t generic, but specifically accentuates the aspects of the home we would like to showcase.
Photography
The photos of a home are the first thing most buyers see as they look at digital listings. We make sure that the photos of properties we sell are beautiful, reflect the strategic attributes we want to emphasize, and are beyond the standard photos you might see – often engaging photographers who can take “lifestyle” or “magazine” style images of the details in a home. We work with a number of preferred professional photographers to capture each home in the best possible way for the property. When appropriate we use 3D tours, 2D layouts, video tours, and more. It all depends on the property!
Social Media
Social media is an important component of our plan. Homes may not be sold on Instagram, but we find that we get much more interest in properties that are well promoted in social media. And the more interest, the more possible buyers! We work to ensure that our Instagram features a property at all stages of the sales process from “coming soon” to “for sale” to “under contract” to “sold.” We develop reels and other videos that often go viral. The keys to our success in social media are using great photography—almost everything we use is professionally shot by our photography partners—and understanding the strategy to sell the home and making sure that the social media we produce emphasizes the key elements of the home we are hoping to accentuate.
Professional postcards
In some cases, we recommend sending a professional postcard—which we design and have printed on high quality card stock—to the neighborhood in which the home is located, announcing the home’s listing, and possibly inviting neighbors to a special neighborhood exclusive open house. By doing this, we hope to catch the early eye of someone who may have admired the seller’s home and has it on their dream home list—or who knows someone else who wants to move to their neighborhood! You never know who might be waiting to snag a home they never imagined would come on the market.
Copywriting
The writing of the house listing copy—you know, those descriptions that end up on all the search engines that talk about charm and feature a home’s amenities—is also important. It should be easy to read and showcase a home’s strongest and best features as defined by our strategic plan. We’re not just listing off attributes of the property, but trying to show the buyer how they could actually live in the home. We have a professional writer on our team who lovingly writes this copy to give a seller’s home the best and most personalized written description possible.
We got you
We have other tricks up our sleeve too, such as super short offer windows, which can drive up interest in a property that’s coming soon, receptions for agents, and receptions for local neighbors to get a sneak peak of the property. We play each listing by ear so that we can do justice with the home that’s been entrusted to us.
Have questions or want to know how we’d propose listing your home? Reach out to schedule a no strings attached meeting or call!