What Does Your Realtor Do?

A good Realtor understands how to market a home successfully. He or she will do far more than throw up a sign and a listing and wait for the calls to pour in. This is because a good Realtor is every bit as motivated to sell your home as you are. This is how he or she makes a living. A real estate agent who wants to be recognized as being tops in their field will step outside the box and not just be average. They will use techniques and marketing ideas that other Realtors don’t.

Marketing is as much an art as a science – a combination of positioning your home appropriately, exposing the property through an expansive network and utilizing the power of the internet to funnel prospects towards your home. These are things that take time to develop and lots of practice to get good at. Luck is always a part of the process, but it is much easier to get lucky when you have done all the hard work necessary to seize an advantage.

The old way of doing real estate had its day, we do success the right way.

Lack of Good Marketing Materials

You will immediately recognize the Realtor who understands great marketing when you see a nice glossy brochure with gorgeous color photography of all the rooms in the home, along with exterior shots of the property including the lot.

What you are likely to see from a bad Realtor is a black and white copy of an MLS sheet left in your home. Why spend money on marketing is how the post and pray Realtor thinks. Obviously this is the last thing you want as a seller who is looking to get top dollar for a home! Unfortunately this happens all the time because people don’t know any better.

Slide show or video tour? I can hear the post and pray Realtor snickering now. Who needs to spend extra money on more marketing? Why do I need to do those things when my sign and the MLS work just fine.

Communications Skills

Study after study shows that one of the biggest complaints homeowners have with their real estate agent is a lack of communication. When you have a showing on your home it is great to know what the buyer thought isn’t it? A good Realtor will have a good system in place to get feedback from the buyers agent.

A good agent will get back to you to keep you in the loop of what is going on. This is common courtesy and should be something every real estate agent does. Feedback helps both a seller and an agent gauge any issues and if there are corrections that can be made. Is getting feedback something that happens in every real estate sale? Absolutely not! If you have hired a bad Realtor you will more than likely find this out the hard way.

Leveraging The Internet

Online marketing is about far more than throwing up an ad for your home. It is about exposure, about getting your home in front of people. Search engines are nice for finding a home within specified parameters, but a Realtor can do more. If he or she has a high quality website that ranks well on major search engines like Google and Bing, your home is more likely to be seen. You can have the greatest looking website going but if nobody can find it doing local real estate searches then it is going to be almost useless.
Some real estate agents realized early on that ranking well on Google would have advantages for selling homes. These Realtors began putting in the work to build a site that was respected for both its information and its listings. This is not something that can be accomplished in day. It takes time and a lot of effort.

Have a Real Estate Blog

There are also Realtors who have recognized and taken advantage of how powerful a real estate blog can enhance their business. Savvy Realtors who understand marketing realize the punch a blog can bring to the table. Not only can you be recognized as a local market expert but also an agent who possesses quite a bit of helpful real estate knowledge that buyers and sellers can utilize.

When looking for a Realtor, you should find one that understands how to to truly leverage the internet for selling your home. Post and pray Realtors are the opposite of this. They take the path of least resistance and expect the internet to do the work for them. Find an agent that cares enough to have a website and to make it a good one.

Utilize Social Media Channels

With social media having become a large part of normal day to day activities it makes sense to have an agent who is tied in and utilizing social channels as another means of broadcasting that your home is for sale. Sites like Facebook, Linkedln, Google Plus, and Twitter are visited by thousands of people daily. A web savvy marketer will use the channels to make your home more visible to the world. Post and pray Realtors would never dream of doing this. It takes too much effort.

The lack of marketing among others, is one of the many reasons so many for sale by owner homes don’t end up selling. The line of thinking in fact lines up well with many of the post and pray Realtors. Many for sale by owners think selling a home is easy and all it takes is a sign. The fact that over 80 percent of all FSBO’s end up listing with an agent shouldn’t be all that surprising.