Costly Mistakes in Marketing Your Property

Once you've done all your homework and listed your house for sale, you are doing yourself harm by not taking an active part in the marketing. Agents should give all copy to the sellers for their review before printing materials or placing ads, and that includes the listing itself in the MLS (multiple listing service) in your area. You know the best features of your home better than anyone and although an experienced agent knows the type of ads that work, the "buzz" words that grab the interest of prospective buyers, there is no-one better than you to know the details of your property.

Let me give you an example of a very costly mistake. Recently a house was listed that was total new construction, built on the original footprint and foundation of a house that was built in the '50s. In the MLS, the year built was automatically added from the tax records and came up as 1950. No amount of description in the remarks and descriptions that the house was built in 2007 can overcome the fact that agents searching for new construction for their prospective buyers will not see your home in the search results! It would have been easy to change the date, but it was overlooked by both the agent and the seller. The items that are automatically filled in when inputting a listing are often overlooked for accuracy and sellers most often focus on the number of bedrooms and baths, upgrades and the written descriptions.

Ask your agent to email you a copy of the listing BEFORE it goes active so that you can go over it carefully. Similarly, your agent should provide you drafts of brochures and print ads before they are actually printed or submitted. Get a list of all websites on which your home will appear and check those as well. It is not unusual when submitting properties to multiple websites that a virtual tour is omitted, a wrong picture is posted, or the copy gets cut off.

Just as you should be extremely particular in how your house shows, you should be extremely particular about the accuracy of all marketing materials. Some websites (such as realtor.com) pick up the information directly from the MLS, however, most others require individual input - and the more times you input information, the more times there is potential for error.

Small mistakes can cost showings - keep in mind that homes are marketed more to agents than to buyers and agents are going to search by very particular criteria - number of bedrooms and bathrooms upstairs, year built, size of lot, school district, proximity of public transportation - so it is important that these be correct!

Hope this was helpful - as always, BE INFORMED and CHECK BACK HERE OFTEN