Using online enhancements to market a home for sale … it works

by Jim Newell

As with any real estate firm, we’re always looking for ways to increase the number of incoming leads we see. After all, marketing a home for sale is about generating buyer interest, ain’t it?

Obviously, our web site is a primary place to generate leads and it does a great job of it. But no one can be so naïve as to think their website is the only place buyers will look for a home for sale. It’s tough enough that people still don’t realize they can find all the area homes for sale at callcarpenter.com. It’s just silly to imagine that we don’t want our listings to appear in every possible place a buyer may look. How do you sell a buyer on that concept?

That’s why I was so happy to have “sold” Carpenter on a new online enhancement to our Home Marketing System for 2012. We’ve been in talks with all the national sites for years – determining the value of having Carpenter listings be prominently featured on those sites. One group that stood out was trulia. For some three years, trulia has been a consistently decent producer of quality leads for Carpenter. Over that time I’ve been watching their growth and it finally really caught our attention. In the past year, they’ve more than doubled their visitor counts. And that’s not from a small number. By my count, they’re #2 nationally in traffic and I expect them to be #1 in the near future.

So what? Our existing homefinder.com enhancement program typically generates 15,000-20,000 online showings a month. And homefinder is a tenth the size of trulia.

In 2012 we’re enhancing every Carpenter listing on trulia.com. 20 million homebuyers a month exposed to our listings. More than realtor.com can give us at a fraction of the cost.

The great thing is that the exposure we’re getting on trulia, including our online showings, has quadrupled. The number of leads generated by trulia has more than tripled since we started. And we’ve always found that trulia leads are decent, serious buyers.

Agents are thrilled. Sellers are thrilled to have this kind of exposure for their home and the online showings they’re getting. I’m thrilled because everyone likes me right now.

Posted by: Jim Newell