Strategic Marketing

Whether you’re selling or buying, here’s the search trends you need to know!
Hey everybody! and welcome to another edition of the Phoenix real estate. Today we”ll talk about advertising in the real estate industry, what works and what doesn’t as well as how to avoid the expire. This is a group of people who had elected to list their home with some real estate agent, for one reason or another, the homes did not sell. Now most people don’t realize this, but about 30% of all homes listed in the Phoenix Metro market end up on a list like that.So homes that don’t sell for one reason or another. So today we’re going to look at some of the advertising that may not being used by some of those agents in order to help their clients get their home sold. First thing I thought we would talk about is what it is that is commonly used by people who are searching for a home.

Real Estate Search Trends

So I’ve got a little list here of things that I thought would be good talking points

Oftentimes then as time goes by, actually a lot of time, in most cases, most people are looking for a period of time between 12 and 18 months before they actually make a buying decision. So they’re garnishing, grabbing all this information. They may end up sharing it with friends and family, certainly with a spouse, all the information that they’re gaining. Then at some point they’ll feel affirmed and they’ll take action and buy the house that they’re interested in.

Now the national association of realtors has done a large study and they have figured out last year that 89% of all people who are looking for a home at some point rely on their mobile phone to search. But now 89% of people looking are using their mobile phones. So we need to have all of our content needs to be really mobile friendly. It doesn’t pay to have a website that somebody has to, you know, pinch on to expand or make smaller so that it fits their phone. All the content that we have online really needs to be super mobile friendly.

Millennial real estate trends are no joke. People will be using video to gain information about communities that they don’t know about because they really are interested in finding out about what makes that community interesting beyond the home itself. So they want to see restaurants, parks and schools and they want to get information about the area in general. I can learn a lot if you could just see some things. So video does a really good job of highlighting those things. They’re relying on the videos in order to get that community information.

So oftentimes what we’ll find is that people are doing a search about what schools are good in a community. As some have children, they have to consider neighborhoods with the best schools. So they’ll search according to a school that they have already heard or research and found out if it is a good school. School information is really important if you have a good school in your area. That’s something we definitely want to highlight in our advertising when we’re working online to attract buyers to your home.

A lot like Google, people will search for topics on Facebook. So we don’t want to leave Facebook out and we want to really cater to that and make sure that we’re posting content on Facebook. Posting about your home and boosting that content, paying in order for people to see it more frequently. Next thing, uh, we already touched on areas and neighborhoods. This is something that’s really important to people. Outdoor activities, although they’re living in the city, they want to have access to trails and hiking and fitness options that are appealing to them.

Maybe running trails and parks pool in the area. And another thing people are interested in are things like farmer’s market. Anything that creates a sense of community in the area that they live in. Because again, people really want more than just a house, when they’re searching for this community information, they’re going to be looking for things like farmer’s markets. So, maybe having a little story on a local farmer’s market and having a link from that to your house wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Next is search the available restaurants in the area. They don’t want to have to get in their car and drive five miles to get something like that if they’re thinking about a home in the Phoenix area. So that’s really important and workplace, they don’t want to have to drive for 45 minutes to get to work. Sometimes people do it. If it’s just a matter of money, they may end up buying a home way out on the outer ring of the Metro and driving in. But for the most part, people buying homes in Phoenix want to do so. Partially because it’s close to a workplace, it’s important for them.

Next thing they’ll do is search the intangibles like crime rates, taxes, affordability. All this information is easily accessible. Online taxes, affordability, all of our homes on our website have a little calculator that they can use to find out what monthly payment would be. So they’re going to look into that. They’re going to want to know that they’re close to friends and that the area has the kind of culture that they’re excited about.

They want to know that they’re going to be able to walk to places that interest to them as they search. So those are some things that go into the proverbial hopper. To speak, in order for someone to make a decision about whether or not to buy. And so once they grab all this, then the wheel really starts to turn and they’re going to continue to research and get more information.

How Do We Get All This Information to the Buyer

So they’re interested in your home and why do some homes? Well, actually most homes in Phoenix right now are taking an average of 70 days or more to sell. Many of them take a lot longer than that. That’s just the average. Currently my average seller is selling their home within 48 days. Some a lot less than that, but very rarely does it go over this 48 days because we’re trying to do a good job of leaning on these functions. Making sure that people are getting the information they need when it’s time to make a buying decision. So now I thought I’d take a look at why homes are sometimes sitting around and not finding a buyer.

They’ll either end up on an expired list they might be, they might cancel a listing. You might notice that a listing is been with two, three or even four agents for before it finally sells. They might become a for sale by owner thinking maybe they can do a better job of themselves. It might be so discouraged. I’ve seen many homes 300 days on the market. So we want to help you try to avoid that.

Another strategy is to create pages on our real estate websites that attract buyers like a magnet. We can be very broad or specific.
Some examples of specific detailed searches would be:

Search Advertising that Works

Before we dig into this, I thought it might make sense to just talk about what it costs to reach our buyer and what particular methods cost effective. So here on the top we have a newspaper. And so this is cost to reach a thousand people. So with newspaper costs around $32 to reach a thousand people magazine is $20 to reach a thousand people radio, $8 to reach a thousand people cable TV, $7 a Google ad, words about $2 and 75 cents.

