Making Your Home Shine Online

When you sell your home, don't underestimate the importance of making it compete well on the Internet. There are three main areas to focus on to make your listing earn top dollar.

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How well does your home compete online? What do you find when you Google your own address? If you want to have success when selling your home, you need to think about your online presentation and how you can improve it.

For starters, there is something called an IDX (Internet Data Exchange) feed, and it's simply a feed from an MLS to all the real estate websites out there like Zillow, Trulia, and Redfin, as well as local real estate brokers' websites that have applied for an IDX feed from the brokerage to the board, and it pulls all the data.

Currently, Zillow has an affiliation with more than 400 boards across the country, so those companies will show up on Zillow and Trulia within a couple of hours. They will also show up on the local real estate broker websites in the same amount of time, but this is critical because if your broker does not have an affiliation and does not have an IDX feed agreement, then your listing will not get out there. Make sure you list with the right company so that your home is seen around the world.

My team excels at making homes shine online.

Secondly, are the photos of your home really going to help sell your property? This is a serious point of consideration. If a "discount broker" comes in and tells you that they'll do their own photos (or they're really good with their iPhone), you need to run for the hills. You get one shot at impressing buyers online, so you want to do it with photos taken by a professional with professional equipment, not a smartphone. The first showing of your property takes place online. If buyers go online and see a cluttered house with dark, low-quality photos, they're going to keep moving.

Finally, think about the upgrades that your home has that others don't. Understand that marketing aims to make you stand out among the competition. You want to highlight things like 12-foot ceilings, stainless steel appliances, underground wiring, or a great lot on a cul-de-sac. The list goes on and on. You have to think like a buyer and what they want in a home, and then highlight those features.

If you have questions about maximizing how well your home shows on the Internet, please don't hesitate to give me a call. My team excels in making homes shine online, so we'd love to show what we can do for you.