When you have a home to sell in Woodland Hills Ca., it is important to know how your real estate agent is marketing your home. Are you really getting the most BANG for your BUCK?
For many years, (and when I say “many” I mean since the dawn of “real estate” time) print advertising was the golden ticket … the only way to sell a home in Woodland Hills … or anywhere. The number one venue for advertising was newspaper. In fact recently, newspapers “hit a high of $5.2 billion in print advertising.” The entire BANG you could get depended on the BUCKS you were willing to spend.
Well, as we all know, the landscape of the local Real Estate in Woodland Hills is changing (like the rest of the nation) and with it is the avenues to which we, as real estate agents, choose to advertise the homes that we sell for our clients.
Print advertising is expensive. Let me say that again: PRINT ADVERTISING IS EXPENSIVE.
Whether it is a glossy page in a home magazine or a 2×2 ad in the Sunday paper, costs for print advertising are extremely high. At one point in our career as local Woodland Hills Real Estate agents, we were spending upwards of $2,000 a month on print advertising. These are costs that we HAD to pass onto our seller clients, as it was the only way to “get the word out” to the general public that a home was for sale. But we did what we had to do to sell the home.
Well, things have changed.
The internet is now fierce competition in the advertising/marketing arena, and has actually cost the print ad industry a drop of “three percent this year, while spending online has grown 25.8 percent, hitting $2.6 billion.” Print advertising is less effective, and is getting even less effective every year.
So, in addition to being expensive, print advertising is also now INEFFECTIVE.
There are 3 Serious Benefits to this paradigm shift in marketing a home for sale:
1.) Over 80% of all home buyers use the internet as an information source*. Advertising your home online is advertising your home to where the buyers are.
2.) The internet is the #2 place where home buyers first saw the home that they wound up purchasing. Newspapers were dead last in this study*.
3.) Marketing your Home for Sale on the internet is extremely less expensive than print advertising. When we reconfigured our marketing budget and cut out most of our print advertising, we found that we could spend 1/10th what we previously spent, yet reach a much larger demographic of home buyers. This is a savings that we can pass along to our clients.
(*National Association of Realtors® Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers 2006)
The internet is also a wonderful asset for someone looking to sell their Woodland Hills home, on the internet (probably more than most home buyers) to look for and buy their next home.
The internet is here. It is a wonderful resource. It cannot be ignored.
So, in essence, the internet has allowed us, as Real Estate agents, to streamline our marketing and advertising budgets and pass these savings onto our seller clients while simultaneously expand our exposure to a wider group of people looking to buy a home in Woodland Hills. Instead of just one newspaper and a couple of outdated home magazines, the Homes I list can be found on over 50 real estate websites and search engines.
Our sellers get more BANG for less BUCK. We like that.
So, when you are interviewing a Real Estate agent to SELL your next home, keep this in mind. Ask them how they plan to market your home and make sure that the agent you choose understands how to get YOU the most BANG for your BUCK.
