Selling Your Home? Make Sure It’s Listed Online

Because of job-losses and untenable adjustable-rate mortgages, many consumers that previously thought they could afford the home that they bought are realizing that they can no longer to keep the home that they own. Many people in this situation have decided to put their home on the market and attempt to sell it. Unfortunately for sellers, with so many homes on the market, it can be very difficult to find a buyer. There are certain things that you can do to improve the likelihood that your home will sell, such as making sure the landscaping looks nice, cleaning up the house inside and doing home staging, but there’s one thing that many home-sellers neglect to do and that’s to create an effective online listing.

Recent statistics show that 77% of all home-buyers use the internet to research properties. Home-buyers will look at real-estate agents’ websites or look at the local multiple listing service (MLS) to see what homes are available in the area. Quite often, consumers will look at the MLS and pick out five to ten listings they are interested in seeing and then have their buyer’s agent line-up viewings for those homes.

For this reason, it’s absolutely critical to make sure that your home has a listing in the MLS and on other sites such as realtor.com. Typically, your real-estate agent will take care of this for you, however some agents are a bit behind the times and haven’t used the internet to its’ full potential in helping you sell your home. Make sure that the real estate agent you are considering using is going to list your property online before contracting with them to be your seller’s agent.

If your home is listed on the MLS, you should go to your local MLS’ website and checkout your listing. Not all real estate agents do an equally good job of creating these listings. Some do an excellent job with the ad-copy and describing the features of your home, others do an absolutely terrible job. If you find that something isn’t correct or there’s something missing on your listing, contact your realtor and get it corrected. If the description is really awful, offer to rewrite it for them.

If your agent asks you for pictures or wants to come over and take pictures of your home for the online listing, you might even want to enlist someone with some pretty decent photography skills to take the best pictures possible for listing online. Most people make judgments on whether or not they want to see the house based on the pictures rather than the actual ad-copy. If you can arrange with your realtor to do some sort of virtual media, such as I-PIX, in your home, definitely do so.

Having an online listing is absolutely critical to getting your home sold. Most of the work will be on the agent selling your home, but you need to watch over their shoulder, so to speak, and make sure that the listings they place online are accurate and portray your house in the best possible manner.