The Internet: How to Sell Real Estate in 2010
If you’re currently selling or about to sell your real estate you need to know how buyers shop for real estate in Southwest Florida. There’s been an evolution towards buyer empowerment by way of the internet. It’s nothing new, of course, but if you or you’re agent aren’t privy to some of the great advancements with marketing real estate online you could be missing the boat.
Not every single person is computer savvy. If you’re a seller and you don’t get computers or you’re only at the beginning stages of learning what the web is capable of delivering you should probably do a little home work to make sure your home is going to be found online.
While we do have our share of full time resident’s southwest Florida also gets the resort vacationer and snow bird buyers. They now hit the ground fully informed and educated on the market, the inventory, the recent sales prices and current listings of most of the homes in your neighborhood.
If it’s public record, it’s available to anyone. Filings, good bad and ugly, at the Clerk of Courts website, business and limited liability company filings at the Florida Division of Corporations filings and local real estate sales from the county tax collector’s websites are a moment’s search away. Oh, and your arrest record, as well as a few other things that you’re probably not thrilled the world can discover about you.
When buyers cross thresholds these days they’re armed with binders full of book marked, printed materials, floor plans downloaded from developer websites, apps downloaded to their phones that offer specialized various real estate tools, a notebook computer or smart phone and they meet their agent at a central location using their a GPS.
The homes they look at are usually chosen by them from an email of listings sent to them or they search for properties themselves on a consumer friendly IDX. Most often they mail the MLS numbers of the top properties they want to see to their agent.
Unless the listing price is compelling enough to bother, homes without photos are placed as alternates because the homes with multiple photos, video or visual tours, floor plans and detailed descriptions go first. They just do.
If you were a buyer you’d weed out the properties that only feature a classic aerial shot swiped from the tax collectors site or the photo montage of eight different views of what the property looks like from the outside only. The “Appraisal MLS report” is a two-for-one disguise that really doesn’t complete either task. There’s just too much out there for buyers to choose from to waste time on vague properties with flimsy info or no photos.
If you’re selling real estate, you need to ask tough questions about online marketing and follow up on the web by Googling properties, your own home by address to begin with or if you’re in the interview process Google a few listings of the agents you’re interviewing, as well as the agent’s name.
If you’re not getting the search results you expect on the web neither will potential buyers that could be searching for a home, just like yours, to purchase.
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Real Life in Bonita Springs is a project by Chris Griffith dedicated to writing useful blog posts for consumers about the Bonita Springs, Florida area. Find out what it is really like to live in Bonita Springs, Florida by reading about our fair city. You’ll get the latest in local real estate information, Bonita Springs real estate market reports and a little bit of humor. If you have topic ideas, feel free to request a story about the idea, after all, this site is just for you.
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