Advertising Your Open House so It’s a Successful Event
Selling
No matter how beautiful you have made your house look, if it is not advertised properly, your open house will not get you the results you want. The internet has revolutionized how advertising your open house happens. Prospective buyers can now use a Smartphone app to find open houses in any neighborhood. The app also allows house hunters to view the listed price of comparable homes.
The power of the internet for advertising your open house
Data collected by the National Association of Realtors shows that 92 percent of people buying homes use the internet in their search for a new home. With these statistics, ensuring that your open house is listed on the internet becomes critical in ensuring the success of an open house. Real estate agents can put open house dates in the multiple listing service so that it can be syndicated to Realtor.com, Zillow and Trulia.
An open house also needs to be listed on all of the main real estate portals as well as on Craigslist. Both the seller and the agent need to use social media to their advantage to advertise an open house. Facebook it, tweet it, post it on Instagram and all other social media so that the word gets out as far and wide as it can.
Post it on Nextdoor.com and neighborhood email lists. Both the seller and the agent can also send out emails to potentially interested parties. The seller needs to email friends, neighbors, and all other contacts about the open house.
Create a property website with photos of every room in the house from several angles, close up photos of the interior features, and photos of the exterior of the home from several views. Each photo needs to have a good description with it. The description needs to highlight the positive features of each room. The buyer has lived in the house for a good while in all probability, so he or she may not even notice these features. This is where the real estate agent can be very helpful.
Either the agent or the seller can do this on GoDaddy for little or no money. Be sure to use the property address as the URL so that visitors to the open house can just plug in the address and pull up the property’s photos and descriptions.
Signs, signs and more signs
Flyers about the open house are great for posting in local grocery stores, veterinarians’ offices, doctors’ offices, and anywhere else local that will allow posting of flyers. Be sure to keep a list of where the flyers are posted and remove them after the open house.
A sign needs to be placed on the front lawn of the open house site a week or two before the open house that show the date and time of the event. Signs with the date and time of the open house also need to be placed at intersections leading to the house a couple of days before the event. Balloons tied to the signs make them more visible to traffic.
A successful open house takes work, but many times a quick sale is the payoff for all the effort.
