Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Working like a dog to achieve specific marketing objectives

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Teri Lussier:

My other question: Good ideas and bad ideas. This bites me in the butt over and over. My brain is great at generating ideas, not so great at knowing what makes an idea great. Something new or different is not always better (I need to have that tattooed on the inside of my eyelids). The million dollar question: How do you know?

The way we work is to think backward from the marketing objective: What event or outcome do we want to have happened? “Sell the house!” is a lot to tear off in one mouthful, but how about, “What can we do to get visitors to sit down and ‘try the house on’ in their minds?” That’s where the coffee table book came from.

I wrote the original version of our sign philosophy before I created our first yard sign. That sign was very different from the signs we make now, but that paragraph of small text was there from the very beginning. I knew that if a yard sign was actually going to work to sell the house, I had to get people to stop their cars, and that paragraph of text has been doing that one little job ever since.

This is all Richard Riccelli again, thinking in terms of direct response marketing. The big yes to the house is an accumulation of smaller yeses to particular marketing tactics, so the most effective marketing efforts will consist of taking away the negatives — eliminating the deal-killers. Who can you turn to for that kind of marketing advice? Your buyers. When you show, again and again your buyers will teach you what’s not working in other listers’ houses. Learn from your buyers and eliminate the turn-offs from your own listings.

That’s important. People will read the things I write and decide that I’m talking about tricks or gimmicks or tactics. I’m not. I’m talking about a complete home-marketing strategy, and each individual element of that strategy is expected to fulfill a particular strategic objective. But our strategy starts with four obvious tactics that are omitted in at least 90% of the homes I show: Cleaned, repaired, staged and priced to the current real estate market. Skip those steps and nothing else you do will make up the difference.

We think of it this way: If there are nine plausible homes for every buyer in our market and our listing is second-best, there’s a good chance it won’t sell in nine months. Why? Because this month’s first-best, which will sell this month, will be replaced by next month’s first-best. Our absolute best chance to sell our listing is to be that first-best home, far and away the first-best — in cleanliness, in curb-appeal, in condition, in staging and in price.

Another way of thinking of the same thing: Sales is the art of taking away objections. If we can remove every one of the buyer’s objections to our home, the buyer has no reason not to buy it. Rather than probe buyers for objections about why they almost like our listing, we prefer to take away every objection we can think of before we list the home. That way, even if we’re wrong about price — an easy target to miss in our market — we can make the correction instantly, knowing that price is likely to be the only consequential objection — and get the home sold in a very short span of time.

Most Realtors do what they do for the worst of all possible reasons: Monkey-see, monkey-do. Why does your yard sign look like all the others? Uh… Why does your flyer — if there is one — consist of a list of features? Even though you live in the Web 2.0 world and you know that savvy shoppers despise sleazy salesman’s tricks, why do you withhold information in the hope of coercing phone calls?

There is no “why” that you can direct at our marketing that we cannot answer in detail, outlining the exact strategic objective — the specific response we hope to elicit — for everything we do.

So: The small text on the custom sign stops traffic, which gets people looking at the home. The coffee table book gets buyers to sit down, to feel the home. Even something as simple as the tiny “docent cards” we put up in exceptional homes pull a yoeman’s weight: They convey to buyers that the home is not just a domicile but a work of art. Before they visit the house, and especially when they get back home, the web site gives them an infinite “wish book” experience.

The latter point is important just by itself. Even when Realtors seem to be half-awake to marketing, they treat it as if they have one swing at the ball — and they don’t always seem to take even that one swing seriously, swinging for the fences. Why are our single-property web sites so elaborate? Because we know that the eventual buyer of the home will be coming back to that web site again and again — which (duh!) mimics buyer behavior with the actual house. We want for the web experience of the home to be rich and satisfying every time a potential buyer comes back. We’re not building a site just to shine the seller on or to fulfill a bullet-point on a bullshit “marketing plan.” We’re not trying to hide the home in the hope of inducing phone calls. We’re trying to make that home available to web visitors in every way we can think of — and we will continue adding content to the web site throughout the marketing period.

In July of 2005, Cathy and I were in a CRS class taught by Ed Hatch — a very fun instructor, wired like a congenital basketball coach. He mentioned that agents for The Group in Denver had started putting price riders on their signs. Cathy and I looked at each other and had one of those shared epiphanies that makes our brokerage work. We’ve never even see the price riders The Group does, but ours are huge, with the numerals visible from two blocks away. What are we doing? With one simple sign, we are establishing our transparency to buyers — and to the neighbors. People hate being torqued into calling a Realtor to get a simple answer to a simple question — dreading what they’re going to have to go through to get that answer. We answer every conceivable question passively, starting with that price rider.

But aren’t we losing out on leads? They’re not leads. They’re just curious people who hate the dumb stunts Realtors pull to try to trick them into becoming leads. This again is not at all hard to understand if you think about the way you react to pushy salespeople. With something as simple as a $50 price rider, we can establish silently and passively but instantly that we are not the kind of Realtors to be feared.

Everything we’re doing is devised to fulfill a marketing objective — to elicit the direct response outcome we’re looking for. The “trick” to our tricks is that there are no tricks, no gimmicks, no clever sleights-of-mind to dupe people into buying our homes. Instead we market real estate using the same time-tested ideas that are deployed to market everything else. We think about the response we want to have elicited, then we build our marketing tools to elicit that response. We test everything, and we toss a lot of seemingly-promising ideas. We’re not afraid to be wrong, which gives us a decent chance of being right — if not right away then eventually.

And everything that we’re doing with our listings is documented in BloodhoundBlog posts. Other than our archives page, there is no decent catalog of those posts, but I expect I could teach two or three days just on marketing listings. As always, if you’re interested in these ideas, don’t try to cheap it out — anti-marketing is worse than no marketing. But if you want to see what I’m talking about — see how we solve specific real estate marketing problems — come see us in Orlando.

If you follow that link, the monetary cost isn’t much — just $99 for a 12-hour program. Even so, my price is very high: You have to pay attention. I’m not going to get drunk with you, and I’m not going to have pillow fights with you. This is not a tax-deductible day-camp for Realtors. But if you will lend me your mind for my share of those 12 hours, I will show you how to go home and dominate your local market — in due course — by delivering the kind of real estate marketing prowess other Realtors know nothing about.

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