Getting Your Home Sold

Getting Your Home Sold: How Internet Savvy Is Your Agent?

When it comes time to sell your home, there are many important factors that can be the difference in getting your home sold quickly and for top dollar. One of the most important things is choosing the right agent.

In today’s technological world, it is important that you choose an agent that understands where and how to reach home buyers.

In today’s market, the home buyers are on the internet. According to the National Association of Realtors, 92% of home buyers use the internet when buying a home.

There any many ways to reach this audience online, but not all Realtors understand this.

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There is one very popular online segment that is perfect for real estate, yet not many agents are taking advantage of it: video.

Video continues to gain in popularity online.

Internet users spend 300,000,000,000 hours a day watching video. The number of online video users is expected to double in 2016.

You Tube gets 1 Billion unique visitors each month, and they watch 4 Billion hours of video.

 

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In fact, the second most popular search engine in the world (after Google) is You Tube.

For real estate, the numbers are equally impressive.

70% of home buyers search for videos online.

They are looking for educational videos about the home buying process, city and neighborhood  videos, as well as virtual tours of listings.

 

 

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Online listings that feature virtual tours get clicked on 40% more often than listings that do not, and buyers spend 3 times as long on those listings.

Real estate listings with video receive 403% more inquiries than listings that do not.

So, based on those facts alone, you would think Realtors would be falling over themselves to use videos for marketing.

However, that is not the case. According to the National Association of Realtors, only 2% of all agents are using video in their marketing.

What’s worse, only 3% of agents are using Virtual Tours. The majority of agents that use virtual tours use outdated styles.

One style is a simple slideshow of pictures of the house. Another is one you probably saw years ago–the camera is placed in one corner of the room and slowly pans across each room.

Studies show that these styles are not only outdated, but they actually turn buyers off. The method preferred by buyers is a walking tour. Despite these facts, only 1% of the 3% of agents using virtual tours use this style.

Videos are an easy way to entice and capture buyer prospects online. Virtual tours are a great tool for home buyers to see a home and determine if it is a possibility before going out to tour it live.

Gone are the days of simply having a couple of pictures. For online buyers, pictures are very important, and so is video.

Home sellers need to make sure the agent they hire uses video in their marketing and virtual tours for getting your home sold.

Videos do more than simply give a home more exposure online. They can be great ways to capture more buyers and lead them to your listing videos.

In order to get a home sold, you have to get it the most exposure in front of as many buyers as possible. Video is just another tool realtors can use to capture more buyer interest.

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courtesy of www.realbizmedia.com

More and more sellers are realizing the importance of video in today’s market for getting their home sold.

According to NAR, 73% of home sellers say that they want an agent that uses video in their marketing.

When interviewing potential agents, make sure to ask them if they use videos in their marketing.

Not just virtual tours (although that is very important), but videos in general.

Ask them getting your home sold if they have their own You Tube channel. Then ask them about their video marketing strategy.

If the answer is “my what?”, then you should move on!

According to Google, 2/3 of people will search a realtor’s name and see what comes up when they are considering hiring that realtor.

This is a good idea to get a feel for a realtor’s “web presence”.

Getting Your Home Sold: Web Visibility

Another important factor of video marketing: syndication.

Syndication simply means getting a video out to as many places on the internet as possible so that more people can find it. This increases what is known as “web visibility”, or making it easier to get found on the internet.

After all, that is the goal, right? For more people to more easily find you.

Simply uploading a video and/or virtual tour to you tube is a great start (much more than most realtors do). But, there is so much more that can be accomplished by syndicating the video across the web.

Another thing to look for is an agent that understands how to get their videos ranked on the first page of Google and You Tube. They should also target popular buyer search terms so that the videos come up before other videos.

Exposure is key when selling a house. Make sure you don’t sell yourself short.

To learn more about my marketing strategies for getting your home sold, visit my Pam Marshall Realtor sellers page.

 

 

 

 

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