From Homescape

Earlier this week I received a phone call from a desperate a homeowner looking to home staging as a marketing solution to help sell his $499,000 townhouse. The property had been on the market for over a year. Right from the start, the caller was frank and wanted to make sure I knew that when compared to similar-sized units for sale in his development, his townhouse was the most expensive. He also wanted to make sure I understood the price difference was due to the fact that his property had been totally gutted and extensively remodeled, including the kitchen and baths. So while the properties were all the same size on the inside and looked the same on the outside, he’d added some fancy upgrades during his occupancy.

Needle in a haystack
Intrigued to know what I’d be working with, I wanted to take a little sneak peek and pop over to the listing Realtor’s Web site. I asked the seller for the name of his Realtor and the name of the firm he sold for. I never heard of the company he was working with. So I did a quick Google search to find the Realtor’s site. To my surprise, NOTHING came up.

Neither the real estate company nor the Realtor had a Web site to market themselves or their listings. While it is a bit odd, it was a small real estate company, and after all, there are other online-marketing options available to Realtors for their listings.

Luckily, the seller happened to know his property’s MLS number. With no other place to go to view the property online, I did what I’ve done before, and I went to an online listing site to search for the property. At the site, I punched in the MLS number and VOILA!, the listing popped up with an exterior shot of the caller’s property!

One-hit wonder
But to my surprise and dismay, there was only a single photo available online for perspective buyers to view. The Realtor was relying on just ONE picture to sell all the wonderful offerings of an updated and rehabbed property. Why wasn’t the remodeled interior of this townhome being marketed? If you ask me, there is no excuse for this level of service — and it’s nothing less than a marketing crime. It’s estimated that 80 to 85 percent of buyers begin their home search via the Internet. That’s a whole lot of potential buyers to attract. But the story gets worse.

After we hung up, I was now even more curious. Something told me to take a look at this seller’s competition. I dug a bit deeper on a home-listing site and found two comparable properties within the exact same development. One property listed for $84,000 less then the property the caller owned, and the other listed for $89,000 less. Now I know there could be a lot of pro and con discussion about the effect a listing price has on sales probability, but this is not the point of this blog post.

The point I’m making has to do with marketing. The Realtors of the two cheaper properties invested the time and money to tap into one of the most basic yet most effective marketing tools available today. The agents used multiple photos and then posted them on an easily accessible online-listing site to help build and reinforce a potential buyer’s interest.

A must do
The seller who had contacted me had a property that costs more, and his home offered more bells and whistles than those of his neighboring competitors. It would have been helpful to capture and display those upgrades to potential buyers.

Most likely, it’s not JUST the lack of pictures that are keeping this property from selling. But Realtors in today’s industry must realize that digital photography, which is cheap and easy, coupled with online-listing sites, give buyers the power to preview and prescreen properties ahead of time. Any Realtor who chooses to ignore this basic yet very important fact is committing a crime that ultimately can force his clients to bide their time while they wait for their homes to sell.

Market It Forward…

Craig Schiller, founder of Real Estaging