Creative Marketing in a Modern World

I’ve been doing a lot of writing lately, but I’ve also been doing a lot of reading and commenting on other blogs with similar themes.  Some of these can be seen in the sidebar on this page.

One blog in particular, is PrivateSaleBlog.ca.  I’ve been reading and commenting over there a bit this  morning, and I’ve been seeing one particular trend – although no one comes right out and says it, this site seems to be heavily biased toward PropertyGuys.com!  Is this a covert viral marketing campaign, or are there actually individuals behind this blog who are attempting to provide fair and unbiased information?

It seems to me that many of the articles here take the same marketing approach as the PropertyGuys web site and franchisees.  Even down to the comparison of commission you can save in the article linked above.  I, for one, had overlooked GST in my initial calculation of commission I’d save selling privately.  It was the PropertyGuys representative that I spoke with originally that brought it to my attention.  The article also states: “There is currently only one company in Canada with certified private Sale professionals, and that is PropertyGuys.com” Ok, that’s nice… but do you think, just maybe, that’s because the “Private Sale Professional” designation is a registered trademark of PropertyGuys.com? It remains to be seen whether their competition can buy a designation for a few thousand dollars.

Something else rather worrisome about this blog from my quick perusal, is that many – if not all – of the links to Kijiji property listings reference PropertyGuys.com listings.

If I’m reading into this too much, or I’m not seeing the big picture here, will someone please set me straight?  Please tell me that you’re not providing your blog as a marketing tool to get more property listings for PropertyGuys.com – or any other private FSBO, for that matter (though it that’s the point, you’re doing a pretty poor job of promoting yourself!).

As for me, although I do have a home for sale that I paid $500 (plus GST) to PropertyGuys.com’s local franchisee to have listed, I can’t yet endorse all of their practices any more than I’d endorse anyone elses.  As “just another guy” with a property for sale, I need the exposure that they can provide.  The only thing that I can endorse is the idea of private sale and the benefits it can bring for the buyer and seller.  I sincerely hope that this is not yet another corporation that’s trying to edge in on the billions of dollars made off of people’s hard-won real estate holdings.

Making Life Simpler

Finding a new place to live is easy – if you don’t care where you live, who your neighbours are, what style or age the house is, how big the lot is, whether there’s a swamp in your back yard…… Hmm, ok – finding a new place to live is damn hard.

Here some things that would make shopping for a new home so much easier:

1. Spelling: I don’t mind if the occasional keyboard slip-up slips through the cracks.  But with modern spell checking, there’s no excuse for any error that would be caught with a simple copy-paste into your favorite word processing program.  I’m not sure about the latest version of Internet Explorer, but the Firefox browser I use every day has had spell checking built into it for as long as I can remember.
2. Price: Put it on the SIGN!  Yes, I know that the point is to have people call of visit the web site to find out more information.  But how do I know when I’m driving by that there’s a neighbourhood conspiracy to artificially inflate the price of real estate?  $400,000 for a 2-bedroom bungalow in the middle of nowhere?  Wow!  Where can I get some of the stuff you’re smoking?
3. Acreage: The same thing for price can be said for the acreage and other important details about the house.  Though it may not be as important in the middle of the city where the property boundaries are pretty clear, it’s rare that you can tell the extents of a rural property from the road.  Some private sales will have an ID number that you can use to get right to the house information by visiting their web site.  With Realtor (again, note the obligatory trademark and/or copyright of the Canadian Real Estate Association and the National Association of Realtors) listings, there’s usually just a phone number.  That means that I have to first get ahold of the listing agent, then listen to all of the wonderful reasons why $400,000 is an appropriate asking price for the bungalow beside the gravel pit.
4. Appointments: I’ve often waited up to 15 minutes, and sometimes half an hour past the time I was scheduled to meet with a listing agent for a showing.  Now, to keep from being hypocritical, I’ve been late too – but when I know that there’s the likelihood I’ll be sitting there waiting for a while, what’s the incentive for me to show up on time?
5. Follow-ups: The mark of a true professional is the follow-up.  Honestly, I’m terrible at this.  Either I don’t remember to follow up with someone, or I’ve moved on to something else and it doesn’t matter to me anymore.  I’ve had good and bad experiences with this, but it seems that after a while I’ve just “fallen off” of many agents’ radars.  I guess they don’t see the promise of the quick return on their time investment.  Do they forget that I’m still in the market for a home?  A very simple technical solution that many agents already keep is a buyer database.  I don’t mean the crappy “send me automatic matching listings” sorts of things; they’re virtually useless.  I mean a regular review of your list of buyer contacts and a bit of mental reflection to see if you’ve come across anything that may be of interest.  This could take 15 minutes in the morning while sipping a cup of coffee.

I hope that you’ve only experienced a few of these things in your own search.  Something tells me you may have had a similar experience though.  Feel free to add your own good or bad experiences, both with private marketing firms and organized real estate.  Tell it like it is, but try to keep it professional please.

If you’d like to come for a showing of our home for sale, I’ll try to do my best to ensure that you don’t experience these annoyances.  Your time is valuable and so is mine.