If you are thinking about selling your Louisville or Bullitt County home, be sure to consider the following 3 points closely.
1) Eighty-Five percent (85%) of buyers start their property search online. They want information, pictures, virtual tours. If they do not find it, the move on. I have had clients literally refuse to tour a home because there was only one photo online.
2) There are dozens of places that a buyer can search for homes and a large number of them are NOT fed from the MLS. If your agent doesn't put your home on the site, the buyer will never find it. However, if your agent truly DOES market your home online, YOU have an advantage over other sellers.
3) We are currently in a Buyer's Market with near record levels of inventory. You want and need as many buyers to see your home as possible.
Obviously, a strong online presence is critical to selling your home for the most money in the shortest amount of time. When you list your with me, this is exactly what you will get. The websites below are just some of the ones that I will use to market your home. Quite honestly, no other Louisville or Bullitt County real estate agent uses all of these tools.
REALTOR.com is the most used real estate web site for people looking to buy homes. My Louisville area homes are all listed on REALTOR.com. Additionally, each listing includes a virtual tour. Since, buyers can use virtual tours as a search criteria, this is an advantage to you.
RE/MAX is the most searched brokerage site in the world. Unlike some other company sites, RE/MAX shows all MLS properties, not just ones that are listed by RE/MAX agents. The exposure to such a powerful brand is just part of the reason that RE/MAX sells more properties in Louisville and in the world than any other company.
VisualTour.com - Buyers want to know as much as possible about your Louisville home before deciding to tour it. Visualtour helps them accomplish that goal. Besides the MLS, my Visualtours show up on dozens of other sites including REALTOR.com, RE/MAX.com, Homes, Zillow, etc. Less than 20% of Louisville homes for sale have virtual tours. This service gives you a huge advantage over other sellers.
I use Agency Logic to create a unique website for your property. We can use flyers, mailers and email to direct people to your site. The benefit to you is that there are no other properties to distract potential buyers.
Zillow allows agents and sellers to list their properties on their site for free. Zillow also provides general data to help buyers and sellers learn more about the real estate market. After reading the articles on Zillow, buyers will start to search through their listings. Your home will be listed on Zillow.
Like Zillow, Trulia allows sellers to place their homes on its site for free. Trulia also has a Q&A page, informative blogs, and other resources available to consumers. Once again, buyers can use Trulia to gather information and search for homes. Your Louisville or Bullitt County home will be listed here.
ActiveRain is an online community for real-estate professionals. I maintain a blog on Active Rain and post regularly. My blog is syndicated to several other sites. As such, your Louisville or Bullitt County home will also be syndicated when I post it on Active Rain.
- Localism is an Active Rain sister-site and a great place for hyper-local information. Cities can be broken down well beyond Louisville, Shepherdsville, or Mt Washington. Your home will be listed here.
Google is the number 1 search engine in the world. When I submit your Louisville or Bullitt County home to Google Base, it will show up on Google. By the way, if you want to know whether agents truly have an online prescence Google them.
After Google, Yahoo! is the most popular search engine. My website feeds my listings to Yahoo!
www.MyHomeInLouisville.net This is my website. All of my Louisville and Bullitt County homes appear here.
In addition, all of my Louisville, Shepherdsville, and Mt Washington homes are listed on the following sites. Many of these sites further syndicate your listings. The net results is that when you place your home for sale with me, the listing will reach more sites and more buyers.
AmericanTowns promotes itself as 'a virtual town square.' The site aggregates news stories and local events for area residents. Louisville, Mt Washington, and Shepherdsville home listings are fed to AmericanTowns via Trulia.
Craigslist contains classified listings for almost anything you can imagine. Louisville area buyers uses this site to purchase everything from toasters to cars to real estate.
The Courier-Journal has an online real-estate section to compliment their printed pages. The obvious benefit of having your home listed here is that the entire focus is on Louisville area real estate.
Cyberhomes contains listings and school/neighborhood information. This is part of AOL real estate and as such gets a lot of traffic.
Facebook is a social networking site. My friends will be notified when I list your Louisville home and willl notify me if they know of a potential buyer. If you are a FB member, you can find me here.
Front Door is powered and promoted by HGTV. About 1/3 of Louisville area listings are on Front Door. Of course, yours will be there.
Homes is a listing site that charges agents to list their properties. However, they spend a lot of money getting good placement on google to attract buyers. Only 10-15% of Louisville and Bullitt County listings are on Homes. This is yet another advantage for you.
Hotpads lists properties for sale and rent. They have a nice map-based search feature.
Live Deal is "is the creator of the nation's first combined local online classifieds and Yellow Pages marketplace." Their site allows you to search for virtually anything in every city and zip code throughout the county. Buyers will be able to find you home on Live Deal.
Oodle is "the fastest growing classifieds service." They have millions of real estate listings. My website syndicates all of my Louisville and Bullitt County listings to Oodle. In turn, Oodle pushes your home listing to sites such as Lycos, Express.com, and Local.com.
Propbot is another free listing site that contains information which attracts home buyer. I syndicate my listings to Propbot.
Propsmart is a Real Estate search engine, aggregating over a million property listings. Your listings will be on Propsmart.
Twitter is another social networking site. Like Facebook, those who follow me on twitter will be notified of all of my new Louisville listings.
Vast is powerful classified listing site for autos, real estate, and more. They currently have over 4 million listings fpulled from hundreds of sites. My Visual Tour account will syndicate your Louisville or Bullitt County home to Vast.
Yourstreet is a news channel that aggregates stories by city or area. In addition to finding your home for sale, buyers can learn a lot about the daily news from Louisville, Shepherdsville,and Mt Washington.
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Erik Hitzelberger is a licensed real estate agent with RE/MAX Alliance in Louisville. If you need a Bullitt County Real Estate agent please email me or call 502.921.3989.
I specialize in the following areas of the Metro Louisville Area: Jeffersontown (J-Town), Okolona, Fern Creek, Shepherdsville, Mt Washington, Hillview, Brooks and Pewee Valley. Click the following links to learn more about Louisville and Bullitt County Real Estate or to Search the Metro Louisville MLS.
Hi Erik-
Just came across your post, and wanted to thank you for taking the time to create this great resource. Also wanted to make sure that other real estate agents understand that they can have their listings added to Cyberhomes.com very easily. I would suggest starting with having their broker sign up the office by contacting connectme[at]cyberhomes.com...make sure to include MLS name and area. Once we have approval, we can pull the listings from the original and verified source, the MLS. Then we can send those listings over to AOL real estate, because Cyberhomes is their sole provider of homeownership and home valuation information. We can also syndicate the listing to Google and Yahoo is needed.
Reggie, Thanks for the information. This should be helpful.
Erik it looks like you got around to following the summary of your websites like I had created. Make sure you get this incorporated to your website.
Wow- I can't help but drop my jaw when I saw that list of websites and resources that you advertise listings on. I can bet your clients and prospects are also impressed when they see that list. Sellers in the Lousiville area are sure lucky to have someone as efficient and hard working as you!
That's the way you do it- that's the way you sell a home! To those agents who Put the sign in, put it on the MLS, and Pray an offer comes in, I say move over because the REAL agents are here to work and get some homes sold!
Kind Regards, Nicole Weidauer
The Egerer & Weidauer Team, Keller Williams Realty North Seattle
Bill - Yes, I did. Thanks for the idea. I already have it on my website and incorporated into my listing presentation.
Nicole - It is a very effective tool to show buyers how I will differentiate their listing from the competition. I like your attitude.
I figured you would:) I would link to it every so often in different places so it actually comes up in the serps.