| The Listing Agent - Marketing Your Home to Homebuyers
Individual Agent Advertising to Homebuyers
Individual agents may advertise your home for the same reasons as companies do. They usually advertise in classified ads or in specialty magazines featuring houses available for sale.
As in other types of advertising, these ads rarely sell your home. Once again, the main goals of advertising are to accumulate homebuyers as clients, and to impress you and future home sellers with how well they market their listings. Some agents actually do sell their own listings, but not that often.
It is much more productive and beneficial if your listing agent directs most of his or her marketing efforts toward other agents. Since this is "behind the scenes" marketing that you dont actually see, it is often difficult for you to measure how hard the agent is working for you.
It is a mistake to measure your agents effectiveness solely by counting the number of newspaper and magazine ads featuring your property.
Neighborhood Announcements
When you first list your home many agents send "announcements" to all of the other houses in your neighborhood. This can be done in the form of postcards, a letter, or flyers left hanging on the front door. These are important because your neighbors might have friends who are looking to buy a house.
The announcements create "word of mouth" advertising, which is the best kind.
copyright 2000 by Terry Light and RealEstate ABC, revised 2002
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