Get more Listings by Understanding your Prospects: Home Buyers vs. Investors

When you’re marketing a listing, how your marketing message resonates with the audience has huge implications. Understanding the key differences between what hits home with home buyers compared to investors, and also how to market to them effectively is a skill set every high-quality agent should have. That’s why we thought we’d share with you our top tips for agents to get more listings.

Firstly, when you’re marketing a property to a home buyer, there is one overriding difference that alters the marketing campaign:

 

Emotion.

You are selling them a home, not just a property, not just an investment.  A place they will potentially raise a family and live in for many years. Keeping this in mind, there are a few key things you can do to ensure your campaign resonates with potential home buyers:

– Ensure all your images make the property look ‘warm’ & ‘homely’. Whether it’s the lighting, the way the photographer arranges the property for the shoot or how you describe the property, make sure you focus on the homely qualities of the property (keep in mind it’s against the law to falsely describe a property!)

Arrange open homes around the times the neighborhood is most active to portray an active and vibrant community. During the open home, it may be worth mentioning to the vendor to have a pot of coffee brewing to entice the senses.

– When describing the property, ensure to list distances from local schools, parks, hospitals, shops etc.

– Target your audience where they actually spend time – are young families reading the Weekly Review or are they on Facebook and Instagram? The advanced and cost effective targeting capabilities of social media are a must in any effective marketing campaign.

When you’re marketing a listing to investors, appealing to their sense emotion isn’t going to work as well. At the end of the day, you are selling them an investment.

 

A money maker.

Not a family home. Keeping these key points in mind, it’s important to target investors with information such as:

– Comparable sales and zoning laws

– Land size

– Forecasted growth in the area

– Forecasted rents and current yields

Social media and email marketing can be used to accurately target investors based on income, interests and geographic location (yes that’s right… overseas investors!)

Understand it’s important to target buyers based on whether or not they are investors or home-buyers.  Trying to target both segments at the same time, with the same content, is not the best way to spend your valuable time and marketing resources.