7 Creative Ways to Market Your Property in a Cold Housing Market
Author: Joshua Dorkin • URL: http://www.biggerpockets.com/July 20th, 2006 •
Properties are not getting multiple offers and selling within hours of listing anymore. Things have calmed down a bit across most of the country, and properties are now sitting on the market. The traditional method of listing your property with a real estate agent and waiting for people to buy isn’t going to cut it anymore, unless you price very aggressively.
What can you do? The market has gotten a bit cold - showing a definite slowdown. If you insist on hollding out for top dollar, you may get a bit creative . . .
What about?
1. Auctions
I recently read about setting up an auction to sell your property. Basically, you list your property at a reasonable price under market value, and let people bid on it. Market this auction with flyers and word of mouth, then invite people over. Hopefully, you will draw interest and your property will sell.
2. Use all the mania in social networking to create buzz.
Create a simple website for your property, then post creative titles on the social sites like del.icio.us or reddit.
3. Use that myspace or linkedin network to let people know about your property.
4. Make a short film about the property and post it on YouTube.
Same goes for taking pics and Flickr (see #5 for more)
5. Get a picture of a celebrity on your property
Put the picture online. Sell the house that (pick your celeb) was at
6. Buy a billboard in the neighborhood.
7. Offer a year of free Pizza to the buyer
This can be substituted with a year of Starbucks (legal crack), a beer of the month subscription, or anything else addicting as incentive. Those plasma screens are a dime a dozen nowadays.
What it all truly comes down to is pricing, location, and marketability. If the place is a hole, you’re going to have a tough time selling unless you’re marketing to the people looking for holes (rehabbers). Spruce things up, price it right, and get out the word, and things will go fine.
Just have some Patience . . .
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Joshua Dorkin
Charles Feldman
Ted Karsch.
Troy Schuricht
Richard Warren
Jim Watkins
[...] The Real Estate Investing For Real Blog cites 7 Creative Ways to Market Your Property in a Cold Housing Market: Properties are not getting multiple offers and selling within hours of listing anymore. Things have calmed down a bit across most of the country, and properties are now sitting on the market. The traditional method of listing your property with a real estate agent and waiting for people to buy isn’t going to cut it anymore, unless you price very aggressively. [...]
Thanks for your comments on our post. It was designed to add a bit of fun to all of the stress people are having. I hope you got that with the celebrity pics, free pizza/starbucks/etc.
I do think that many of the tools, including social networks, video/photo sites and others will be part of standard marketing in the future. As for auctions, that was probably the one serious suggestion I was actually making.
As for your suggestions in response to ours, those are very reasonable and good ideas, but those are the things EVERYONE uses nowadays anyway, right? People need to start thinking out of the box a bit to stand out. That was all I was getting at. Hope you at least enjoyed the post.
Online auctions started the whole “I can sell my stuff on my own” craze. Now, with so many Social websites out there offering access for free, many people are doing the work on their own. However, in a “cold market” a person who must sell their property gets the best results when they put forth this effort along with working with a real estate agent. But that is only if they have to sell the property.
If they can afford to sit on it, that is when the Social website / auction idea really it prime.
Friends of mine have been struggling to sell their home. I like the ideas listed here - pretty creative. I am passing this on, thanks!
Wanted to know if it’s legal to raffle off your home in southern CA?