Monthly Archives: January 2021

Creating a market ready home can be a stressful process; throughout this blog I am going to share some tips on how to stage your property best for buyers. What does it mean to stage a property? House staging refers to the process through which you create the optimal environment for buyers to ideally generate the most profit from your listing. This is a step every seller should incorporate when getting their home ready for the market. No, you don’t have to be an interior designer or professional decorator to make your property stand out, but surely doesn’t hurt. 

I was lucky enough to interview Sharon Knowles, a professional organizer, decorator, and stager who was kind enough to share some tips and steps that go into the process of getting a house ready for the market. Throughout her career, she has transformed countless properties that have benefitted from her special touch as well as helping to declutter homes owned by hoarders. Her work has helped numerous people to maximize their properties’ potential and has even been featured on television real estate shows. By utilizing the experience of a professional, like Sharon, you gain the services of someone who is well-versed on market conditions and the thought process of potential buyers. Another advantage to hiring professional help is that they are typically well connected to highly qualified companies or individuals who specialize in home improvement services. However, if you’re in a situation where you prefer to do your own staging, these tips can make a world of difference!

This link will direct you to the video blog I recorded on this subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4UD-2Dtfws

One of the first steps you can take to get your house ready is to depersonalize your home. This is an important strategy used when staging for a couple of reasons. Start by removing family photos that are irrelevant to the location or environment that you are trying to convey. For example, if you’re selling a snowy mountainside log cabin, a photo of the family skiing together could help the buyer to envision the memories they could make there, but less relevant imagery displaying graduation photos, vacations in far away places, or baby pictures may distract the buyer from imagining how they would decorate the space. Another way to depersonalize your home is to store away collections that add clutter or draw attention away from the room. Although they may be treasures to you, not everyone shares the same interests and neutralizing the space is key. Religious decor or objects should also be stowed away as these items may limit your market by potentially offending people of differing faith.

Sharon Knowles, Arrange the Change

Throughout our interview, Sharon expressed the importance of neutralizing the areas of your home. A great tip that she shared is to try to emotionally disconnect from the property once you decide to list it on the market. This technique can be applied not only to removing personal items from the house, but also by repainting the walls with appropriate color pallets. Typically, neutral colors can create a warm and soothing environment that are appealing to buyers who won’t have to worry about the hassle of repainting immediately after move-in. It’s not uncommon for kids to want fun or bold colors covering their bedroom walls, but repainting these rooms, perhaps with grey or beige tones, can make for a much more attractive experience for the buyer. 

Sharon lists one of the most crucial cosmetic updates as being fixing repairs around the property. The process of purchasing a new home, packing up, and moving all of your belongings is already a tedious and stressful process, you can prioritize their experience by helping to make the transition as smooth as possible. A large majority of Americans prefer a move-in ready home, so by repairing even small inconveniences such as torn screens, leaky faucets, chipped paint, etc. can put your listing at an advantage on the market. Additionally, by fixing minor damages around the property can increase the value of your house. Small details that you may find insignificant can send buyers the wrong message, making them wonder “What else needs fixing?” 

Sharon Knowles, Arrange the Change

When staging your home, furniture is a key element in creating a charming and welcoming environment. Depending on the condition or appearance of your own furniture, they can add to or take from the room’s aesthetic. Furniture rental companies can aid you in this process if you feel as though your own pieces aren’t up to par. Too much furniture in a small space can limit the eye and block the buyers from seeing characteristics of the room. The furniture should not limit one’s walking space or their view of the space. It’s best to determine the room’s statement piece or focal point, such as a fireplace, window, or other unique features, then position the furniture around it. If your room lacks a statement piece, add one! Something as simple as a decorative rug can add pizazz and work as a statement piece in your space. As for the furniture itself, Sharon offered tricks including breaking up boxy couches with a round side table and utilizing furniture that fits into itself such as an island with slide-in stools to maximize the room’s potential. 

Sharon Knowles, Arrange the Change

By implementing these steps prior to listing your home, the value of your home will increase and likely sell faster and for a higher price. If you have additional questions on how you can create a market ready home, leave me a comment on this blog or reach out to me directly via email or through my social media so that I may provide you with answers in future blogs. Be sure to check out the comment section as well to share your house staging experience. Did you hire outside help, or do it yourself? How much did the value of your property escalate after applying these steps? Let us know! Don’t forget to like this blog post if you found it to be helpful and share it with your friends and followers to help us grow our community. Additionally, if you’d like to learn more about real estate promotion remember to subscribe to my “Media Promotion Within Real Estate, A ‘How To’ Blog” so that you can get notified whenever I post new content.

