In my previous Crystal Coast Blog post, I spoke about the major time commitment involved to go For Sale Buyer Owner. The next big challenge you’ll face when selling your Emerald Isle home yourself is the need for a solid Internet marketing plan. You might be asking why an Internet marketing plan? Many real estate marketing experts (present company included) will tell you can forget about placing ads in your local area newspapers. It’s a waste of your money and your valuable time. The vast majority of Crystal Coast home buyers troll the web. In fact, statistics now indicate as high as 85% of all home buyers now use the web to search for homes.

Competing For Buyers

Keep this thought in mind when selling your own Emerald Isle beach home, your property will be competing with many other similarly priced properties (we’ll discuss pricing your home in the part3) here on the Crystal Coast. To compete on a level playing field your property will need to target the same set of “eyeballs” as similarly priced homes marketed by area real estate agents. Are you prepared to do that? If you are, stay tuned.

Web-savvy Crystal Coast Home Sellers

Now granted not all real estate agents on North Carolina’s Bogue Banks are web-savvy, but there are those agents who know how to use the power of the web to market their listings. Many of these Internet-smart agents use their personal website(s) to feature their listings plus “push” their listings to the prominent “syndicated” portals on the web for maximum exposure (see below). You’ll need to do likewise. Here are a few of the syndicated real estate web sites you should list your home on:

  1. www.zillow.com
  2. www.GoogleBase.com
  3. www.Craigslist.com
  4. www.Frontdoor.com
  5. www.Oodle.com
  6. www.Yahoo.com
  7. www.Backpage.com
  8. www.Hotpad.com
  9. www.Vast.com
  10. www.Geebo.com

Unfortunately, two of the most popular high-traffic websites used by Crystal Coast home buyers to search for homes for sale are only available to licensed real estate agents. Those high-traffic websites include Realtor.com, and Trulia.com.

Web Tools To Help Home Sellers Market Your Home

There are some excellent tools web-savvy Crystal Coast real estate agents use to “push” or distribute their listings to insure the home is featured on the maximum number of high-traffic syndicated real estate web sites. Some of these tools are free, and some offer this service as part of a larger package of marketing services including single-property websites for your home. Using these tools, you will need to enter your home’s features adding professional photographs taken of your home and include all the details of your property. I highly recommend you carefully check out each website:

Other FSBO Marketing Strategies

Don’t forget some the basic elements to marketing your Emerald Isle home along with some additional Internet Marketing strategies to take your FSBO marketing plan to another level. Consider these strategies:

  • Yard Sign – your 24-hour a day silent salesperson
  • Property flyers in your for sale sign “tube”, and for the local bulletin board at the Food Lion in the Emerald Plantation Shopping Center
  • Search Engine Marketing using a pay per click campaign
  • New to the market postcards mailed to your neighbors in your community/subdivision (and to top-producing agents should you decide to offer a buyer’s agent commission)
  • Single-property website with your property address as your URL
  • One of the best tools is only available to real estate agents. It can only be accessed via a listing agreement with a local agent – the Carteret County Multiple Listing service (MLS)

What To Expect for Part 3 of this Series on Selling Your Emerald Isle Yourself

In Part 3 I’ll discuss why buyers will expect you to discount the price of your Emerald Isle FSBO home.

Your Feedback

By now you can tell marketing your Emerald Isle yourself is not for the faint of heart. By using these strategies, you will be one step closer to selling your Crystal Coast home quicker and for more money. Please offer your thoughts on selling your Emerald Isle property yourself.

Until part 3,

Bobby