Archive for the ‘taking home photos’ Category
Sellers Market 1st Quarter 2010…then ?
The Federal government leads us to believe that housing sales (number of units, not prices)will be up at least until April of 2010. But, the Fed, along with other experts, have expressed fear that home sales will dry up after early spring, when the homebuyer tax credits expire and the Federal Reserve ends their policies that are keeping loan rates cheap for borrowers. (Click here to Read the short article.)
What can you Learn from Foresight vs Hindsight this Year?
- To make the most money in 2010…Get your house clean, cleaned out, staged and priced to sell NOW.
- Do not wait until Spring is here to put your home on the market. Do it NOW!
- 90 percent of all home buyers shop on the internet, not newspapers, local or otherwise. If you aren’t marketing your property on all major websites for real estate, buyers will not find your home. There are simply too many homes for sale and buyer’s will not any waste time ferretting out information or for obscurely advertised property.
- Use photographs and video’s to show and sell your home. Add in video or snapshots of the neighborhood, nearby shopping, parks or attractions. Pictures, and especially video, create interest and a glimpse of lifestyle that buyers crave.
- Sell it yourself, but enlist the help of buyers agents. Buyer’s agents use the MLS to find property for their clients. Advertise on the MLS and offer up some commission to them, if they bring you their buyers! Bonus: If you list your home on the MLS, it will immediately stop all annoying listing calls, too.
Why 6 Percent is in the business of helping sellers market their homes on every major real estate website, search engine and the MLS with one click of your mouse. Visit our website or phone 1-800-381-9496 for details. We can put your property in front of millions of home buyers within 24 hours. Don’t delay. Act Today!!
3 Ways to Attract Home Buyers
Making your home attractive and memorable to home buyers is critical if you want to sell your home. There are a number of proven methods to attract buyer’s through your door, but the Top 3 offer the biggest payoff.
Top 3 Ways to Attract Buyers to Your Home
- The Internet. The internet is the single most powerful tool available for home sales. If you want the maximum exposure, get your home listed in the MLS (Multiple Listing Service) database. Secondly, take full advantage of all social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.
- Professional Fliers. Make a nice flyer or brochure that you can place inside an InfoTube or InfoBox that is attached to your For Sale sign. In addition, you can pass them out to prospective buyers and open houses. InfoTube.net offers a Free online service that can help you create and print professional, full colored flyers about your home.
- Giveaways and Incentives. Everyone loves FREE. Adding an incentive to your offer can generate interest and make your home stand out from your competition. Some of the most popular incentive items are home theatre’s, new appliances, club memberships, pool table, hot tub, free travel vouchers, seller paid closing costs.
Thank you for visiting Why6Percent.com. We have helped thousands of home sellers find the perfect buyer. We can help you, too.
Tips for a Fast, Top Dollar Home Sale – #1 – Staging
For the next few weeks, I will be providing Essential Tips for Preparing Your Home for a Fast, Top Dollar Sale. Please check back with us each day, or click on our RSS feed below, to receive great idea’s to maximize this spring home selling season.
Sell Fast and For Top Dollar Tip #1
#1 – Stage Your Home Before You Take Pictures for the Internet.
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90 Percent of Home Buyers shop on the internet, so it is imperitive that your pictures look great to entice people into wanting to see the home in person.
Other Articles of Interest about Using Photographs Effectively are:
How to Take Great Pictures that Help Your Home Sell
Use “In Season” Photographs on Your Home Listing
Examples of good Home for Sale Pictures
Proof that Internet Photo’s Sell Houses
It’s Spring. Freshen Up your Photographs
Bad Examples of Home for Sale Pictures
Thank you for visiting Why6Percent.com. We can place your home listing on the local MLS and dozens of major real estate websites such as Realtor.com for $399.
Call us today at 1-800-381-9496 to place your Home for Sale Listing in front of 12 million home shoppers each month.
