I want to thank Oliver Muoto at vFlyer.com for selecting me for their vFlyer Star Program. This program recognizes the real estate agents and brokers who use vFlyer to help give get the maximum online exposure for their sellers’ homes.
The write-up that Oliver did was very complimentary, but there’s definitely a mutual admiration thing going on here, as you can see from my remarks about them. vFlyer not only does a fantastic job of putting together a multi-use flier for your home and helping us publish it to various sites like Craigslist and Sacramento News and Review, as I’ve pointed out earlier, on a typical listing the visits to our online vFlyer ad outweighed the visits to Realtor.com for the same listing by over 4 to 1!
Of course, it helps to have good traffic to begin with, and it helps to make sure the flyer is accessible from a variety of pages. But in the end, what matters in the end to sellers is people find your home (that’s our job). It also matters that it looks great when they find it, and vFlyer’s great layouts and templates do a fantastic job of supporting us in that. (For examples, see the flyers available from our main vFlyer listing site).
Over the weeks we’ve highlighted some of our online listing services under the heading of “Elite’s Ultimate Online Listing”. In this seven-minute screencast, we show you how much exposure you get from a typical listing agreement with an agent, and how our listing marketing compares to this.
Topics we cover include:
The multiple listing service — great for agent exposure, bad for clients.
What to make of the claim “I will list your home on Realtor.com” and how valuable that is.
How buyers find your home, and what you can expect from our online marketing.
We have a local version of the video here, but a couple of folks mentioned some technical trouble with that one, so even though it’s smaller you might try the YouTube version if the big one gives you trouble.
PlOur seller’s just reduced the price over 10% on this beautiful home on almost four acres in Placerville. You must see inside this home to appreciate it — model quality. Seller is moving out of state and wants it SOLD, so give us a call at (530) 672-9160 for more information or a personalized showing.
Beautiful Home Among Stately Pines — Price Reduced
Location: Pleasant Valley
This beautiful manufactured home on peaceful acreage shows better than many “stick built” homes we’ve seen. Plenty of room for a growing family or for vacation home with 1950 square feet and four bedrooms. Back yard features pool, a seasonal creek, and a large deck, with low maintenance landscaping and the smell of pines. Open floor plan with bright and lovely kitchen and a pantry. Large master bedroom with walk-in closet. Minutes from downtown and highway 50. Don’t miss this one!
Don’t forget to come and visit our beautiful listing in Placerville, being held open TODAY (Sunday, September 23rd) from 1PM to 4PM. The address again is 3400 Fort Jim Road, Placerville (map). This is a really beautiful 4 bedroom home with a pool on almost four quite, pine-studded acres.
Please join us and check out this wonderful home. Check out the video and the online flier.
Note: We’ll have free lists of other homes being held open in Western El Dorado County this Sunday, so come and stop by if you’re checking out the open houses this weekend.
One of the things we hear from sellers that is a concern is that their home get the most exposure possible. Naturally they want the best value for their dollar, so they want to see their home get good exposure.
This evening I wrote to a seller about her home which she listed with us in the middle of August. I was able to show her who had seen which ads since then.
Here is an excerpt of the email I sent to her (of course the “you” in this excerpt refers to that seller):
Number of times agents viewed your home in MLS: 48 Number of times the photo of your home was loaded from our main web site: 3,059 (You could probably call it 5,000 from all our sites). These numbers tend to be high because we feature it on our home page, and these pages get lots of traffic. Views of your movie on our main web site: 399 Views of your movie on Youtube: 52 Views of your movie on Yahoo Video: 39 Views of your online flyer [at http://eliteproperties.vflyer.com]: in August approximately 705. In September, so far, approximately 445. Page views on Realtor.com: In August 34, In September 56.
Of course, with any listing, you need to get the price right. In fact, I honestly think that the role of advertising is more of a case of ruling things out than making a sale. Price a home at 200% of market value, and your agent couldn’t sell it if he ran an ad on Superbowl Sunday.
Having said that, once you get the price at 100% of market value, you don’t want an agent who drops the ball when it comes to marketing.
Since we have this fabulous listing in Foresthill, I thought writing a little bit about living there might help you decide about moving there, or buying it as a second home. At 3225 feet above sea level, it definitely qualifies! A mere 54 miles from Sacramento, it gets between 5 - 10 inches of snow between December and March.
If you like a quiet place to run away to for the weekend, this might be the place for you! In the year 2000, only 1,791 residents were recorded in this paradise.
