5 Restricting Factors that Can Harm Your Marketing Strategy

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Every real estate business needs a marketing strategy in 2019. In a highly competitive industry, real estate businesses are reliant on a variety of marketing tactics to stand out from the crowd. If you are struggling to find success with your marketing strategies, here are a few things that may be holding you back, as well as tips on how to improve moving forward.

You are not using social media

Social media continues to grow in popularity in the real estate industry. Real estate businesses are becoming more reliant on social media to connect with potential buyers and sellers. Many real estate businesses use their social accounts to do things like promote home listings, engage with users, and share local news stories. If you are not set up on social, you are missing out on some of the best tools available today for promoting your real estate services. Social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitter will help you extend your reach and attract more business.

Your contact information is not accessible

How accessible is your contact information online? An interested client should not have any trouble locating your contact us page on your website. Be sure that it stands out on your site, as well as all of your social channels.

You are not using local images

Be sure that you are sharing local images when you promote your listings online. Keep in mind that in addition to the home, buyers also want to learn about the local area. You can sell an area by including high-quality photographs of local parks, landmarks, dining hotspots, etc.

You are not using a professional photographer

Excellent photographs go a long way in the real estate industry. If your listing photos are subpar, you may be turning away potential buyers. A professional photographer has the knowledge, skills, and equipment to take high-quality photographers that should help intrigue potential buyers.

Your website is not mobile-friendly

Many people today are reliant on their mobile devices. With this, your real estate website must be mobile-friendly. If interested buyers can’t successfully access your site, they may become disinterested and choose to hire another agent.

HUD Foreclosures

HUD foreclosures and VA Foreclosures are some of the best homes to buy when price is part of the equation. As with most Americans, price is always a concern. If not buying the same house for less, why not buy more house for the same dollar invested? When looking for a good deal it is hard to do better than the VA or HUD foreclosures market. The simple truth is that there are just more VA and HUD homes on the market, as they represent such a large number of mortgages that are generated each year. This translates into more foreclosures just by the magnitude of difference between all others comparing to the two largest.

The two largest also being government owned and operated means that they have less time to wait to make money back on the home. The FHA is especially known for selling HUD homes for less than the average sales price in a given area. FHA foreclosures represent a fraction of HUD but they are still a significant number of homes and both should be considered.

VA (Veterans Administration) and HUD (Housing and Urban Development) have different and unique opportunities for the buyer. Both are often forgiven for the local taxes normally associated with the purchase of a home (this is on a county by county basis). Be sure to ask the local title company or escrow company to look into it for you before closing as this is often missed due to their are not used to dealing with the 2 to 3 percent of the market that VA and HUD foreclosures represent.

Foreclosure Listings Increasing

As the market settled after the mortgage meltdown foreclosure listings also settled and fewer homes were on the market with a placard reading “Bank Foreclosure” in big red lettering. This was a good thing for the entire real estate market. Having an abundance of foreclosures brings the entire market down and it makes it harder for home owners, who would like to move, to get the appropriate price for their home as a similar home down the same street was sold for substantially less and the appraiser is using the foreclosure as a comparable sale.

This is just one of the problems when there are too many foreclosure listings in any area. Another issue is the television set that sits in everyone’s living room harping about the price of homes based on the number of foreclosures and this constant barrage of negative information makes most people sit on the sidelines waiting for the market to either implode completely or to correct itself. Meanwhile while they wait, others are buying foreclosure listings and making great investments.

Whatever the reason, a market can only handle so many foreclosure listings at any given time. The more foreclosures, the lower the market gets and this is a lesson the banks that were foreclosing and selling off realized too late. The market and their investments would have been better off if there had not been a rush to divest themselves of the toxic assets made more toxic by their own actions.