The goal of every real estate agent is to sell more properties (or lease out properties – if they’re a CRE agent) and the first touch point that actually determines whether a lead is serious or not is with the property listing.
This alone makes your property listing one of the most important elements in your real estate content marketing tactics. Because if you create great content that you’re promoting effectively and using to drive traffic to your website, without properly optimizing your listings for this traffic, you won’t convert any of them into leads.
In this article, we look at 5 mistakes real estate agents make when it comes to their property listings:
- Poor Quality Photos
The real estate industry is a very visual one – a very aesthetically visual one.
Many agents, however, overlook this aspect of the industry and use amateur photos for some of their listings. They consider using a professional photographer as costly and a waste of time; something only AirBnB should be doing.
Pro Tip: Professional photographers can transform your property into a beautiful composition by capturing essential building details – they can transform uninteresting properties into attractive ones.
- Generic Property Descriptions
People have very short attention spans and are used to tuning out something that reads very familiar. Many agents make the mistake of using generic, copy-paste listing descriptions that hundreds of other agents are using.
Instead, write a unique property listing and make sure your property overview is informative and provides important highlights about the property.
Use the answer to any of these questions to craft your listings:
- What type of property is it and where is it located?
- Who is it for?
- What benefits could the prospect enjoy?
- What tenants are already there? (If it’s for rent)
Pro Tip: Read this article about 5 things you should never say in your listings.
- Not Adding Floor Plans
Next to photos, floor plans are the most important element on your property listing to help drive engagement and capture interest. Why? Because it is a form of visual content and study has shown that visual content engages people longer than just text.
Many agents make the mistake of not adding floor plans for many reasons best known to them, but agents who have added floor plans to their listings have enjoyed the benefits outlined below.
- Floor plans help keep your visitor engaged with your listing for more time
- Floor plans enable prospects to start visualizing themselves in the property, which further elevate their interest
- Finally, floor plans saves you time by reducing prospects that are not a good fit.
Pro Tip: Without floor plans, capturing serious interest from prospects is going to be hard. Go through all your listings and add floor plans to the ones that didn’t before and see the results.
- Weak Call-to-Action – CTA
Even though the primary objective of any property listing is to get prospects to initiate contact; many agents neglect the golden rules of CTAs – persuasive, short and visible.
In order to generate more leads out of the people who have viewed your listings, it is important to have a convincing and visible call-to-action prominently displayed.
A CTA essentially, tells your visitor what to do next:
- Contact you via email or phone call
- Watch your video tour
- Share listing with friends and family through email or social media etc.
Pro Tip: Provide short, clear and very visible instructions that lets the person viewing your listing know what you would like them to do next.
What other mistakes do you think could be ruining real estate listings that we didn’t include? Share your thoughts in the comment section below; we’d love to hear from you.