In terms of the real estate market here, sales have been slow, but have not ground to a halt as in some other places. Compared with last year’s 46 sold homes, we have for the year 2007, 37 sold single family residences. 5 more are pending sale and there are still 69 homes you can look at.
Our listing at 5166 Cold Springs Drive is set at the median asking price of Foresthill at $495,000 but well below the average asking price of $636,770.
We have two pieces of news about Susan Norris’s beautiful listing in Foresthill.
First, the price has been reduced to $495,000.
Secondly, Susan accompanied me to preview this listing today and take some photos, and so I can now attest that this home is every bit as gorgeous in person as it is in the photos. We were able to take a lot more pictures, some of which we’ve worked into a video slide show. If you’re in the market for an immaculate, 3/4 bedroom on almost an acre, we urge you to take a look at this one. The seller has kept this in immaculate condition.
We’ve changed the way we publish our video photo tours, using new software that lets us create a movie in a number of different formats. The good news for our clients is that we’re able to publish their video photo tours of their home more widely than ever before.
For example, today we published the video for our seller’s listing on 3400 Fort Jim Road to a number of online video hosts, including:
And of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t also include it on YouTube.
In addition, we’ve published links to the video in our vFlyer ad for this property. The link in the lower left corner of the flyer now takes you to the video. What’s cool about having it here is that the video link also appears in the Craigslist ad (I won’t link to that here because it gets updated once per week, but I checked, and it’s there).
Purva Brown just listed this beautiful home just a stone’s throw from my house.
Because it’s just down the street from me, I know that it’s in walking distance to a dog park, and even nicer, to Cameron Park Lake, which recently was the subject of my Cameron Park Lake video (based on my walk around the lake of the same name).
But seriously. You should live here. It works for me.
We recently listed a beautiful 4 bedroom, 2 bath home on over three acres of peaceful Placerville pine forest. This 1950 square foot home has a great back yard with a huge deck and pool that is ideal for entertaining. Inside, the seller’s pride of ownership and taste for decorating shows throughout. Please check out the video (below).
This is one of the best homes we’ve listed in some time, and is definitely worth a look if you’re looking for an impeccably maintained home on acreage in Placerville at an affordable price.
Beautiful Home Among Peaceful Pines
Location: Pleasant Valley
This beautiful manufactured home on peaceful acreage shows better than many “stick built” homes we’ve seen. Plenty of room for a growing family or for vacation home with 1950 square feet and four bedrooms. Back yard features pool, a seasonal creek, and a large deck, with low maintenance landscaping and the smell of pines. Open floor plan with bright and lovely kitchen and a pantry. Large master bedroom with walk-in closet. Minutes from downtown and highway 50. Don’t miss this one!
I should probably ask Purva Brown to come over and join me here at the Sacramento Real Estate Blog.
I need air support. I am pinned down by enemy entropy.
(You can see: I’ve been watching too much of the Military Channel, and taking my daughter out to see Transformers last night didn’t help at all).
The thing that has me pinned down and semi-literate is the new real estate listings site. The reason it has rendered me semi-literate is that there’s a large body of work in front of me, and even though an intrepid early adopter (can I get an intrepid early adopter?) could start blogging right now, I’m trying to get the site to the point where I’m not embarrassed to even be calling for intrepid early adopters.
The usual dynamic on software projects goes something like this:
CEO: “Ship it.”
Programmer: “It’s not ready.”
CEO: “I need something to show people.”
Programmer: “It’s not ready to show anyone. If I get a demo ready the whole project will take longer.”
CEO: “Ship it.”
Programmer: “It’s not ready.”
The problem with a one man software project is that I’m both sides of that argument.
I wonder which one of me will win?
Meantime, in order to get the work done at all, the programmer needs to be sitting at the keyboard thinking about nothing else but the project, period, and every twenty minutes the CEO comes along and says: “Did you blog something today? You know we need to keep up on our existing stuff while we’re doing new development, right?”
I recently announced plans to create a web site where Realtors® could post their listings for free. Although the development is strictly preliminary, I have posted a development blog so those of you who want to be first on your block can get a feel for what’s going on.
I recently posed the question about whether the real estate industry needs another social networking web site, and got only one yes vote, from a colleague in Albuquerque.
I can understand the concern. On some level I agree with those who said we really don’t need such a site.
First of all, how many blogs can you have? I try to make a consistent and meaningful contribution to this one, but I have three or four others that I’m either a main author or co-author on, and really one is plenty.
