Questions to Ask Before Listing Your Home with a Real Estate Agent

Posted by Tina Merritt on 3/10/2010 at 7:04 PM Posted in Property Management

It's common knowledge that today, 87% of buyers are searching for homes on the internet. They are still using real estate agents to buy the homes; however, buyers are going to the internet before and during their home search in greater numbers each day.
Now, let's say 87% of all buyers were searching in your local newspaper for a home. Would you hire an agent who ran 1 ad a month in the newspaper or would you prefer to go with the real estate agent who ran an ad everyday? Dumb question, huh? But it's not...many sellers are still not asking the right questions regarding the internet presence of their real estate agent in marketing their property. "My agent has a website and my property is on the site" is not an acceptable online marketing strategy for your property. Here are some questions I came up with and I hope they will help you in finding a real estate agent who can successfully market your property in 2010:
1. On how many websites will my property be advertised?
2. Will my property be featured on any of these websites?
3. Do you have your listings professionally photographed or do you take the pictures yourself? If you take them yourself, can I please see a sampling of the quality of your photos?
4. Do you create a video of my property and post it online? If so, where do you post it?
5. On which classified websites do you advertise your listings? (i.e. Craigslist, Backpage, etc)
6. Do you create a single property website for each listing?
7. How do you make sure my property ranks high in the search engines?
8. Do you create interactive floor plans of your listings?
9. How will you market my property to buyer-agents and how will you get feedback from them for showings?
10. How will I be kept in the loop with regards to showings, feedback and marketing activities on my property?
11. Will there be a text-for-info, VoicePad or other form of marketing on my "for sale" sign for potential buyers who drive by?
12. Does your Company have a website? How will your company be advertising my property? (Remember, when you list your home, you are listing it with an agent of a company...they BOTH should be advertising your property)
13. What phone number will buyers call to get information on my home? Does this number connect them to a recording, an office, an answering service, a cell phone?
14. If a buyer leaves a voice mail or an email requesting more information about my property, who gets that message and how quickly is it responded to?
15. What other marketing activities will be done? Newspaper? Magazines? Open houses? Direct mail? (These are not nearly as important, but even marketing that is 1-5% effective can help as long as is does not become a waste of valuable time).

Source: http://www.trumpuniversity.com/blog/post/2010/03/questions-to-ask-before-listing-your-home-with-a-real-estate.cfm