If you’re interested in learning more about Sharon’s work, or are in need of her expertise and hoping working with Sharon and her company Arrange the Change, you can visit her website using the following link: http://arrangethechange.com/ 

Resources:

Fontinelle, A. (2020, August 28). How to Stage Your Home for a Quick Sale. Retrieved January 03, 2021, from https://www.investopedia.com/articles/mortgages-real-estate/08/staging-home.asp 

BE MARKET READY! (n.d.). Retrieved January 03, 2021, from http://arrangethechange.com/ 

SSI Staff. (2016, October 19). 44% of Americans Looking for Move-in-Ready Homes Say Smart Home Technology Should Be Installed. Retrieved January 03, 2021, from https://intellecy.com/44-of-americans-looking-for-move-in-ready-homes-say-smart-home-technology-should-be-installed

Unless you’re already a real estate agent, you might feel a little uncomfortable giving house tours, let alone doing it on camera. This is a common phenomenon and a normal concern for someone who is in the process of promoting a property. With the coronavirus chaos we’ve endured, this year has been an adjustment period for everyone, affecting so many industries in countless ways. The real estate industry is no different in that aspect, causing major decreases in open houses and walk-throughs; buyer experiences that can often make or break a sale. Livestream tours are an excellent way to combat this threat to your property’s exposure as well as generally beneficial for it’s position on the market.

Filming a walk through house tour supplies your audience with a better understanding of the property’s layout, prior to an in-person tour. Additionally, this is an excellent way to minimize the traffic within the home which may pose the threat of spreading COVID-19. As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, you can use different media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube to promote and produce livestreams gives your audience an opportunity to interact with you directly during the tour by enabling them asking questions or making comments throughout. If you haven’t already read these blogs, make sure you check them out to learn about all of the ways they can be utilized for real estate promotion.

Prior to giving the tour, there are a couple of steps that you’ll need to take to ensure success of your livestream. Along with cleaning and staging your property for the market, you’ll want to promote the tour through your different accounts. Publicizing the day and time of the tour helps to make your audience aware of the livestream, giving more people an opportunity to tune in. This step is important in maximizing your amount of viewers for the tour. It’s my suggestion that you announce the tour publicly through multiple media channels a couple of days in advance then post reminders each day leading up to it. Get people excited by encouraging them to join in and ask questions about what parts of the property they want to see. Another step that you can take to improve your livestream is to use stabilizing tools while filming; these are great to reduce shakiness and help to create a clear video. 

If this is a new experience, you may be asking yourself where to begin. Well, curb appeal is super important to buyers, so a good place to start any live stream or video house tour is outside. This is an awesome time to talk about the area and some aspects of the community before entering the home. Including aspects unique to the community that could be appealing to buyers, for example, swimming pools, a nearby school, popular downtown scene, local shopping or restaurants, etc. are all great topics to add. Buyers aren’t only shopping for a house, they want to find a place where they can build a life, for many people the area can be a deciding factor for them.

Once you enter the property and begin to walk through the different rooms, be sure to keep a positive and energetic tone as you describe the features within the home. A good way to structure a video tour is to enter and introduce the room, briefly describe and speak about the space, then finish by showing a pan of the room. Although the focus will mostly be on the structure of the room, simple tricks such as opening the curtains or turning on a ceiling fan, can add movement and light to the space, creating a more appealing space. If you’re showing less desirable aspects of the property, offer ideas to show the versatility of the space. For instance, while displaying a small bedroom, be excited about the possibility of the space being used for a nursery, vanity room, or office space. By doing this, people are able to envision more potential within the room. Focus on not what you are using it for, but rather on what potential buyers can transform it into.

Livestreaming is a super helpful tool when promoting your listing, giving you the opportunity to elaborate on your property, interact with potential buyers, and get them excited about the space. I hope that you found this blog to be helpful. Have you ever livestreamed a house tour? Which rooms or features do you think are most important to include? Be sure to leave a comment below to let me know what you thought about this post along with giving me ideas of what you want me to cover in future blogs. If you believe that these tips are useful, don’t forget to like this post and please share it to your friends and followers. By subscribing to my “Media Promotion Within Real Estate, A ‘How To’ Blog” you’ll get notifications when I upload any new tips and tricks of how to better your position on the market. 