4 Real Estate Mistakes Seller’s Should Avoid.
Timing is Everything, when attempting to catch a fish in your mouth or selling a home. Home Seller’s take note. Several factors have converged to make this the TIME to Sell!
Spring is here. Tax incentives, low interest rates and deep discounts on home prices have buyer’s jumping off the fence to buy a home. The question is “Are You Doing What it Takes to Sell a home in this Market?”.
Learn the 4 Mistakes That Prevent Home Sales
#4: Not Using Effective Marketing and Advertising. Simply put, people can not buy your home if they don’t know it is for sale. Forget print advertising. 95 percent of home buyer’s shop on the internet, so you have to maximize its power. Use a lot of photographs to showcase your home, buyers love photo’s more than anything else when they shop for a home. Video tours are also great sales tools that expose your property to a whole new audience.
#3: Trouble Making Appointments to Show: When a seller has trouble making his home accessible for showings, it is very likely that the buyer will move on to the next house and never look back. It is imperitive that your home is available to be shown in a moments notice. There are simply too many homes on the market for buyer’s to choose from. They are ready to buy now, they will not wait on you.
#2: Home is Not in “For Sale” Condition: As a rule, buyer’s form a first impression about a house in 60 seconds. If your home doesn’t appear neat, clean and cared for, buyers will walk. And, if you have an interested buyer, don’t forget that will insist on a home inspection. Fix problems and address delayed maintanence issues or risk stopping your sale in its tracks.
#1: Incorrectly Pricing Your Home: If your home is overpriced, you will drive away buyer’s. A high inventory of unsold homes means that buyer’s have plenty of choices. And, the internet allows buyer’s to see what people paid for houses similar to yours. Most buyers instantly know when a piece of real estate priced incorrectly. If yours is, buyer’s will simply refuse to look at it, at all.
To Learn More About How to Capitalize on the Busy Selling Season by reading these articles:
How to Find a Buyer for Your Home
The Most Effective Way to Advertise Your Home for Sale. Proof that Photo’s Sell Homes Use a Real Estate Video to Sell Your Home Tough Talk About Pricing Your Home What Home Repairs will a Buyer Expect You to Fix 10 Repairs that Seller’s MUST Make
Thank you for visiting Why6Percent.com. We have helped thousands of home seller’s market their homes successfully and we can help you, too. Our real estate marketing program places your home in front of 10 million home shoppers each and every month.
Internet and MLS Pay Off for Homesellers
If you are one of the thousands of people trying to sell a home, you need to know what kind of marketing and advertising pays off and what does not. To better concentrate your advertising and marketing efforts, learn which strategies work and which aren’t worth the effort.
Proven Methods to Market Your Home.
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The Local MLS: The #1 place to advertise your home listing for the maximum exposure is the MLS. Every real estate agent uses the MLS exclusively to locate property for prospective buyers. And, over 60 percent of individual home buyers found the home they purchased through public access MLS websites.
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The Internet: If you are putting money into newspaper advertising or home buyer guides, you would be much better off spending the money for online advertising. Only 3 percent of all buyers found their home through traditional print advertising. 90 percent of buyers located their home on the internet. (Curb appeal still counts. 77 percent of buyers drive by or view the home in person)
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Website Features: Homebuyers overwhelming reported that photographs (86 percent) and detailed information (84 percent) were the most important and useful website features. Video or virtual tours (offered on InfoTube.net) are also popular with 68 percent of home buyers. When it comes to photo’s it seems the more you have the better. Studies show that having 16 photo’s instead of 15 resulted in 33 percent more page views. 20 photo’s were the optimum number for maximum exposure, which happens to be the number of photo’s offered on InfoTube.net.
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Yard Sign with an InfoTube or InfoBox: One of the best ways to advertise your property is clearly low tech. 15 percent of all buyers reported that they found their home by seeing a yard sign. And, it seems that all buyers love the convenience of driving by and picking up a brochure to learn more about the house. A whopping 90 percent of buyers are angry or upset if they find an empty InfoTube or InfoBox.
