What is the best way to market your home for sale?

So you’ve finished your property search, found yourself a good home loan to pay for it, but you’ve still got one problem to deal with: your old home. While you may have plenty of fond memories of your  house, unfortunately this affection doesn’t transfer to people looking at buying your property.

While it’s perfectly possible to sell your home without much advertising, the fact remains that marketing your home could be one of the most important steps in pushing out with the old and in with the new. So just how should you market your property?

The power of the Internet

Everything seems to be online these days. You can find everything from clothes to home loans with the right website, but is it the right step for marketing your property? Do people really trust the stuff they read online?

According to a new survey from Nielsen, people seem to be coming around to online advertising.

While people still overwhelmingly indicated that they would ‘completely’ trust the recommendations of people they recommend, online advertising seems to be making a bit more of a dent than you might think when it comes to marketing. Opinions posted online, editorial content and branded websites all commanded a strong following of people who would trust them completely, even outpacing emails that the person actually signed up for and television ads.

Evidently there is something to be said for ensuring that your property has a strong and positive online presence when it comes to selling your home.

Practical steps to utilising the web

So, let’s say you’re convinced, and you want to use the web to advertise your property. Where can you start?

First, if you are using a real estate agent, engage with them in order to get the most out of your online advertising. Many agencies utilise this kind of online marketing campaign, particularly if you are auctioning your home.

Secondly, it might be a good idea to engage with social media. A Nielsen study found that in January of this year, each person spent over five and a half hours on Facebook alone and almost another two hours on eBay (which conveniently has a real estate section).

While people said they didn’t trust ads on social media in the first Nielsen survey, the fact remains that there were almost 50,000 instances of people taking out loans to buy houses in January alone, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics – one of those mortgagers could have been one of your Facebook friends, so be sure to let them know you are selling!

There are plenty of other ways to use the net to sell your property – sponsored ads, search engine optimisation, even creating a website for your property. But the whole journey to a new home starts with finding the right loan, so be sure to speak to a local mortgage broker before you crack open the marketing budget!