You Lost Me At ‘Hello’

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This article is ‘Part 3 of How to Get More From RealEstate.com.au Without Paying Extra Money.’

In Part 1 of this series, I covered how to get the best coverage for your agency within the Find An Agent Section settings and in Part 2 I discussed an important internet marketing strategy where you can improve the number of visits you can get to your listings.

In that article I also covered 3 simple internet marketing concepts, the first of which was ‘The Image Catches Their Eye’ which leads me to…

You Lost Me At ‘Hello’

Have you ever seen that part in the movie Jerry Maguire where Renee Zellweger says to Tom Cruise “You had me at Hello?” If not, here’s a quick snippet from the movie.

Well, with this phrase in mind, I can not stress how important it is to grab a buyer or sellers attention over the web, especially on realestate.com.au.

Ultimately, you want to aim to ‘Have them at hello too’ which means that they will continue to keep reading about your listing.

The ‘Hello’ part is so important over the web, because with a woman you have somewhere between 2 – 4 seconds to grab their attention, whereas for a male, it’s 5 – 7 seconds, yet unbelievably there are still a number of agents who are committing the cardinal sin on realestate.com.au.

What’s the cardinal sin on realestate.com.au?

I find it astounding in today’s world of digital photography, that some agents are still uploading their listings onto realestate.com.au without any images of the property at all.

What’s more, realestate.com.au don’t allow listings to be uploaded to their site unless their is an image & some agents actually go out of their way to upload a generic image instead, just to get the listing up onto the realestate.com.au site.

Some agents must be in such a hurry to get the property uploaded onto the web on a Friday afternoon, before the receptionist goes home, that they upload the listing without photos, without considering the damaging consequences.

Maybe the owner is super keen to have the property uploaded before the weekend, but uploading any listing onto realestate.com.au without photos of the property is a huge mistake.

The image is such a big attention grabber and having no image could actually put the ideal buyer off.

Plus, lots of potential sellers subscribe to email alerts and if they see a property that is poorly marketed by an agent then they could easily be put off from listing with that agent.

It’s the biggest database in Australian real estate – Use it.

REA has the biggest real estate database within Australia & they have hundreds of thousands of people who have subscribed to receive email alerts when new listings come onto the market within their chosen criteria.

Realestate.com.au include the first email notification via their email alert service at no extra cost to the agent. It’s part of the subscription fees & is a very affective part of an agent’s marketing strategy for matching properties to suitable buyers.

Now, if an agent uploads a listing without the property photos & wants to access the REA’s database to re-send the property details out with photos now uploaded, they have to pay (normally hundreds of dollars) to send out one of REA’s e-Brochures.

Even though you could always pay to re-send the property out to REA’s database via the e-Brochure in an attempt to try to rectify the initial mistake, you’ll never get a second chance to create that great first impression.

No matter what the circumstances, an agent should ‘never’ upload a listing onto realestate.com.au without photos of the property.

Quick Tip: To get the greatest exposure for your listing as it is emailed out as an email alert to the REA database, make sure you set your price guides within the admin section as far apart as you feel that you comfortably can without misrepresenting the price.

This will allow you to broaden your marketing out to potential buyers in a lower price range who may end up deciding to increase their spending range and/or market to buyers in a higher price bracket that may consider reducing the amount they want to spend on a property.

But, make sure you reset the price range within the system within the first week after the first email alert has been sent, as by this time you’ll probably have direct feedback from buyers and you should have an even better indication of the properties real price point in the market.

Obviously, use your common sense, sending an $800,000 listing to buyers with $300,000 to spend isn’t going to win you any friends.

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6 Comments

  • Sal Espro
    Posted February 17, 2010 at 7:43 am 0Likes

    Hi Greg, I love the 4 vs 7 sec attention span between the sexes. (Shows we’re the more caring/sharing, willing to give more of a chance, gender after-all 🙂 Do you have a reference for it, please?

    Thx,
    Sal 🙂

  • Craig
    Posted February 18, 2010 at 6:51 am 0Likes

    Also, people buying properties are smart enough to know their budget and how much they can budge on it, they don’t need to be tricked or mislead into looking at other properties. I would consider it somewhat unethical to try and trick someone into buying a house that is above their budget. Banks of course do this by approving loans that are well beyond the means of the borrower.

  • James
    Posted February 18, 2010 at 5:24 am 0Likes

    I think ” comfortably can without misrepresenting the price” is dangerous advice and is very subjective. I would not be putting a range any different than what was on the agency agreement.

  • Greg Vincent
    Posted February 18, 2010 at 5:43 am 0Likes

    James, This is where it does get interesting for agents, with all of these new legislations. At which point are agents misrepresenting a price & at which point are they doing a disservice to their sellers by not promoting their listing out to the widest audience possible?

    I think the industry bodies should look at getting back to the basics of where an agent’s fiduciary responsibility sits and allow agents to use marketing tools like realestate.com.au as effectively as they can.

  • Nick
    Posted February 18, 2010 at 6:45 am 0Likes

    Ideally the price range should be very strict, and the portal should have a box saying ‘show similar prices’.
    Thats the best compromise for that situation. You could have the box ticked by default.

  • Greg Vincent
    Posted February 18, 2010 at 8:14 am 0Likes

    That’s why I did say ‘use your common sense’.

    Just for an experiment, it would be interesting to see what data set would come up within an e-brochure on some agents current price range settings for one of their listings & then see how many extra potential buyers would enter the equation if the same e-brochure was generated but with the price range changed by say $10,000 above & below the first set of e-brochure results.

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