How to Sell Your Home Better Than Any Ordinary Agent

Welcome FSBOs!!.

Unlike some real estate agents, I don’t view For Sale By Owners as greedy or ignorant, but as patient and brave individuals for wanting to sell their most important asset alone. Selling a home can be tough. You have to worry about setting the right price, the possibility of people whom you know nothing about parade through your home during showings or open houses, inspections, appraisals, and in general just that the process runs smooth and seamless. What's even worse to worry about is not having any of those things to worry about. What if your home sits and sits and you don’t get any good offers on it or even more dreadful, no interest at all? Its a lot to handle especially if you don’t have a professional to lean on. That is why I applaud you and want to give you the absolute best advice so you don’t fail.

You can avoid the threat of a stale market and of strangers parading through your home simply by doing target marketing, and no you don’t need to have marketing experience to do so.

Identifying the Buyer

With target marketing you first need to identify your target market or your “selects”. Your buyer must have household income equal to or greater than a 3^rd of the sale price and a certain credit score, that's the most foundational characteristic.

Other factors to consider:

How many bedrooms does your home have? One/Two – Single buyer or married couple with young children or without children at all. The more bedrooms the bigger the family.

Do you have the main bedroom on the first level and the rest upstairs? This would be more suitable for an older couple with teenage kids so parents and children have their own space. This set up could also be a family with grandparents in the house who stay on the bottom level and parents plus smaller children stay in the upstairs bedrooms.

Are all of your bedrooms on one level and on the same side of the house? Then your most likely buyer will be a couple with young children or infants since the parents will want to be close to them.

Do you have a large fenced in backyard? This could be most suitable for a buyer/s with a dog or other active pet.

What features of your home may speak to the different hobbies an individual might have (Large Kitchen → the one who likes to cook, Water view → boat/fishing enthusiast, large outside patio/balcony → the entertainer, etc.)?

Reaching that Buyer.

Once you have these selects determined go to the website: https://www.infousa.com.

This website is a mailing list broker so you can buy a mailing list full of the addresses for each buyer that fits your selects. See this PDF on how you can operate the website.

“PDF”

For the first mailing list you buy you will get a discount but after the first mailing list you will be charged $2 per lead. You want to reach the maximum amount of people with this mailing list so make it count! I would say for best results, aim to get a list between 500 and 1000 leads.

The Postcard

After you have your mailing list, you need something to mail to them. For our clients we buy the 200 pound gloss cover postcards but you can get as low as 120 pound paper. We also make sure the size is no smaller than 6” by 11” so its stands out. Just don't be frugal with this. You literally just bought a 500-1000 person list of the most opportune buyers for your home, you want to impress them not deliver them a small, flimsy, and crinkled piece of paper with smudged ink.

Once you have your paper stock you need to get some professional photos of your home. Good quality will cost you between $150 - $350 per shoot, depending on the photographer.

Next you need to hire two more people, a designer and a copywriter. A designer to ensure the most appealing placement and style of the words and a copywriter for the actual words. Copywriters write commercials; they are experts in getting the consumer motivated and called to action. The paper stock, photos, and design might capture them visually but the message pushes them to move forward. You can hire a decent copywriter and designer from the UpWork website for as little as $75 and $60 an hour, respectively.

The Website

One component on the postcard will be a website link. You rarely should urge a consumer to “call now”, you need to feed them more information first so they can become more and more confident that you have what they need.

You can create a website on Weebly for free, but unless yourself, a friend, or family member is willing to design your website for free, its recommended to hire a website designer to maintain the professionalism of your presentation thus far. Again, UpWork has successful freelance web designers for as little as $75 per hour. The first page should give them a little more information than the postcard and prompt them to opt-in then lead them to Page 2 with remaining details about your home concluding with contact information.

Printing & Mailing

You can either take your pre-bought card stock and your design on a flashdrive to a printing lab or to save some time, a trip, and money you can order prints from VistaPrint for as little as $0.41 per print for 1000 postcards. Just select the orientation, size 6” X 11”, Premium Plus paper weight, Glossy Front & Back paper stock, then upload your design and order your prints!

Now you have all of your marketing ammo and its time to launch your campaign! If you bought a mailing list from InfoUSA, be sure to either get those addresses on the postcards before printing or print all the address labels to stick on once you receive your print order. If you didn’t buy a mailing list from InfoUSA, you can take advantage of EDDM (Every Door Direct Mail) on USPS’s website. First, select the area you want to mail to, could be specific streets or communities, then head to the checkout (cost averages at about $0.18 per household).

Once you’ve mailed them, now its time to sit back and wait for the phone calls!

Spend Money to Make Money

Now I know if you haven’t already said “screw this” and left the blog, you are still here and interested in doing this to get the best results on the sale of your most important asset but you are also scared of the risk. It is a lot of time and money but as the poet and philospher, Titus Maccius Plautus said  “You must spend money to make money”. If you have any doubt still, then do yourself a favor and purchase the book “Sell Your Luxury Property For More Money” by Greg Luther on Amazon for $12. It not only highlights what I’ve already mentioned in this blog but it also includes testimonials from other “For Sale By Owners” on how this method worked for them.

With this method, any prospects who got a postcard and request a showing you know are qualified buyers and therefore you can show your home with ease. Its not even always guaranteed that a buyer with an agent coming through is qualified but with this method you know they are because you made sure of it.

Interested but I/We Don’t Have the Time

I wouldn’t give you all this great advice if I didn’t want to see you succeed at doing this on your own, but I also understand that not everybody has the time or out of pocket money to do so.

At my brokerage we are specialists in this kind of marketing and have been highly successful since we began doing business this way. We are open to speaking about the possibility of taking on a new project but because for each client we spend lots of our own money for marketing we have to be very picky about what projects we take on.

If you ever consider listing with an agent, please see the Agent Selection Guide on how you can select the one who will sell your home fast and give you the most return.

Conclusion

Again, you aren't selling a box of old VCR tapes, you are selling your home and your most valuable asset. Whether you sell on your own or decide to hire an agent, please do your research and be smart so you can move on to the next place feeling good about your decisions.

Thanks for listening!