One of the many great things being a One Agency member is the potential for huge savings. With fewer restrictions from head office, there’s constant scope for our team to be savvy and use different digital marketing platforms to list their properties cost-effectively.
We’ve observed that some of our members are making the most of social media, especially Facebook, using its great potential to sell a property without the need to pay listing fees on property portals.
While you can use property portals to list a home, they can be expensive. As well as your monthly membership, you pay a listing fee for every property you list on their sites. For some agents, there’s value in what’s on offer, especially in terms of personal branding, but others are moving in a different direction.
These agents have mostly moved away from these listings sites to focus on Facebook as a selling platform. By doing this, they avoid listing fees for a majority of their properties but still make use of membership packages that allow them to list their sold properties ‒ giving them that branding edge.
Use Facebook and the portals strategically so you spend least while getting maximum exposure
One of the huge advantages of using Facebook is its targeted advertising platform. With so much data at its disposal, Facebook can target your Facebook ads to get your listing in front of a particular demographic – the people most likely to buy your listed property. You can set up your ads so that they’re seen only by certain age groups, in specific locations or by those who’ve shown an interest in your topic, real estate.
As well, you can add Facebook Pixel to your arsenal. This tracks the people who click on your ads. You can then put these people into targeted groups (such as suburb, price range or number of bedrooms) for future use. When you list a similar property, you can make sure the same people get shown your new ad.
While there are packages through property portals that include Facebook advertising, these are done under the portal’s branding and they get to keep the data. While this can have good short-term benefits, building up your own audience data and advertising properties with your own logo pays dividends in the long run.
Facebook might not be a complete replacement for real estate portals, but it’s great for teasers. By listing your homes first on Facebook, you get the word out about them and see if there are any bites. If there are, you’ve saved yourself or your customer a listing fee. If you don’t get any responses, you can use the portals to give a campaign a bit of a push.
If the idea of those possible missed days on market doesn’t appeal, you can run campaigns on Facebook and property portals simultaneously (for some A/B testing).
See what works best for each type of property. You might find Facebook is effective with some types and not others, so you can use the platform more selectively.
The testing option also gives you an avenue to experiment, perhaps seeing how much more interest you get when you add a video.
This is important, especially if you’re currently working with a franchise and thinking about opening your own business. Even if you’re thinking about switching between agencies, you might be a worried about losing your contacts or listings history. With your own Facebook page, you control your data. When you sign up with a new agency or open your own business, you keep your followers, the evidence of your successful sales and all the five-star reviews you’ve earned.
Still a fan of the portals? Users have seen changes in the fees of the main property portals recently, with the monthly subscriptions coming down but the cost of individual listings rising. Admittedly, the costs are generally passed on to the seller as part of vendor-paid advertising but wouldn’t it make your life easier if you could offer a viable alternative?
When you can offer Facebook, for example – especially when you can prove that it’s worked successfully for other sellers – can often make a huge difference in your relationship with your sellers.
So don’t be shackled to one form of online advertising. Experiment, crunch the numbers and see what works best for you while minimising your costs.
As founder and CEO of the fastest growing real estate network across Australasia, I offer real estate professionals an opportunity to reap the financial rewards of going it alone with the security and clout of an established brand. Talk to me and my team about your options.
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