Marketing a Hot Property 101

Home sales are trending down, home prices continue to rise, and home buyers are still trying to claw their way into the housing market.

All this means that good homes are a hot commodity. Naturally, agents charged with selling a desirable property will want to do everything they can to market it effectively.

But this doesn't mean that agents can rely entirely on the competitive market to sell a home.

Instead, agents committed to delivering a great deal for their sellers should perform a thorough market analysis, advertise across multiple marketing channels, and stage strong open houses and virtual tours.

Perform a Thorough Market Analysis

Setting an attractive, competitive listing price will make it easier to market and sell a property.

A property's value is most likely to be influenced by the surrounding neighborhood, the square footage and number of rooms, in-home amenities, and whether the property is in good condition and has received recent upgrades.

Agents can use this information to perform a competitive market analysis (CMA), which produces an estimate of a home's overall value. With a CMA, agents can list the property at an appropriate price, which should increase visibility and attract more leads.

Homesnap Pro — available to agents for free, courtesy of their MLS — includes a rapid CMA feature so agents can quickly create and customize these reports and print or email them to share with clients. Plus, since Pro agents have access to up-to-date MLS data, the market analyses they create and share are incredibly accurate.

In addition, Homesnap Pro+ members have exclusive access to Sell Speed, a tool that aggregates and analyzes recent sales in your area to estimate how fast a listing will sell at a given listing price. Such information can streamline the market analysis process and help agents deliver clients a reasonable estimate of the time between listing and sale.

Advertise on Multiple Channels

After determining a listing price and putting their listing on the market, agents will be ready to begin their advertising efforts. Agents should create a marketing plan that enables digital advertising across multiple channels, because people spend hours at a time online, much of it toggling between sites such as Google, Facebook and Instagram.

Consider a prospect's behavior: They search Google for information about real estate, interact with ads on Facebook and Instagram when scrolling through their feed, and use Waze to get from one place to another. Why wouldn't agents work to find people at all of these places?

Fortunately, agents can and should advertise across all of these channels. With a hot property, agents can post the listing on their Facebook business profile and invest in Facebook ads to reach prospects as they scroll. Agents can also invest in Google's Local Services Ads and Instagram advertisements to reach potential buyers.

Stage Strong Virtual Tours

When it comes to closing deals, generating leads alone isn't enough. Agents should also prioritize staging open houses and virtual tours that highlight a property's strength and value.

The in-person open house experience is a traditional tenet of the real agent playbook. In general, agents know that having a clean, well-staged home makes it easier to sell.

But open houses are no longer the sole means of providing buyers a holistic tour of a property. Virtual tours exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, and will likely remain important for agents.

Even with the return of in-person open houses, virtual touring has remained popular, so agents should create a strong virtual tour for every property they have listed. If your property has a virtual tour, people will be able to watch it before committing to an in-person open house, driving more interest in the property, increasing the number of leads, and likely leading to the people you tour in-person being the highest-quality, highest-intent leads.

Agents can use Homesnap Stories to create and host their virtual showings. With Stories, agents can add a video tour of a property to their listing page on Homesnap. Homesnap Stories includes features such as emojis, augmented reality, and voice overs — all of which make a virtual tour more exciting and personalized.

To view the original article, visit the Homesnap blog.