 Resources:

G. (2020, September 21). Real Estate Agent’s Ultimate Live Streaming Guide In 2019. Retrieved January 03, 2021, from https://www.becomealocalleader.com/lead-generation/real-estate-agents-ultimate-live-streaming-guide/

The 15 Best Real Estate Video Tips. (n.d.). Retrieved January 03, 2021, from https://truefocusmedia.com/the-15-best-real-estate-video-tips/

Just how important are videos to your listing’s success? Studies show that over half of consumers reported feeling more confident in their online purchases after watching associated videos and ninety-six percent of consumers say that they find videos to be helpful when online shopping. Being that real estate is a major investment for most people, it’s important to prioritize your audiences’ experience and help to provide comfort with their decision in any way that you can. Offering a video tour, along with photos of the property can be comforting, entertaining, and engaging for potential buyers. Including a video tour of the property in your online listings has clear correlation to potential buyers’ interaction with the listing, greatly increasing overall interest.

When making a video house tour of your property, there are a couple of things you should keep in mind. Tip number one: keep your video short and sweet! People don’t always realize how much can be accomplished within just a couple of minutes. On average, our attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter, likely due to our mass consumption of media that has increased tremendously even in just the past couple of decades. You may not always notice the different tactics that content creators use to keep us engaged, but one example of the strategies can be easily examined by simply counting the amount of time in between switching camera angles during television shows or movies. 

Studies find that the average human attention span typically only lasts for one minute when viewing online videos. Wait a minute, does that mean you have to squeeze an entire tour into a minute long video? No, but it means you have to find a way to grab attention quickly and cut out any unnecessary filler. Start off your video strongly, like I mentioned earlier, people tend to lose interest quickly, so a good strategy to keep them engaged longer is to include the listing’s best aspects in the beginning of the video. One way that you can generate interest right off the bat, is by creating a quick video montage that briefly shows some of the property’s most appealing features in the beginning to generate interest for what’s to come. 

Photo by Maddy Smakulski

Tip number two: include multiple angles of your space. This provides the viewer with a better understanding of the space, while also making the video more interesting to watch. Not all of a room’s features can be captured by a single angle, and by including multiple your audience can better imagine what they would do with the space. Draw attention to aspects or amenities unique to the room; funky lighting feature, great view, new floors? We want to see it all. Prioritize the spaces, buyers are typically most interested in the kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms, dining and living rooms. If you start getting too specific and begin showing every storage closet and crawl space, the video might start to drag. Throughout my research, I found multiple sources that list the kitchen and master bath to be areas that hold the most value for buyers which is important to remember when creating your online listing.

The third tip that I believe can help you to make a great video tour is include audio. By recording a voiceover you’re able to express your own excitement about the property while providing some awesome insight throughout the video. Personally, I believe that voiceovers are the most beneficial kind of audio that you can use because you can customize it to the video by discussing the property’s background, renovation history, local community, etc. However, if you decide not to use a voiceover, be sure to include some type of background music to keep the video entertaining. Depending on the listing, try to incorporate a fitting song; perhaps choosing new music for more modern properties. Audio adds an extra element to the visual, helping the viewer know how they should feel about what’s happening on screen, and creating a more pleasing experience.

I hope that this post was able to demonstrate the importance of including video tours within your online listing as well as provide you with some helpful tips that can make your video stand out. Do you have suggestions regarding how to create effective real estate content? What rooms or amenities do you think are most important to feature in a video tour? Do you have ideas about which music genres best align with different types of properties? You can share your ideas with me and the rest of our community in the comment section. 

If you have additional questions about how to conduct a proper video tour I do want to hear from you, don’t hesitate to reach out to me via email, social media, or through by commenting on this blog so that I may address any shared concerns in future blog posts. Please like this post if you found it to be helpful and subscribe to my “Media Promotion Within Real Estate, A ‘How To’ Blog” so that you don’t miss out on new posts and updates. Share this post to your friends and followers to help us grow our community and keep them updated on these useful real estate tips!

Resources:

Chen, J. (2020, August 28). Amenity. Retrieved January 02, 2021, from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/amenity.asp 

Editing sound in video: It’s more important than you think. (n.d.). Retrieved January 02, 2021, from https://trint.com/resources/0784l313/editing-sound-in-video-more-important-than-you-think 

Savage, C. (2011, February 07). 4 Ways to Keep Viewers Engaged in an Online Video. Retrieved January 02, 2021, from https://wistia.com/learn/marketing/4-ways-to-keep-viewers-engaged-in-an-online-video 

The 15 Best Real Estate Video Tips. (n.d.). Retrieved January 02, 2021, from https://truefocusmedia.com/the-15-best-real-estate-video-tips/  

The 5 Most Important Rooms In The House. (2020, January 30). Retrieved January 02, 2021, from https://www.luxurypresence.com/luxury-real-estate-the-five-most-important-rooms-in-the-house/ 

