Let’s face it. It’s hard work rehabbing a house. You work for months either sweating yourself or worrying about contractors. You see more and more of your funds going into the house and more and more of your potential profit disappearing.
Then it comes time to sell your house. You have it all fixed up and staged beautifully. All that potential buyers have to do is walk in, qualify for a mortgage and show you the money. All that work is rewarded with a big fat check.
Or is it?
Real estate agents tell you it’s not easy to sell a house without them. So you use one.
But, all they do is:
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Put a sign in the yard
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List your house on the MLS
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Show the property a couple of times
Because your house looks so good, they sell it quick. Then for just a short amount of work, they can pocket a huge percentage of your profit.
Wait – who did all the work here?
Who deserves the big, fat check?
That’s right – you do. In the old days though, it was hard to sell it yourself. These days, with the internet, it has become much, much easier. We thought we would put together a few tech tips on how to help sell your house on your own, and pocket more cash-o-la.
I Got Your Ad Materials Right Here
Real estate is the hot new target for internet techie entrepreneurs. They are working hard to help create new ways to sell real estate. Why not take advantage of their efforts?
To prepare for your marketing campaign, you can use two websites – Obeo and VFlyer. Obeo is all about visual marketing. Obeo has a network of photographers around the country that can take beautiful pictures of your house.
Obeo can also ‘virtually stage’ the pictures. By virtual staging, we mean they can ‘photoshop’ furniture into a vacant house to give prospective buyers an idea of a house will look with furniture in it. Obeo’s pricing for the virtual staging is a lot less than a real stager (although you might want one of those too depending upon the house and the deal).
VFlyer creates beautiful flyers out of your pictures and text. You can use the flyers then for both online and offline marketing. Not only does VFlyer create beautiful marketing materials for you, but they help you put your message out there.
Here is a list of sites where VFlyer will automatically post your marketing material. They also provide HTML code for your virtual brochures, so you can copy and paste to all the big internet sites for further advertising.
Besides all those big internet sites, doesn’t it make sense to have a website dedicated to selling your house? VFlyer has a service called vSites to create a website personalized for your house. Sound expensive? Not really. In fact, you can have a 5-page site built for free.
Two other quick and easy sites you can use for marketing materials are Taskrabbit and Witness Designs. Taskrabbit has a network of people around the country that will perform tasks that you don’t want to do for a reasonable price. It does not cover the whole country, but if they service your area, you could find a great photographer.
Witness Designs has some great pricing on signs to put around your neighborhood. It helps to make your house stand out with lots of signs – especially if you have signs offering benefits to the buyer, such as:
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Seller Financing
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Low Down Payment
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Rent To Own
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No Bank Qualifying
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Zero Percent Interest
These signs work particularly well for open houses, or if you are trying to sell your house through an auction-type format.
Yoohoo…Buyers….I’m Over Here
There are three basic types of sites to advertise your house on the internet – databases, classified sites, and social media.
Then there’s the MLS. You can get your house listed on the MLS through the internet without a Realtor. Generally the sites charge a flat fee for the listing, regardless of whether the house sells. Just enter ‘Flat Fee MLS listing’ or something similar into a search engine and you will find lots of sites.
Databases are sites like Zillow, Trulia, ForSaleByOwner.com, FSBO.com and Yahoo! Real Estate. You may want to search something like ‘Homes for sale (Your Town)’ and see which one comes up first. That would be the best to start advertising on.
The king of classified sites is Craigslist. But many people also look at sites like Oodle and Backpage. People go on these sites looking for a good deal. Why not help them find what they are looking for? Headlines like ‘Rambler for Sale’ are not going to attract a lot of attention. Be bold. How about:
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Owner Desperate
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Wife Forces Sale
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VERY Motivated Seller
Don’t you look for these keywords when trying to find good deals? Other buyers do too. Doesn’t mean you have to price the house at a fire sale price. Think about it. If someone offered you a million dollars for your $100K flip, wouldn’t you be desperate to sell to them? I definitely would be motivated. Use keywords to attract attention.
Lastly don’t forget about social media. Lots of people have sold houses on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other sites. You can join groups at social media sites that are interested in buying and selling real estate. You can even create a profile for your house that you can link to with your personal profile.
Many of you may have heard of a lot of these sites, but we wanted to put a bunch of them together to help you with an internet-based marketing campaign.
Talk to Us
Got a tech tip you want us to investigate? Tell us about it below.
Become a Great Marketer – Whether you are trying to find good deals, rent out properties, or sell your deals, you need to learn how to market. The better the marketer you are, the more successful you will be as an investor.
Plan a Strategy – Don’t just go blindly posting ads all over the place to promote your business. Have a plan. Take some time to think about the best way to find buyers/sellers/renters. Then follow the plan.
Follow Up – Marketing is definitely not about ‘set it and forget it.’ To be a great marketer, you have to stay in touch with your prospects, refresh your advertising and keep all your information up to date.
JP Moses
is a real estate investor in Memphis, TN, with experience ranging from land lording to note buying, rehabbing, and wholesaling. However, wholesaling is the area that he enjoys most and where he bring the most experience and expertise to his students.