The numbers are in and Beth and I repeated our 2007 performance by outselling ALL of the Realtor teams in the combined Gulf Harbors, Woodlands, and Sea Forest communities in 2008! We are very proud of our 2008 MLS figures. They show our unique marketing methods and home presentation styles are paying off for our clients. Below I talk about those statistics and some of the marketing strategies we used to achieve them.
MLS statistics show that in 2008 there were a total of 66 homes sold in the Gulf Harbors communities, Beth and I sold 14 of them. That’s 21% of all homes sold in these 3 communities! Our nearest competitor sold 11 homes. The second closest team sold only 7 homes combined and none of the 7 homes they sold were their own listings. Of the 14 homes we sold, 5 of them were our own listings. Eight of our listings sold last year which means we sold 63% of them. Finding the buyers for our own listings saves our clients thousands of dollars in commissions! Compare our 63% of own listings sold to our competitor's 40% (he sold 2 of his 5 listings sold) and the second closest team’s 0% and you can see we are aggressively selling our own listings and doing it better than anybody else! By the way, that figure of 8 listings sold is the highest sold by any Gulf Harbors Realtor team. This means our listings sold more than any other Realtor’s listings.
How did we accomplish these statistics? Exposure. Exposure of our websites, our videos, and driving traffic to our websites where our listings can be viewed by buyers who want to be informed. But exposure alone does not sell homes. It's just as important to provide professional and valued service to both the buyer and seller and Belloise Realty Tropical shines in this department!
We also get rave reviews from our buyers (and other Realtor’s buyers) about our videos. They tell us it gave them the best perspective of the homes they viewed when they were searching on the Internet. They love our website too!
Some of the more recent marketing strategies we’ve executed is running an ad in the Waterfront section of the Tampa Tribune classifieds. This ad ran in the Tribune’s entire distribution area during the week of Super Bowl festivities. It also appeared on the Tribune’s websites, including TBO.com, TampaBayOnline.com, and in their child publications like the Suncoast News. Our hope was to catch some of the hundreds of thousands of visitors that were here enjoying themselves during the Super Bowl. Although we didn’t get a flood of calls last week, our website, which address was printed in the ad, showed a significant increase in activity for the period the ad ran. So hopefully, this will translate into additional future buyers.
We also started automated processes which distributes our listings to over 3 dozen websites. These sites include:
GoogleBase, Yahoo! Real Estate, Trulia, Zillow, Oodle, FrontDoor, Lycos, MySpace Classifieds , OLX , Yakaz , Love2Trade , Overstock, AmericanTowns, Kijiji, HouseFront, Local, Hotpads, FeedBurner, eHouseAds, efind, DotHomes, Info , Vast , RealtyFeedSearch , CLRSearch , RealtyFeeds , Enormo , Express , PropBot , MillionRSS , Craigslist, Realbird , WalMart Classifieds , VillageList , MattFined , ListPic , ActiveRain , LiveDeal , BackPage, and several other websites.
Our video tours are a great selling tool and they are time consuming to produce. On average it takes 8 hours to produce a single video. This is why you do not see many Realtors producing these video tours. Yes, you’ll see the boring slide shows set to music which some Realtors call a video tour. These can be constructed automatically and many service providers will create them for under $10. However, buyers feel these are a waste of time since the photos in the slide show are the same ones they have just viewed in the listing.
Our videos are true streaming videos, now in widescreen format, with narration and music which shows off the qualities of our clients' homes. We also include video of community features, like its private beach, tennis courts, pool, and nearby islands. We distribute these videos to YouTube, Yahoo! Video, MetaCafe, and other video sites.
I can't stress how important it is to have a strong Google And Yahoo! presence. A website is worthless if it cannot be located and is not seen. It took at lot of time and hard work tweaking our sites and using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods, but our clients now enjoy having their listings on several websites of ours which all have strong presences on the major search engines.
It’s all about exposure. The more eyes which see a listing the better the chance it will be seen by the right buyer. And MLS statistics show we are doing the best job in getting our Gulf Harbors communities' listings sold!
We are also Short Sale experts. We have completed many short sale transactions and have implemented several efficient and proven short sales procedures we created. Read our previous blog entry for details on how a Short Sale might be the right choice for you. View our waterfront short sale listings and other fine Gulf Harbors waterfront homes.
We also have other fine New Port Richey homes and other nearby communities' homes too!
Please call us if you would like us to put our proven marketing strategies to work for you.
Chris & Beth Belloise
(727) 858-8692
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