This article is ‘Part 3 of How to Get More From RealEstate.com.au Without Paying Extra Money.’
In Part 1 of this series, I covered how to get the best coverage for your agency within the Find An Agent Section settings and in Part 2 I discussed an important internet marketing strategy where you can improve the number of visits you can get to your listings.
In that article I also covered 3 simple internet marketing concepts, the first of which was ‘The Image Catches Their Eye’ which leads me to…
You Lost Me At ‘Hello’
Have you ever seen that part in the movie Jerry Maguire where Renee Zellweger says to Tom Cruise “You had me at Hello?” If not, here’s a quick snippet from the movie.
Well, with this phrase in mind, I can not stress how important it is to grab a buyer or sellers attention over the web, especially on realestate.com.au.
Ultimately, you want to aim to ‘Have them at hello too’ which means that they will continue to keep reading about your listing.
The ‘Hello’ part is so important over the web, because with a woman you have somewhere between 2 – 4 seconds to grab their attention, whereas for a male, it’s 5 – 7 seconds, yet unbelievably there are still a number of agents who are committing the cardinal sin on realestate.com.au.
What’s the cardinal sin on realestate.com.au?
I find it astounding in today’s world of digital photography, that some agents are still uploading their listings onto realestate.com.au without any images of the property at all.
What’s more, realestate.com.au don’t allow listings to be uploaded to their site unless their is an image & some agents actually go out of their way to upload a generic image instead, just to get the listing up onto the realestate.com.au site.
Some agents must be in such a hurry to get the property uploaded onto the web on a Friday afternoon, before the receptionist goes home, that they upload the listing without photos, without considering the damaging consequences.
Maybe the owner is super keen to have the property uploaded before the weekend, but uploading any listing onto realestate.com.au without photos of the property is a huge mistake.
The image is such a big attention grabber and having no image could actually put the ideal buyer off.
Plus, lots of potential sellers subscribe to email alerts and if they see a property that is poorly marketed by an agent then they could easily be put off from listing with that agent.
It’s the biggest database in Australian real estate – Use it.
REA has the biggest real estate database within Australia & they have hundreds of thousands of people who have subscribed to receive email alerts when new listings come onto the market within their chosen criteria.
Realestate.com.au include the first email notification via their email alert service at no extra cost to the agent. It’s part of the subscription fees & is a very affective part of an agent’s marketing strategy for matching properties to suitable buyers.
Now, if an agent uploads a listing without the property photos & wants to access the REA’s database to re-send the property details out with photos now uploaded, they have to pay (normally hundreds of dollars) to send out one of REA’s e-Brochures.
Even though you could always pay to re-send the property out to REA’s database via the e-Brochure in an attempt to try to rectify the initial mistake, you’ll never get a second chance to create that great first impression.
No matter what the circumstances, an agent should ‘never’ upload a listing onto realestate.com.au without photos of the property.
Quick Tip: To get the greatest exposure for your listing as it is emailed out as an email alert to the REA database, make sure you set your price guides within the admin section as far apart as you feel that you comfortably can without misrepresenting the price.
This will allow you to broaden your marketing out to potential buyers in a lower price range who may end up deciding to increase their spending range and/or market to buyers in a higher price bracket that may consider reducing the amount they want to spend on a property.
But, make sure you reset the price range within the system within the first week after the first email alert has been sent, as by this time you’ll probably have direct feedback from buyers and you should have an even better indication of the properties real price point in the market.
Obviously, use your common sense, sending an $800,000 listing to buyers with $300,000 to spend isn’t going to win you any friends.