Written by Don Martin. You can follow all of Don’s work HERE and/or a lowly newsletter HERE. Please share with your buds using the above buttons. Thanks! (Do you deserve the new GOLD LEVEL SERVICE for your MLS listing? Make it easier on yourself!)
Communication is the key. But not just any communication.
If you stand in front of somebody telling them about your house while poking your index finger on their lapel, you will probably just run them off.
Yes, they need to find out about your house in order to love it, but that has to happen unobtrusively so as not to drive them away. I call that non-invasive communication. Let your house do the communicating.
Captions
In the various MLS systems they have spaces for 20 – 30 photographs, usually including the primary picture. Under each photo (except, maybe the primary) there is room for a caption. Captions look best as one or two conversationally styled sentences. Bullet-lists don’t look good in that format. They have sometimes as few as 250 spaces for letters or spaces. That amounts to a couple of complete sentences. After 250 letters the system drops the rest. Find out how much area you have first.
If you do captions, don’t mention the obvious – mention something that is not obvious, and not dealt with in the rest of the listing. You should also check the type listing that you have. Some very basic MLS entry-only listings do not allow captions under the photos.
Tent signs
Tent signs are nothing more than 3 x 5 index cards folded in half, so that they stand up like a pup tent. Since your house will be selling itself, you may need to let it explain some items that may not be readily apparent. For instance, you put all new cat 5 cable behind this wall, but it doesn’t show up in the picture or in person.
You should not have to give the tour of your house, but there are often things that need to be pointed out, and with tent signs this can be accomplished with ease. I have had Realtors tell me that they hate my tent signs because they make control of the prospects. People are looking for the next Easter egg, and concentrating on the house, rather than the agent, and that makes some of them feel unimportant.
The fact is that today in 2019, agents are not only beginning to accept tent signs, I saw last week a listing belonging to one of the mega-agencies that was sporting tent signs.
You might say that the tent signs may end up reading like the picture captions. Grab you a GoPro camera and do a walk-through. Slap the URL on the media page of your listing. The important thing is neither you nor the agent will be will sell your house. Your house will sell itself when the magic happens as the prospect looks at it. We need to simply let that happen.
One of the biggest parts of the job is non-invasive communication.
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