If you need to sell a home, it is vitally important to advertise the property where they buyers are. Don’t sell yourself short. Experience and Research prove that the MLS, the internet and yard signs, with stuffed InfoTubes and InfoBoxes, pay off for the professional real estate agent and for sale by owner, alike.
Thank you for visiting Why6percent.com. We will List your Home on the MLS for $399 and you also receive a Free Featured Home Listing on InfoTube.net , with all features that buyers are looking for. If you need to sell your home, we have you covered. Call us today at 1-800-381-9496.
Video Is Important Tool for Home Sales
Home video tours are a fantastic marketing tool for home sales. Why? Because of the viral nature of the internet and because video’s are more likely to make your property show up in search engine results.
If you aren’t using video in your marketing plan, you are selling yourself short. Grab your digital camera and start shooting. We recommend that you keep your video under 2 minutes, which is plenty of time to cram in a lot of info, while maintaining viewer interest.
Do you need another great reason to upload a video today? How about, It’s Free. As a Why 6 Percent customer, home video tours are provided FREE of charge as a part of your InfoTube.net Featured Home Ad.
Tip for MLS Customer’s-Freshen Your Photo’s
Given the slowdown in home sales, it often takes more than 130 days or 4 months to sell a property. If your home has been on the market, as the season’s have changed, now is time to update your marketing material. Good news is it is free, quick and easy to do.
First, if you are using photo’s of your home that were taken during spring or summer, you should immediately replace them with a current picture. As we are all aware, little compares to the marketing power of a picture to attract or turn off a home shopper. And, nothing screams STALE listing like an old photo taken out of season.
You can leave the summer photograph of a swimming pool, flower beds or other feature’s about your home that show off the beauty or quality of life in other seasons. But, change the captions to reflect the fact that the pictures remain to fully illustrate all ammenities your home offers. For a swimming pool caption example, consider changing your caption to read something like “Summer fun and Poolside entertaining 2009″.
Changing photographs in your InfoTube.net home listing is quick and easy. Just log in to the homepage with your user name and password. Edit your ad and upload the new photo’s. Then, Save and you are done.
To update your MLS listing photo’s, send the new pictures, along with your request, in an email to your listing broker. They will handle the changes for you.
Don’t sell yourself short with an old photo that sticks out like a sore thumb. Out of season photo’s simply mean that your house has been on the market for months and you don’t care who knows.
Update those photograph’s today and make your listing look brand new.
Free Home Video Tours for Why6percent.com customers
InfoTube.net is now providing a Free Featured Home listing with video tours and 20 photo slideshow to all Why 6 Percent MLS customers.
The InfoTube.net homes for sale website, combined with a flat fee MLS listing places your property in front of millions of home shoppers each month. But, in a difficult housing market with far to few buyers and far too many sellers, there is another way to reach millions of new buyers per month…Video.
Making a Video about the benefits of living in your home is easy and fun to do. Dust off that digital camera you don’t often use, and put it to work selling your home to a whole new audience.
Tips for Shooting a Good Video Home Tour without Editing:
- Plan Your Tour and Your Shots: Decide what property features are important and how you will highlight them visually. Make sure you clean and stage the area’s that will be on video so your house looks its best. Plan the order of the shot in the same sequence as someone would tour the home. Start with the front walk up, entry, etc. to make your video easy for the viewer to follow.
- Get familiar with your camera. The on-off switch, zoom and record buttons. You can pause between scenes by touching the “shoot” button and resume filming by touching it again. (Practice a little to see how the camera works inside your home.)
- Use the video camera like a still camera. You can walk with a camera, but the video will be shaky. Keep the camera as still as possible. A tripod is an excellant tool used to steady the shot.
- Shoot 3 Basic Shots of each Feature: Start with a Wide Shot to establish the location. Zoom slightly to use a Medium Shot to follow action or frame a view or scene. Use a Close Up shot to show off a detail or something special.
