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Developing a Property Marketing Plan
Listing and Marketing Checklist
Marketing Media To Consider
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Property Advertising Techniques
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Advanced: Getting the Most from Your Advertising Dollars
Online Property Marketing
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Conducting Open Houses
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Alternative Selling Options
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Complying with Fair Housing
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Property Disclosure
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Common Property Hazards
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Property Marketing Quiz
Bright Ideas: Property Marketing
More Resources: Property Marketing
Code of Ethics: Property Marketing
| | ONLINE PROPERTY MARKETING
Virtual Tours
Online home tours come in a range of formats from a slide-show-like series of still photographs to a full-on 360-degree panorama tour. The options for purchasing these tours include:
- Full-service solutions (i.e., you call the company and state the property’s location, and they’ll will take the pictures and post them on the Web for you)
- Partial do-it-yourself solutions (i.e., you create the images and text and submit them to the company, which provides templates and Web-hosting services)
- Completely independent solutions (i.e., you purchase a digital camera with special attachments and software that enable you to create and upload your own images)
Questions to Ask Before You Buy a Digital Tour
- Is the price within my budget? Prices range from $39 for a budget-minded, supply-your-own-photos tour to $295 and up for a full-scale, professional tour.
- Will viewers need to download a “plug-in” to see the tour? If additional software is required, many people won’t watch the tour.
- Can the tour be played regardless of the viewer’s Internet service provider? You wouldn’t want to exclude America Online’s millions of subscribers, for example, by using technology that’s incompatible with that service.
- How large will the digital files for the tour be? The tour images should be good quality, but small enough to be downloaded quickly even on a dial-up Internet connection. Ideally, each image should be 35k to 50k.
8 Tips for Online Home Tours
Anne Riley of Coldwell Banker-Burlingame 400 in Burlingame, Calif., has been using digital images to market luxury homes in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly five years. Here are her tips:
1. Choose your vendor and photographer with care. “Some of the companies don’t have good photographers. They pick up a camera, and they take the most awful [images]. You need someone who has a good eye and who keeps up with the technology,” Riley says.
2. Don’t delay. It’s much smarter to order the tour as soon as you obtain the listing, rather than hoping the home will sell itself in a week, and then getting a late start if it doesn’t.
3. Show the home’s best features, and make sure the tour downloads and moves quickly. “You don’t want the people viewing the home to feel as though their time is being wasted,” Riley says.
4. Be sensitive and sensible about showing the sellers’ valuables in a home tour. Images can be edited, and valuables can be removed before the tour is shot or eliminated from the picture afterwards, if necessary.
5. Shop around. Riley pays $99 per tour.
6. Use online home tours to screen buyers. “The people I don’t hear from who have seen [the tour] are as important to me as the people I do hear from, meaning I haven’t wasted my time or theirs,” Riley says.
7. Emphasize space and scale. “[Virtual tours] are wonderful for showing cubic volume space, scale, and proportion,” Riley says.
8. Use caution when shooting views. Not all cameras are equally capable of capturing distances well.
TIP: Use still shots for a small home and panoramas for large homes. “You don’t necessarily want the 360-degree tour for a smaller and less expensive home, and you need to be more selective in the way you photograph a small home. Otherwise, you’ll end up with half a shot and the rest [of the scene] will be a wall,” warns Anne Riley of Coldwell Banker-Burlingame 400 in Burlingame, Calif.
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