There’s always something to howl about.

Boringly functional artwork in the service of marketing homes: If people can’t figure out what you’re selling, they won’t buy it

I wrote about the back side of that card last week. It’s the Open House invitation for 56 West Willetta Street in Downtown Phoenix, a home we listed for sale yesterday. This is a full-bore Bloodhound launch, but the card itself is kinda boring, wouldn’t you say?

That’s not an accident. I could wish I were more talented as a graphic designer, but I’m a firm believer that, if something is so cool looking that no one knows what it is, you’ve wasted your money. As radical as our real estate signs are, they still look like real estate signs. And the most profoundly valuable graphic element on our signs was suggested by marketing-provocateur Richard Riccelli: The snipe in the upper left hand corner that says “For sale.” In the uncivil war between obvious and obtuse, obtuse wins all the glamorous awards and obvious wins all the money.

Which brings us to our directionals. I’ve been writing about custom directional signs for more than a year. In that time, we’ve gone through many designs, and we’ve never done the same thing twice. For this house, I think I’ve finally hit on something I like and will use again:

Could not possibly be more obvious, yes?

That “Buy me” call to action is swiped from Redfin.com. Their signs do nothing for me otherwise, but those two words are the essence of good copywriting, in my opinion.

In our own small way, we launch a house in the same we someone else might launch a new car or a new kind of dishwasher or a new magazine. Those business-card-sized Open House cards will be distributed to 6,000 homes. We’ll get a 1% or at most 2% response on that effort — extremely direct mail — but the chances are excellent that the ultimate buyer will be among the parties who come to the first open house.

And: The signs, the directionals, the web site, everything else we do to market our listings — these techniques sell houses. This is not rocket science. Drawing more attention — and more-positive attention — to a house will make it sell faster and for more money. In the market we live in right now, in Phoenix, only two types of homes are selling at all: The cheapest and the best. That implies the best-marketed, as well, and that much seems obvious to me, too.

If you bring yourself to BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando, I’ll talk to you about what we’re doing, how we go about doing it, and why it works.

Click on the PayPal button shown below to get your discount price – $99 for BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Orlando on Friday, November 7th, 2008


















When: Friday, November 7th, 2008, 8 am to 8 pm

Where: Crowne Plaza Hotel and Conference Center, Orlando Airport, 5555 Hazeltine National Dr, Orlando, FL 32812

Listing our way is a lot more work, to be sure. But unlike the Realtors we compete against, our listings sell. And if the benefit of that is not obvious, you might just be a candidate for an award…

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