Realtors often debate which is more important, marketing or price. I say, yes, price is very, very important. You can't overprice. You need to price reasonably. But, unless your marketing shows that that price is of value, the price is irrelevant. If you post one picture from a cell phone with you in the bathroom mirror and poorly backlit, for example, or a picture with a blinding light coming out of a window and dark couches—people won't understand the home’s value, even if you were to price it at rock bottom. If, instead, you do luxury marketing and amazing photography for every property, they're going to see the value in the price that you post, and they're going to want to come tour the home. This is why I bring the same level of quality to every home, regardless of price point. And maybe that just goes back to my marketing degree, where I first learned this lesson. Take as an example a Mercedes Benz, which is not that much different from a Honda in practical terms: you have cooled seats, you have power everything, you have a screen on the dashboard, you have the smooth ride, the distance monitoring when you're on cruise control, and so on. But a Mercedes sells for a lot more than a Honda. And yes, part of it's quality, but part of it's perception. And a big part of that perception is the marketing Mercedes does to elevate themselves, which elevates that car into a different status level. And so even when I'm doing a $300,000 home, I market it like a $2 million home. Because, what I've found is that on a $300,000 home, $5,000 matters a lot more than on a $3 million home.
$5,000 is make or break for someone, even at the $500,000 level. Think about $5,000—if you found it on the street, you’d think that's a lot of money, right? One thousand dollars is a lot of money. So I try to get every thousand dollars for my clients every time I market. We’re doing a 6-page brochure. We're doing videos, we're doing walkthroughs, we're doing flyovers, we're doing 3D models, floor plans, professional photography. We unleash the entire marketing package on every single home. That way, when I send the owner the pictures, they react like “Oh my gosh, my house is beautiful!” That's what I want someone to see online because all we can do is draw people off their screens and into the house. If we create a sufficient surge in demand for the house, then we can get a bidding war going, and then we can get the results we want for our client. In the end, you don't know if the video's going to sell the house or not. You don't know if the single property website is going to sell the house. You don't know if the 3D model is going to sell the house. But what you do know is that in the event that the seller comes to you and says, “why isn't my house moving?”---especially in the context of a shifting market—you can say, “there are only two things we can control. One is the marketing and one is the price. Is there anything that we've left out of our marketing?” I always want them to say “no” at that point because we've turned over every single stone; we've done everything possible from a marketing standpoint. If we’ve done all this, they're not going to be able to find a reason to go to another realtor or brokerage because we've done everything and at the highest possible level. So if there are two things that are going to move a property, marketing and price, now there's just one left: price.
SMART AGENTS | 18
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