7 Questions to Test Your Agent’s Real Estate Marketing Plan

2. Who’s our target buyer pool?

Like a politician should know their audience before delivering a speech, your agent should have a clear understanding of who your target buyer is.

Ask your agent about the buyers they’re focusing on with your home’s marketing plan. A good agent will have research and knowledge of the area and know the buyer pool like the back of their hand.

Listen for the agent to tell you about demographic shifts in the neighborhood, who’s moving in and who’s moving out, and make sure they have a clear and vivid picture of the people who would buy your house.

Are they young families looking to settle down before the school year starts? Are they older, making your single-story style an attractive option for aging in place?

3. How do you plan to market my home visually?

85% of homebuyers browsing online find property photos “very useful,” according to the National Association of Realtors.

Ask your agent if they plan to hire a professional photographer to snap pictures that will portray your home in its best light. A professional photographer will take photos of your home with the right lighting, mechanics, and details, including:

• A wide-angle lens to show more of a room at once
• Natural light to make each photo feel warm and inviting
• Angles that don’t show mirror reflections in the shower door, or windows where the view outside is blocked with bright light
• A DSLR camera and tripod rather than a freehand cellphone

Beyond photos, 65% of agents are leveraging drone footage and 64% are using listing videos as part of their marketing, according to a recent HomeLight survey.

4. How do I know whether the marketing plan is working?

If you’re the type of person who likes frequent updates, you want to find out if your agent will have the tracking metrics, should you ask for them.

Will they text you, call you, or email you with new developments?

Even if you plan to stay at an arm’s length throughout the marketing process, you’ll have peace of mind knowing your agent’s staying on top of your home’s performance and buyer interest around it.

Listen to see if your agent keeps tabs on things like:

• How much traffic your online listing is generating
• How many showings you’re booking
• Where buyers are finding your listing
• Social media metrics around any ad campaigns

5. What happens if we don’t get any showings?

A marketing plan shouldn’t be set in stone; rather, it should be able to shift and react to changing circumstances as needed.

You might listen for a response like Fykes: “You’ve got to adjust to what the market tells you. At the beginning, we’re making really educated guesses on all of the pieces of the marketing plan.”

For example, perhaps your home has been on the market for 10 days yet no real estate agents or buyers have toured it. Maybe, then, it’s time to bump up Facebook advertising or send marketing emails to a different group of real estate agents.

Marketing professor Randy Hacker, executive director of the Keller Center for Research at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business, offers this word of caution: “Sellers should recognize that many marketing efforts require a reasonable amount of time to generate results, so don’t pull the plug too quickly.”

You want an agent who won’t panic at the first sign of trouble but can identify the issue, adjust fast, and tweak your marketing plan accordingly.

6. What’s your marketing budget?

Here you’ll get a feel for the money behind your home’s individual listing, but you also want to find out how much the brokerage you’re working with cares about marketing their business and brand to the community at large.

“We spend a lot of money, not just for every specific property but for generating views online, attracting buyers, and we then convert them to buy the properties that we list. All of that marketing money is being funneled into these different listings,” says Fykes.

So not only should there be a strong marketing plan for your individual home, but you should see if the agency who will represent you has an effective overarching marketing plan they are willing to invest in.

7. How will I know if the price is right?

Your agent should be well-versed in creating a comparative market analysis to price your home accurately from the get-to. If a home is priced incorrectly and lingers on the market, buyers will question whether something is wrong with it.

Pricing a property too high is going to lose you money in the long run, so you want your agent to be real with you about what happens if your home sits stale for too long.

According to the National Association of Realtors, 38% of recent sellers reported that they’d trimmed the asking price at least once.

How aggressive will your agent be in adjusting the price to market conditions and buyer demand?

Maximize your home sale success with a tailored real estate marketing plan

Businesses across all industries rely on clever marketing plans to promote their products and services. Your home — which is a product, too — deserves its own tailored publicity roadmap.

But great marketing doesn’t come out of thin air. It requires deep knowledge of your target audience and careful planning.

That’s what you hire an agent for. When you’re ready to sell, HomeLight can connect you with a top agent in your market who has the marketing prowess you need.

Header Image Source: (Photo by Matthew Henry from Burst)