Marketing Your Home Today – Part 1

By Tanya Nazariya (Owner of Brilliant Staging & Design)

Hello my lovely followers!

I have been getting blown up with questions on social media and I promised I would start putting out more information. One of the biggest questions I get from both my followers and homeowners is- “Why do we need to prepare our homes for sale? Aren’t people just looking at the house and seeing if it fits their needs?” This seems obvious to some people but in reality it’s a lot more than that.

I highly recommend you read my prior blogs about our current market and how it affects sellers. I also discussed the things you need to do in order to prepare your home prior to marketing it. In this blog I will discuss in more depth the marketing aspects of selling a home and why they are so important. But just to recap, our market is slowing down dramatically. And 2019 is forecasted to be much different than the last couple years. The price increase will go back to a slower rate, mainly because of the huge increase in homes for sale. The supply is now greater than the demand. This makes preparing your home for sale and marketing that much more important.

First Impressions

We talked about this in my last blog but I want to reiterate the importance. Psychologists say that we make up our minds about a person within the first fifteen seconds of meeting them. The same is true when viewing a house. It’s likely a prospective buyer will have made up their mind before they’ve even walked through your front door. I have had multiple clients tell me they plan to list in the contract that improvements will be made prior to closing. This doesn’t work well and here’s why: First impressions, marketing and buyer psychology. People will not even make it to your house or read about your offers to fix things because your house didn’t make the cut in the first place. When they look at photos online and see your ugly run down home they will skip to the next home. You need to LURE people into your home before they ever get to a contract!

When a buyer walks through a home they mentally make a list in their head of all the things that need to be fixed or that they hate. Your goal as a seller is to minimize that list as much as possible.

The good news is that Staging helps distract buyers from all the little flaws throughout the home, because they are in awe at the beauty first. They see the true potential of the home and that helps them understand that the small stuff isn’t very important. Their eyes travel throughout the room looking at all the beautiful furniture and tchotchkes and not at the spots on the carpet and dings in the walls. You have approximately 15 seconds to impress a buyer, make it count!

MARKETING

Anyone who didn’t live under a rock for the past decade knows that all homebuyers begin their journey of searching for a home online. They go to Zillow, or Redfin or one of their other favorite housing websites and they search homes for sale in the area they wish to live in. Guess what pops up when they click on a house? Beautiful, bright, eye-catching photos! So they mark that house as a favorite, and schedule a viewing. Right?

Or maybe not… maybe what pops up are dark, grim photos of an ugly un-kept, dirty, outdated home. So they quickly click to the next! Because the thought of raising their children or retiring in that house scares the sh*t out of them! (Pardon my bluntness… but let’s just be honest!) Here are a couple horrifying photos that were actually listed on MLS:

Enter funny comments here:

Does the dead body come with the house?

Does the original artwork come with the house?

Oh goodie, how about this one?

What exactly am I even looking at?

You get the picture right? What’s that super smart saying I heard before… a picture is worth a thousand words! If your listing photos don’t capture the attention of buyers online, they will never show up to your open house or think twice, or even once, about making an offer. Marketing isn’t a new idea. It’s been done since the beginning of time. When you go to sell something on Offer-up you probably clean it up a bit and take a nice photo of it and sell it for $5. Yet you’re not willing to clean up your HOUSE? Before listing it for $600,000?!?! Come on people! A house is probably the most expensive thing you will ever sell.

How to Market Your Listing

Marketing is an umbrella term. This is done after you did some renovations, cleaned and prepared your home. There is a lot that goes into marketing your home, and there are many professionals who can help you with marketing it properly. The most important thing is to make sure you have a good real estate agent/broker who will walk you through the process and help you succeed. Your broker should be an expert in selling homes and your go to person about any questions relating to marketing. Once you find a good real estate agent you will need a good stager and photographer to make sure you have beautiful photos for your marketing material. Marketing can include listing your home on MLS and different housing websites, as well as spreading the word about the listing on social media and to other agents. The good news is- if you have a good agent, stager and photographer you really don’t need to worry about the rest. This team of individuals should help get your home sold fast.

Stay tuned for the rest of the parts to this Marketing series. In my next blog we will dive deep into the world of staging. I will be answering some questions about the importance of staging and go over the statistics behind it.

Follow me on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest for more tips, tricks and photos @brilliantstaging. If there is any topic in particular you’d like to read about, please don’t hesitate to ask. I take all questions to heart and want to help people understand staging, real estate, and design.

1/17/2019