Sunday, May 6, 2012

Can you sell a house on Facebook? Yes - sold with multiple offers in 3 days!

When you own your own micro-business (we're not even big enough to be called small!), you get to wear a lot of hats.  Richard gets to be the CFO and CIO.  I get to be the Chief Marketing Officer.  And I thought that was going to be an easy role.  I was planning on getting my real estate license and would use the usual marketing channels when it came time to list our house.  But I quickly discovered that when you're working on the house 10-12 hours a day, you don't have the time/energy to complete your license. And as our margins started getting slimmer and slimmer, it became apparent that we needed to do a For Sale by Owner - FSBO - to make a profit.


So we decided to use a multi-pronged approach, which employed a lot of social media.  Here's what we did:

1 - Built on the community that we'd already started with the Blog and Facebook business page.  And it took some work!  Given Facebook's algorithms to appear in their newsfeed, we needed to be posting every day - ideally 2-3 times per day.  It's a challenge to come up with something clever multiple times a day (okay, so I failed on that one....not so clever...and only once a day)

2 - Put up a professional style sign in front of the property, directing them to our social media for more information.  My Facebook reach almost doubled within 24 hours of the sign going up in the front yard.   And interestingly, even though we also posted our phone number, we got very few calls.  The vast majority of the traffic was online.

3 - Posted a 'Coming Soon' banner on the Facebook page as we got close to putting it on the market.  We put this up about 2 weeks before our Open House.  We made sure we did a 'pin to top' - that put it at the top of our FB page for a full week.

4 - Kept the blog up with 2-3 posts per week.  The blog had more in-depth information and lots of photos of the house.

4 - We always do an Open House as a kick off to listing a house.  Word of mouth (virtual or live) is powerful, and the more people you can get in the door is better - if they like it, they'll be letting their friends and family know.  We posted an 'Open House' banner on our Facebook page with a link to our  Open House blog and photos, 4-5 days before the big day.  Also, ask your friends that are well networked if they'll 'share' your posting.  We got lots of additional Open House traffic from that!
5 - Put up additional signs with balloons the day of the Open House.  We did a Saturday and Sunday open house and found a lot of people returned the next day or told their friends who came the next day.  Having back to back open houses was helpful, since it was brand new to the market.

6 - Post on the free sites like Zillow and include your blog address.  We also used Zillow's link to do a one time MLS (multiple listing service) post, which helped generate additional traffic and got us wider exposure.

So how did all our marketing strategy pay off?  We had so much traffic come through the doors of the Open House, we don't really have an accurate count.  And while I tried to get people to sign in, I failed at that, it was just too busy.  Our guesstimate is we had 50-70 people each day - plus a lot of children.  And because people had read our blog and the work we were doing, they already knew the house when they walked in the door!  It was so funny to hear them say 'Oh look, here are the Martha Stewart kitchen cabinets' or 'look at the Pottery Barn light fixtures'.  Richard said they knew more than he did, because he rarely reads the blog!

We had people want to make offers immediately, but we asked everyone to hold off until Tuesday.  That way, they had time to work with their bank and have all the necessary paperwork in place.  By Tuesday evening, we had multiple offers in hand, from some wonderful people who really loved the house.  The hard part was having to call the folks that didn't get it and deliver the bad news.

Would we use this approach again?  Absolutely.  It was a lot of fun and we got to meet a lot of interesting people, both online and in person.  We'll be continuing the blog and the Facebook page.  But I'd really like to have the additional support of a real estate license for the next transaction!

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17 comments:

  1. I was so bummed I missed the open house! I can't wait to see what you guys do next!

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    1. I'd love to meet you in person soon!

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    2. Same here! I'll have to plan to come visit your next project, or maybe we could do coffee sometime!

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  2. Congrats on the sale of your fantastic home !!!!
    I knew it would sell on the first day. Can't wait to see the next project. I'm just not sure how you're going to be able to top this.
    Thanks again for sharing knowledge and the journey.
    Vanessa
    KCMO

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    1. Thanks so much Vanessa! We've already got the next one in the works, I hope to post some photos later this week. It's got a lot of potential for 'before & after' photos!!!

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  3. Laurel,
    After all the TLC you poured into this renovation, how could you bear to part with it?
    Ilene

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  4. We get asked that all the time! And the truth is, we love the creation process. Figuring out what the new design will be, replacing charming features (or creating new ones) and enabling the transformation is what we really enjoy. Once it's done, we're ready to go on to something new!

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  5. Congratulations, what a wonderful outcome!! Looking forward to following your journey on the next one :)

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  6. Congrats on your fast sale! We're renovating and selling down here in Atlanta, too, so I've enjoyed reading a little about what you're doing. I think I'll follow and keep up with you.

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    1. Thanks Patti. Are you seeing the Atlanta housing market start to rebound a bit? We had a strong spring market here, which was great timing for us. But I know some areas of the country are taking a little longer to recover.

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  7. I'm curious if you'll do a post on the financials of the renovation projects you do? We're in the process of a major renovation of a house we bought 2 years ago and currently live in with the plan to sell immediately when done so the bottom line is most important with everything we choose. Much like what you're doing I'm guessing. I'd be interested to hear what type of percentages you're trying to get back if you don't want to talk specific numbers. We'll probably do an in depth post about financials on our own property as we keep a very detailed spreadsheet on all the costs. Our process is to buy a house to live in while we renovate in place so it takes 2-3 years.

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    1. Hi Brian. I don't know that we'll be posting financials until we have a lot more experience. This was our first project and we just wanted to prove to ourselves that we could make a profit, build a team, etc.

      We have heard from experts that you should always try to aim for a 15% return. Others have told us that you should make sure you have at least a $50K profit, before you bid on a property. But like I said, we were just hoping to end up in the black for our first try!

      Best of luck to you - and I'd love to see you project.

      Laurel

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  8. Hi Laurel

    I've read the same thing... 10-20% profit is good. Anything over 20% is great and anything under 10% is probably not worth the time/effort. Although that probably depends a lot on the area and what else you'd be doing with your money that's tied up. Lucky for us we live in an area (Washington DC) that has high real estate prices so the numbers can work even if you spend a lot on renovations. For us we're living in our house while we slowly renovate so it's an added bonus to make any money at the end, much less the 20+% we're tracking for. We're hoping to buy our next house soon and rent it out while we sell this one and prepare the plans on the next one. The upside is no taxes on the profits if we live there for a couple years. The downside is living in a construction zone for a long time! Check out our progress the last 18 months - http://notquiteateardown.blogspot.com/.

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    1. Brian - I love your site, I check in all the time! You've done an amazing transformation - I just love the Craftsman style. Best of luck to you as you search for the next one. As the market starts to pick up, we're finding it difficult to find something that makes the numbers work.

      Laurel

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  9. Thanks! I'm also a daily reader of yours :)

    We've been keeping our eye on a few properties near us. The ones that are cheap are bought up by investors who tear them down and put up new houses. We're looking for the ones that are slightly too expensive for an investor that is in livable condition and has been on the market for a few months. That's how we got our current house, but the good deals are definitely harder to come by these days. I'm excited to see how your current project turns out!

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  10. Taking the decision to sell your house or flat online seems the most logical for all modern day home movers, especially in such financially difficult times. Selling a house online, rather than through a costly high street estate agency, has been made easy by House Simple and our tiered services packages.

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  11. Thanks for sharing this information. I found it very informative as I have been researching a lot lately on practical matters such as you talk about..

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