Web-savvy Crystal Coast Listing Agents and Their Tools to Sell Your Home

Continuing from my last post, when selecting your real estate listing agent to market your Emerald Isle, Indian Beach or Atlantic Beach home or condo, it is important the agent possess many online tools to increase your chances of selling your Crystal Coast home. In part I of this series, sellers were informed of the many syndication websites available to feature your home. These tools are meant to attract buyers, which is a good thing for you. Just understand many of these buyers may not necessarily qualify for your home’s price point nor be drawn to your home’s features. So what online tools should your potential listing agent use to help you market your home? Great question!

Smart Online ToolsCrystal Coast Properties

Obviously, the first tool your Crystal Coast real estate agent should have in their online toolbox is a personal website that is attractive in appearance, rank well in the search engines and be easy to use especially for property searches. If the agent’s website offers too many navigation buttons to click, crazy spinning icons and weird flashing images, these types of websites are dated and unfriendly to use. Buyers will quickly leave these websites for more “functional” websites that are buyer-friendly. This is important to you for many reasons. What if you listed your Crystal Coast condo or beach front property with an agent and that agent placed your listing on an inferior website’s “featured listing section”. Chances are buyers would never click on the “featured listing” button to view your home. That’s lost opportunity for you. Take a critical look at your potential agent’s website from a buyer’s perspective to insure it’s easy to use, allows for “free” MLS searches without a mandatory sign up and embraces a home buying consumer with informative mapping tools and area information.

But What About the MLS, a Website & the Website Syndications – Isn’t that Enough?

The short answer is possibly but in the current competitive environment, wouldn’t you feel better knowing your Crystal Coast agent was maximizing all their marketing efforts? If you have searched the Internet lately, you already know there are many websites competing for buyers attention. When marketing your home, the strategy should be all about maximum exposure and repeated impressions – that’s marketing 101.

What Online Tools Should My Agent Utilize?

While many of these tools are more about a search engine optimized online presence for the agent, ultimately these tools will drive more traffic (site visitors) to their main website which in turn helps market your Crystal Coast home. Many forward-thinking Crystal Coast real estate agents use any combination of the following tools. Some agents may use a few of these sites while others use many of them:

  • Web logs or blogs (this site is considered an example of a blog or online journal). Agent blogs allow for consumers to interacte with the agent in a very informal environment. Agents often use blogs to “soft sell” their service and position themselves as “local experts”.
  • Online Social Communities or networks. Examples of online social communities include Myspace and Facebook. Yes, many web-savvy agents use these sites to interact with consumers. There are also niche online social networks like the real estate online social community Active Rain. A sister website to Active Rain is Localism. At this site, consumers can gather “local” information about a county, community or a neighborhood. Web-savvy real estate professionals use Localism to interact with consumers. Other examples of online social communities include Flickr and Squidoo.
  • Some agents participate in “Internet Yellow Pages” or IYPs. A couple of examples of IYPs are the websites Yelp and Infospace. Here agents can interacte with site visitors who review their services.

These Tools Help Market Your Home

As stated earlier, these web tools directly impact the amount of traffic or site visitors the agents website receives. It also impacts an agents standing in the search engines. This in turn impacts how many buyers ultimately “see” your Crystal Coast home. In a real estate market like the Crystal Coast, buyers from all over the nation are using the Internet to search for homes. Therefore the Internet marketing efforts of your listing agent are critical to your home being seem by these buyers. If your agent uses these sites in concert with their personal website, chance are more potential buyers will view your property.

If you have any questions about this information, be sure to leave a question or comment. Crystal Coast real estate agents, if you have a comment or question about the information shared, you’re welcome to chime in too.

Helping you be a smarter more successful Crystal Coast home seller,

Bobby