Checking The Pulse Of The Kansas City Real Estate Market

With more than 4, 5… 10 months of inventory on the market in some of our local areas, it’s important that sellers are choosing agents who understand and make use of today’s technological advancements. 87% of home buyers are currently finding their homes online, before they ever step foot in the door. So your home better be in all the places buyers are looking for homes — and be memorable once they find it.

Some of the best buyers are the ones who have narrowed down the area they want to live and are spending time driving through a particular neighborhood. When that happens, does your agent provide home brochures at the yard sign? Probably 3/4 of the listings I see do NOT have brochures. That amazes me. Print advertising such as newspapers are dying out, but one type of print marketing that is still a very effective means for marketing a home are the brochures a listing agent puts at the yard sign. When buyers drive by our listings, we provide color brochures on glossy, water-resistant paper. We want to be sure they take something valuable with them to help them remember your home by later. We also want them to be able to get more home details and more photos than can be put on a brochure.

If we can get a home buyer to go and view your home online, we know that they’ll benefit from the mapping features online, get to view a virtual tour of your home, ask any questions and schedule a showing on your home. So how do we get buyers to our listings online? We were one of the first Overland Park Realtors back around 2005 to provide each of our listings their own domain to take potential home buyers straight to the listing online — rather than having to navigate through our home page or featured listings to get to the client’s listing. We still advertise a unique web listing domain for each of our listings. For example, here’s the domain for an Overland Park home we listed this week… http://16044.JBPRealtyGroup.com.

We’ve more recently piggy backed on these web domains through the use of Quick Response (QR) Barcodes on our brochures. This allows potential buyers to use their smart phones to snap a photo (with the camera in their phones) and a bar code application on their phones will take them straight to that home’s listing online – without ever typing anything! Most new phones come with a scanner app already included. If you have an older Blackberry, iPhone or Android a couple of good FREE applications are ScanLife and NeoReader.  The most important thing you can do when listing your home is hiring an Overland Park real estate agent who is on the cutting edge when it comes to marketing their real estate listings.

Posted by Jason A. Brown