It is an art form to find out why people buy, and why some listings sell and others don’t.
Atlanta REALTOR® Hank Bailey advises sellers to start thinking like buyers so they might find ways to market their home that they never considered.
“The 2010 Profile of Buyers and Sellers report is put out by the National Association of REALTORS®. The NAR surveys home buyers and sellers annually to gather detailed information about the home buying and selling process. These surveys provide information on demographics, housing characteristics and the experience of consumers in the housing market. Buyers and sellers also share information on the role that real estate professionals play in home sales transactions.
What I want to focus on right now is steps taken in the home search and then sources used to find the home these buyers surveyed used in their home search. Were open houses high on the list? How about printed media? Well, we know some of the answers intuitively, don’t we, but in our stress and the strain to sell when the pressure is on, are we reaching at some areas to try and create a sale while burning our energy needlessly?
First Steps Buyers Took in the Buying Process
- Looked online for properties for sale - 36%
- Contacted a real estate agent – 19%
- Looked online for information about the home buying process - 11%
- Contacted a bank or mortgage lender – 8%
- Drove-by homes/neighborhoods - 7%
- Talked with a friend or relative about home buying process – 7%
- Visited open houses – 4%
- Looked in newspapers, magazines, or home buying guides - 2%
- Attended a home buying seminar – 2%
- Contacted builder/visited builder models - 1%
- Contacted a home seller directly – 1%
- Read books or guides about the home buying process – 1%
Overwhelmingly, it shows the beginnings of the buying process dominated by online looks for homes, photos, and information coupled with the contact of a Realtor. Tqo out of 3 home buyers in this 2010 survey focused on these areas. Drive by’s were only implemented by seven percent of buyers. Remember this the next time you are concerned about an empty or absent flyer box at the yard sign, and only four percent of buyers actually visited open houses.
All in all, if you are on the Web, and if you are attracting Realtors to your property, you are hitting roughly 9 in 10 buyers just with these two factors alone. You can’t necessarily increase that figure by hitting the same people with a home book ad or open house. Too many times, I think sellers in a market that is still clearly a buyer’s market (and has been for the past few years) want to reach and try to force a sale that is not going to happen any faster by spending more marketing money, time, energy, and effort doing things that are overlapping factors in the sales process.
After being covered across the Web and getting the attention of Realtors, patience and price are your two best factors in getting a sale in today’s market! Even foreclosures that are priced too high sit on the market and rack up big Days on Market without a contract until the price is right.”
Click here to read the rest of this post by Hank Bailey.
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