- Watch how much you zoom. The camera registers better if you move closer to the subject, versus just zooming in. Also, avoid using the zoom if you are hand holding the camera. You won’t be able to keep a steady shot.
- Try to shoot at least 10 seconds for each shot. If you are panning the scene, 10 seconds will produce a nice flow and the viewer won’t get sick trying to watch while the room spins.
- Lighting is a must. Do not shoot toward a bright window. Lower the blinds and turn on all the lights, if you can’t get another angle. Lamps or drop lights aimed at the subject and positioned behind the camera are an ideal way to light your space. If shooting outdoors, try a cloudy day, early morning or late afternoon when harsh sun won’t wash out color and details. Also when shooting outdoors, make sure the subject is facing the sun.
- Plan to bring emotion and life into your presentation. Include historical facts, neighborhood shots, nearby attractions, special views, street scene’s, neighborhood schools and parks, splashing hot tubs and roaring fires. Add fresh flowers in the kitchen and dining room. Set the dining room table. Place candles around tubs and fireplaces. Add color outdoors with inexpensive hanging baskets or pots of flowers. You don’t need to plant them unless you want to. You can hide the pots in the dirt or behind shorter plants.
- Time the Video. The majority of viewers will not sit through a video longer than 3 minutes, unless it is really compelling.
- If can have a lot of fun Editing, if you have a newer computer. Movie Maker is Free on Microsoft software. IMovie is free on Apple. While you don’t have to edit to make a great video, editing is great for adding captions, music or voice overs, or selecting the best scene. We will discuss editing and special effects later next week.
Video’s don’t sell a home all by themselves, but they certainly attract serious buyers. Do yourself a huge favor and upload your home video tour to InfoTube.net today…we will put it on Youtube for you.
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Take Good Home Photos and Draw Buyers
Your property’s photos “pix appeal” or attractiveness in photos posted in online listings is as equally important as “curb appeal” is from the street. Over eighty percent of home buyers used the Internet last year to search for a home, and nearly 25% reported that they first found the property they purchased on the Internet, according to a National Association of Realtors survey.
Without pictures buyers are much less likely to go see a house. In most cases-85% of the time-online photos are the first view of a home. Photographs are powerful bait. Good ones can lure buyers; poor ones can turn them away.
Follow these tips to create flattering photos of your property:
1. Lighten up-shoot exterior shots in the middle of the day when the sun is shining and the sky is blue is your best bet. Interior shots are best with all the lights on and using a flash. The flash adds color correction and eliminates the shadows, making the room look brighter.
2. More is better-Buyers want to see more than just the front of the house. They want to see all the rooms and the backyard. Include your home’s best features, such as a home theatre/media room or an exercise room. For condos include shots of your unit’s interior, as well as photos of amenities such as a pool, tennis court or gym. If you have spectacular views, by all means, include them.
3. Get clear shots-remove clutter before photographing it. Remove all distractions, fridge magnets, children’s toys, dirty dishes and clear all counters. Spend some time moving things around. Outside shots-remove garbage cans and take the car out of the driveway. Try not to include utility poles, wires and other homes in the scene.
4.Go Pro- If you are selling without a real estate agent or aren’t handy with a camera, hiring a professional photographer may be the way to go. Examine samples of their photos before you make your choice. You can use Microsoft Live Search Maps at no cost to show buyers a bird’s eye view of your community.
5. Give it your best shot-Quality counts when taking photos, a camera with wide angle lens is ideal, but point and shoot digital cameras can also do the job.
For a clear photo, place digital cameras on a tripod or something solid so the camera doesn’t shake when the shutter goes off. Set the camera on its highest resolution. Never use less than 72 dots per inch for online photos.
6. Edit-If you didn’t get a good shot, you can fix it with basic photo editing software. Crop out ceilings or unnecessary background and adjust the brightness and contrast or edit in a sunny day.
There are a number of free Web sites that can make editing a snap. Some to try are www.Snipshot.com, www.picnik.com and www.Pixenate.com.
Remember, clear out the clutter and then snap the shutter!
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