Real estate marketing isn’t so different from marketing any other product. When it comes time to market your home, you have to select your intended audience, and market to them. A crucial aspect of this is to differentiate your marketing between the potential homebuyers, and the Agents who may potentially sell the home to them. It’s important that your marketing addresses the needs of both parties, and a little extra effort can go a long way. This post is going to discuss what you can do to make your home more interesting to real estate agents.

Tactic 1: MLS Presentation

Proper MLS presentation is important. REALTORs often look at several listings online in preparation for appointments with their Buyer-Clients. If the Listing Agent inputs poor directions, bad instructions, incoherent copy, etc, then there’s a chance the Buyer’s Agent will just look past the listing altogether. For example, if a Buyer’s Agent is busy running a search, and the Listing Agent forgot to include information such as the school, the square footage, or something else that might have seemed insignificant (but which was important criteria to the potential Buyer), then the Buyer’s Agent might skip that house. Buyer’s typically have a few key criteria they’re looking for: if you miss any of those critieria, you may have lost your Buyer.

Tactic 2: Realtor E-mail

Another way to get the attention of Buyer’s Agents is through e-mail. Creating customized e-mail lists is a great way to promote a listing, and it is something you rarely see out of Listing Agents. In the past year e-mail communications amongst REALTORS in San Antonio have increased dramatically, and I believe part of it was spurred by our aggressive use of e-mail, which we always use to advertise our Client’s listings. The way to use e-mail effectively is to cater the e-mail to the professionals most likely to act on it. For example, 285 Agents sold homes in Rogers Ranch between the summer of 2006 and the summer of 2007. 64 of them have sold more than 1. I know this because my e-mail database is ready to go—any listing of mine in Rogers Ranch will IMMEDIATELY get sent to those agents. Why does that matter? Because who do you think is more likely to find a Buyer for one of those houses? A brand new agent who works in Cibolo or Schertz? Probably not. By creating personalized e-mails to the Agents who work those areas, you can create a better response, and get targeted exposure to your listing.

Tactic 3: Broker Open Houses

Broker Open Houses are valuable because, again, they are targeted to those Agents who are most likely to sell a house in your neighborhood. It doesn’t make sense to have an Open House in a gated community such as Summerglen where people won’t be stumbling by randomly. In general, people looking for more expensive homes don’t do it blindly or alone—they’ll have an Agent working for them. So by hosting an Open House for the Agents who work in that area (who learn about the open house through those personalized e-mails), you can get more exposure to your home. Again, you want the Agents most likely to sell your home to come see it–there’s no sense in having an event for every agent in town if they’re just coming by to get some free lunch.

Tactic 4: Incentives

Incentives speak for themselves. If you offer someone something of value, you’re more likely to get their attention. If you offer incentives for the Buyer’s Agent, that can make a potential difference for your home. If two homes are priced the same and are otherwise very similar, the one that has incentives for the Agent might become more appealing–and the Agent might help the Buyers make their decision. I’m not saying that you need to provide additional incentives to sell a property, but, as you’ll see in a second, there are instances where it can come in handy.

So does this really make a difference?

Yes, and I’ll give you an example. We once listed a property for a former REALTOR. It was a small multi-family investment property here in San Antonio in an area full of properties for sale. She asked us to list it for X amount of dollars, and under certain conditions. We explained to her the downside of promoting her property in that fashion since there were many other nearly identical properties on the market for up to 10% less. She stuck to her guns and we respected her wishes and followed her plan. 30 days later, there was no activity on the listing. I called my Client and asked if I could change the marketing approach. She conceded. That day we changed the MLS presentation, we INCREASED the price of the building, we changed the incentive for the Agents, and we sent a highly-personalized e-mail to over 5,000 Agents in San Antonio. The e-mail was sent out at around 8PM. At about 9 AM the next morning we had a full-price offer, and by noon we had 2 backup offers. The beauty of it is that the price increase paid for the Buyer’s Agent incentive–our Client got exactly what she wanted, and it happened quickly.

That’s the power of targeting your marketing to real estate agents.