Secondly, I’m sure that from the point of view of someone with forty or eighty posts invested in ActiveRain, thinking that some other site will start to get well positioned for real estate topics is not a great prospect.
Now having said all that, I’m still itching to do some development on the State of California or National level, and so what I envision putting together is a site where each user will get a blog when they sign up that they can use, but which will be centered around a national database of real estate listings (similar to Point2NLS or ZMls).
Assuming this itch continues, the roll-out order will look something like:
Phase I (Alpha Release — Early Adopters)
Set up the blogging software, and the author’s blog.
Site design outline — show where the pieces will go.
A listing that we just entered into VFlyer / Craigslist, etc. is Vicki Agregado’s beautiful townhome listing in Citrus Heights. I visited this listing with Vicki awhile ago and I was especially struck by what a nice setting it, on a shady cul de sac in front and with a large greenbelt in the back. Check this one out.
Gorgeous 3 Bedroom Condo
Location: Crosswoods
This lovely townhome has great curb appeal with many oak trees and a feeling of privacy. This unit has 3 large bedrooms, newly tiled kitchen floors, inside laundry room, large living / dining combo, and a large deck for entertaining. Close to bike & walking trails.
Currently the lowest priced condo in the best part of the complex. This terrific starter home or investment features newer carpet, paint, blinds, tile, and remodelled bathroom. Alarm, sun shades, fans and secuity gate on tiled patio.
First-time homebuyers and others: this is a rare 3 bedroom, 2 full bath home in Colonial Village. Wonderfully relaxing bkyrd w/ waterfall. Updated appliances in kitchen. Hrdwd flrs. Newer roof & central air. Marble in bathroom.
I was spending a few minutes on Facebook today, checking if I have enough friends yet and so forth, and I learned something cool: here’s another place your listing can go!
Facebook has a classified ad system they call the Marketplace, where you can post houses or whatever. I thought I’d try it out on Susan’s beautiful listing in Foresthill.
It seemed like there were a lot of views of the flyer right off, but we’ll see how it goes.
Susan Norris just listed this terrific home in Rancho Cordova. For more information or to arrange a showing, please call Susan at (877) 735-5657.
Beautiful Upgraded Brick House
Location: Rancho Cordova, CA
Lowest price per square foot in Rancho Cordova!!! Beautiful upgraded brick house in a quiet neighborhood. Remodelled kitchen and baths with lots of tile. New carpet, laminite floors, and tile floors. Tile counters, tiled mud room, large bonus room. Dual pane windows and fireplace. Large outdoor shed and landscaped yard.
I realized today that I was playing Listing Whack a Mole.
If you’ve never played, here’s how to start:
Start a real estate company.
Hire several talented agents.
Make a commitment to yourself that you’re going to really try to help your agents market their listings, instead of just sticking the listing in MLS and letting your agents and your sellers take their chances on a down market.
That’s all you need to do.
In no time at all, you’ll be playing listing Whack a Mole. I’ve saved a game for you:
Bridget gets you high quality photos on East Marlette. Create vFlyers and publish. Whack!
Vicki sells her listing on Sandhurst. Sellers move on with their lives, hooray! Payday doesn’t hurt. Whack!
Purva joins the company, get two new listings transferred in Metrolist. Whack! (Or is that: Whack whack!).
John and Vicki’s Birchgrove listing gets multiple offers. Get one accepted and put it in escrow. Whack!
Enter first of Purva’s listings in vFlyer and copy it up to a bunch of sites. Whack!
Next day, Purva gets a huge $40,000 price reduction. Deja vu all over again, new price. Whack!
Just as you’re getting ready to write about the pending and sold, Susan faxes you a new listing! Hooray. Whack!
And with that, I’m off to beat the new mole over the head with a mallet until it’s in the MLS. Then I’ll come back and beat it here some more.
Purva Brown has the listing on this great opportunity for a general contractor or accomplished handyman. We have the pest report on file, and there’s a fair amount of work to be done, but if you’re handy and want an opportunity to put some sweat equity into owning a terrific home at a great price, this may be for you.
Handyman’s Special — Huge Price Reduction
Location: Sacramento, CA
Investors and contractors! Fix the pest damange and you have a fabulous investment! This home features a family room addition with permits, a full garage, big backyard, and possible RV parking. Central heat and Air. Eight year old roof.
I want to thank Oliver Muoto at vFlyer.com for selecting me for their vFlyer Star Program. This program recognizes the real estate agents and brokers who use vFlyer to help give get the maximum online exposure for their sellers’ homes.