About 75 cents to reach a thousand and Facebook ads currently running about a quarter, a 25 cents to reach a thousand people. So you can see that the online methodology is much more cost effective and makes a lot more sense. Here I have a little diagram of some of the things that we use when we try to help someone sell their home in 48 days or less. So this diagram kind of goes in this direction. It doesn’t really have to. In fact, what often happens is, let’s say somebody is making a search at a blog post that we wrote about your house that’s for sale. So they get to the blog post.

First let’s back up for a second and ask how did they find the blog post? Well, they probably started in a place like Google and typed in community information or houses for sale in Phoenix or houses for sale in a specific neighborhood and ended up finding this post and they’re on that post. There might be a YouTube video that talks about that house that talks about the neighborhood and the community all you have to do is search.

Now, they may have found, the house just by driving around and noticed a yard sign. They may have looked at all the photographs that we have taken. Then, they may have even shared what their findings with their friends on social media to get affirmation. So that they can feel comfortable taking action. They might even after all this has happened, they may even go to their agent and say, “Hey! we found this house and we’d like to know more about it.”

Now you would think that the person would just find the home just because the real estate agents sent the home to them. And that’s not always the case. Now there’s so much freedom online to do our own search that buyers are consistently finding homes that their agents aren’t sending them. They’re finding them on their own and then they’re using their agent to help them negotiate the transaction. Go to see the house and take all the necessary steps, inspection, process, appraisal and all the like in order to complete their process. But they may able to find that home on their own through search. Know how to be better at home buying with the simple tips

So sometimes it’s kinda hard to tell where all this got started. So, it may just be that the person started from an ad on Facebook. They might’ve seen an ad on Facebook that we ran and then that linked off to our blog post. They may have taken that and gone to their agent. At that point, they may just go directly to their agent after that and tell them about the house they search and ask them to get more information. So this is kind of what we call Pogo sticking. You definitely don’t know where all this started there are number of agents who use these tools. To send out different bits and pieces of information in order to appeal to people.

And one of the things that most real estate companies do is they use a syndication called a list hub. In order to get their information out on hundreds of websites. So they enter their information into the MLS and extracts that information and sends it out onto tons of different websites like Zillow and truly realtor.com and so on and so forth. Now all those findings that someone may search on Google as a result of that are all going to be a little bit generic in nature.

They’re kind of going to all look the same. So we really think that it pays to have unique advertising on these with you through these other sources in order to promote the house. For example, the community video might be on YouTube and we can have a link inside the YouTube advertisement that links off to the blog post. So they may start to search the community and finding a community video and then they see that link in our video and a link off to the blog post and find out more information.

Request texted information to them where we’ll send them information on the property via text. So sometimes people will start with their yard sign and they will go from there over to the website. Where we’ve got the listing hosted on the website. Then from there they may search and send that MOS or address over to their real estate agent. And how do I know this happens? Because it’s happening to me all the time. I will, when I start working with a buyer, oftentimes it’s because they have started either been referred to me and that one’s easy to kind of figure out or they have.

They have come into our wheelhouse through my website and signed up for the privilege to search on our website. Now, if even if they’d been referred to us, that person will often start to search on their own and finding homes in all kinds of places. They may be finding it online. I’m having through social sharing, they may see an advertise for a house on Facebook.

They may say see pictures on realtor.com. They might see a video about the house or about the community and come back to us and say, Hey, what about this house at such address? And it doesn’t matter to me where they got the information. I instantly look it up and find out whether or not it’s a home that is currently under contract or if we can go and see it. So this is how I know that people are not always following a straight line when it comes time to share information with me. And that’s okay.

Wherever they get the information, when they’re doing their online search is just fine with us. We just want to make sure that people are getting the right information. So, you can see that these paying attention to what’s happening online is critical in today’s advertising. And having unique content on all these platforms is really important. So we don’t want to just rely on the MLS to send out generic information to, you know, hundreds of different websites that we know about, like Zillow and Trulia.

Finding-out a Correct Information About the Property

Those were all good. But we want to, as agents, create unique content so that people can find out unique information about a property and we don’t want to tell them everything either. We want to leave a little bit of information that is lacking in their search in order for them to be interested. In other words, we want to sell the sizzle, not the steak. We don’t want to show them everything in the videos, in the, in the pictures. We just want to give them enough information to where they want to go and see the house, get inside of it and hopefully be interested.

So this is how we sell homes in 48 days or less. If you’re interested in finding out what your home is worth or if you’re interested in just staying on top of that, it’s really easy to do. We can send a set up a market report for your neighborhood so that every time a home selling your neighborhood. You’re going to get a monthly report showing all the homes that have sold in the, in the neighborhood, all the ones that are for sale. And it’s going to be way more accurate than something like Zillow which relies on things like tax records. In order to pull in that data.

Interested in Having that Set up For You?

It’s easy to start the process.

Our information is much more up to date and current and you’ll be getting pretty much like a live feed to that information to the market reports. So if you’re interested in having that set up for you just reach out to me, give me a call on my cell or email me and I’ll be happy to help you with that. In the meantime, thanks for watching today’s video about trends. We’re advertising and marketing your home so that it will sell quickly and not end up on the good old expired list.