These Are The 2 Rooms That Really Sell Homes – Trulia’s Blog – Real Estate 101. (2018, March 08). Retrieved January 02, 2021, from https://www.trulia.com/blog/2-most-important-rooms-in-a-house/ 

Throughout the process of selling your house, you may be one of the many people who struggle with making their listing stand out. Just in the United States, there are projected to be over five million existing housing sales this coming year. With our technology usage continuously expanding, our society is becoming more and more integrated with media; meaning that most of these properties will likely pop up online. That’s a lot of competition. Sure, there may not be as many listings in your specific area, but even in that case, you’ll want your property to stand out on the market. Whether or not you’re confident in the quality and likability of your house, learning how to generate as much traffic as possible to your online listing is an integral part of the process and ultimately your success with online real estate promotion. Taking advantage of the fantastic free media channels that we all have at our disposal is a great place to start. It may take a little bit of time for your listing to develop a presence on multiple platforms, however one that you should utilize early on is YouTube.

YouTube is one of my absolute favorite platforms, and I am not alone in that, being that there are approximately thirty million daily users it has become the second most visited website in today’s media hungry world. The massive website has hundreds of hours of video uploaded to it’s server every minute, making the endless content more diverse than any other social media network. The massive audience that uses YouTube makes the platform an excellent place to market anything including real estate. Videos are an awesome way to advertise your property because buying real estate is a visual process. Don’t believe me? Studies which found that 403% more inquiries were generated by listings that include video. Creating an entertaining visual experience keeps your audience engaged longer and the more time spent viewing or interacting with your listing, the more and more invested they become. 

You’re probably wondering how you can make your video stand out on such a huge platform amongst billions of other videos. Before you ask, no, you don’t have to have thousands of subscribers to get your video noticed. Being owned by the top search engine in the world has its perks, and one awesome benefit of YouTube is that Google prioritizes video content, making it easier to find when searching. It’s important to connect your listings; include a link to your YouTube account within your other online profiles so that potential buyers can easily be directed to the content. Every little detail can add or take away from your video; not only should the video itself be entertaining, but by creating an exciting thumbnail, appropriate title and an informative caption, you can optimize your viewer’s experience. Once they get there the focus becomes keeping them engaged.

One in five viewers will leave a video within the first ten seconds if it hasn’t hooked them, making the start of the video vital to your success. A suggestion that I have for this initial impression is to start with a quick montage of some of the property’s best features or to include a reaction to something that will be shown later on in the video. By using these strategies, the viewer is left on somewhat of a cliff hanger and is inclined to stay tuned to learn more. YouTube also allows its users to live stream which can be used in this situation as well. Another helpful tool that YouTube offers is the ability to geotag. I was unaware of this feature at first, but after some research I think this can be super helpful when used properly. Geotagging is when you link your videos or live streams to the location or area that you’re in so that search engines can categorize your upload with other content related to the area. That means if someone is interested or searching for a home in your specific location, your property will quickly pop up during their search.

Are you going to incorporate a YouTube video the next time you list a property on the market? Have you uploaded content to YouTube’s platform before? What do you hope to see when watching a YouTube house tour video? Have you used YouTube to promote properties in the past? Let me know in the comment section of this blog what techniques you found to be most helpful or successful when dealing with this platform. 

It’s difficult to squeeze all of the awesome features that YouTube has into one blog post, so if you have additional tips or tricks I’d love for you to interact with this post. Like and share this video if you found it to be helpful or if you think it could benefit someone you know. Subscribe to my “Media Promotion Within Real Estate, A ‘How To’ Blog” if you want to learn more about all of the different ways that you can promote real estate online. Don’t forget to leave me any questions that you may have in the comment section or you can contact me directly through my email or social media accounts, and I’ll be happy to clarify any confusion in my future blog posts! 

Resources:

Aslam, S. (2020, October 28). YouTube by the Numbers: Stats, Demographics & Fun Facts. Retrieved January 01, 2021, from https://www.omnicoreagency.com/youtube-statistics/ 

Bushery, M. (n.d.). The Ultimate Guide to Real Estate YouTube Marketing. Retrieved January 01, 2021, from https://placester.com/real-estate-marketing-academy/real-estate-youtube-video-marketing

Davies, D. (2020, October 09). The 7 Most Popular Search Engines in the World – SEO 101. Retrieved January 01, 2021, from https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101/meet-search-engines/  

Tag your location on videos and live streams – Computer – YouTube Help. (n.d.). Retrieved January 01, 2021, from https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7638112?co=GENIE.Platform 

United States Existing Home Sales1968-2020 Data: 2021-2022 Forecast: Calendar. (n.d.). Retrieved January 01, 2021, from https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/existing-home-sales