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Eric Robbins

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Benefits of Listing Your House with Mary Robbins

12-09-10
Eric Robbins
As if you needed another reason? Here's her marketing muscle:

5 Comments
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To stage or not to stage

03-19-10
Eric Robbins

The 2010 RESA (Real Estate Staging Association) reports that houses that are marketed without staging, removed from the market and then reintroduced with staging spend a significantly lower amount of time on the market. However, the study makes no mention of whether the houses were put back on the market at the same price or a lower price. I would think that most houses that get reintroduced to the market have a lower price than earlier listed. Could that be a factor in the shorter market times?

Honestly, I believe under the right market conditions, staging is a
major benefit to selling a home quickly. People are visual and seeing a
cluttered house detracts from visualizing their new home. Maybe it even
reminds them of their old, cluttered home - the one they no longer want
to live in. And as for empty homes, they're lonely and uninviting.

However, when the bubble is getting hot there is more demand than
supply. Staging isn't as important during this period since buyers are
in a feeding frenzy. However, staging still helps drive those multiple
offers and the price. When the market is down, you just want to get feet
on the floor.

Last comment and I'll shut up finally! But this is the most important
piece to all this. If you are selling in 2010, you are marketing on the
Internet where 90% of buyers do their research. That means they are
looking at pictures and videos of all the houses that meet their
requirements. If a house looks shoddy, they simply click to the next
one!

Of course, I have a vested interest in those pictures and videos looking
good...that's my business. But I also have a vested interest in helping
my clients - agents and sellers - to move their homes quickly. To
accomplish that, I prefer a staged home.

9 Comments
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Rizzle-Dizzle Listing Presentations

03-17-10
Eric Robbins

Stupid title but it got your attention, no?

If you are one of those agents sold on the benefits of staging, than this post is for you. If you're going to invest in staging a home right, make sure you get the most mileage by producing a home tour video. You will reach more buyers and your seller will love your marketing-savvy. And because your video lives on the Internet long after your listing sells, you continue to benefit and your ROI keeps going up-up-up!

But an even better tack is to highlight your staging and video marketing during the listing presentation to get the business. Are any of your competitors doing this? If they are, what's your counter-punch? Here's your counter-punch: free tech-savvy presentation materials (.ppt,.mov).

3 Comments
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Listing property on Facebook

03-04-10
Eric Robbins

Sure, you can post your listings directly onto your personal Facebook profile but this can alienate your friends who are not in the market for a home. Here are a few other methods for marketing your new listings on Facebook (don't forget to trumpet this service in your listing presentations):

1. Create a Group or Fan Page and post your listings there. This is FREE but can take some time to populate with friends and fans. Video-YES

2. Widen your net and post your listing on the Facebook Marketplace. Facebook launched the marketplace in May 2007 but with few adopters, it retooled with the help of Craig Donato, CEO of Oodle.com. This new format launched recently, so the juice is concentrated for early adopters - there are few agents doing this and it's FREE! Video-NO

3. Create a Facebook Ad and target Facebook users by city, age, gender and education level. Choose a headline that is accurate, yet disarming, and a photo that shows off the best feature of the house in high detail. A buyer who clicks on this ad can be sent to any landing page you desire - the property or agent URL makes the most sense. However, you could also send it to one of your Facebook pages so the buyer can interact more easily with you. You could link to the listing video in your profile videos or link to your Facebook Marketplace listing. Cost is minimal - $1 can get you 5,000 impressions or more. Video-YES

For more advice like this, please join the Mimicc Real Estate Marketing Lab.

Eric Robbins, Chief Storyteller
Look Ma! and New Rulez Marketing




11 Comments
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What is a green house agent?

02-28-10
Eric Robbins

There are two ethics being addressed with this question:

  1. How is an agent personally green?
  2. What does the agent know about green building and houses?

Question #2 is certainly more identifiable and measurable. NAR's Green Resource Council has a designation designed to help agents get knowledgeable about green housing issues and to subsequently market themselves as having said knowledge. Clearly there is value here both to the agent and the consumer. But what isn't as clear is to what extent a consumer is persuaded to work with a green agent based on 3rd party designations. There are certainly consumers out there who seek out green houses but do they really care about the green agent when their last agent proved capable and trustworthy? I don't know the answer but I suspect 'trustworthy' wins out over 'green' much of the time.

Question #1 is more interesting because it requires an agent to make sacrifices that put him/her at a competitive disadvantage to other agents. If you use your car less or stop altogether, you can't visit clients as much and we all know how important it is to be seen by our clients. If you go completely paperless, you stop doing direct mail and your competitors will be seen more often. And so the big question becomes, do consumers care that you lowered your carbon footprint? How would they even know unless you visited them more often or sent them direct mail?

This is issue is near and dear to my heart so I wanted to dedicate some brainstorming on how to best serve the consumer's green needs and how to overcome the competitive disadvantage that is created in personally going green.

What do you think? Feel free to respond here or join me in the Mimicc Real Estate Marketing Lab where we have dedicated a group to this topic.

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