MINDSET. Everything you do with your house during this time is entirely for the benefit of the next owner, your buyer(s). Now some of the most important people in your life.
At this point, it is only a house - one you must move away from, but you want to make it an attractive home for your buyer to move into. Chances are, you are now a buyer yourself, looking for your next home, so unless you are looking for a wreck to fix up, the things you look for may be similar to what your house's next owner will want to see themselves.
While people are looking for their next home, they are looking to fall in love with the one that captures their imagination. They may not describe it as such, but there is an emotional connection they make with their choice for a new home.
What is residential property marketing?
Communication describing values and features, capturing imagination, and making an emotional connection with a buyer.
Obviously, to be truly effective, this communication must be located in a place where as many buyers as possible are able to make the connection. According to the National Association of Realtors®, that location is the Internet, via the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) listing. 80% of buyers found their home there, either they found it themselves, or an agent sent it to them. Eighty percent.
Now, some may say that the MLS is "marketing." The MLS describes a market, but it is not marketing when all listings look essentially the same. When a $10 million estate gets the very same MLS listing file to display as a doublewide, then it is only an announcement of availability. Maybe it has more and better photos and a longer block of text but it is not compelling enough to capture imagination and establish emotional connection.
But it could have a link in that block of text that takes a buyer out to another place on the Internet where something like a WordsEyeTour can motivate that connection to begin. Attractive and sincere messaging and imagery, are key to strengthening this connection. Stimulating the inquiry and imagination of your buyer is what Residential Property Marketing accomplishes. Scroll below
and click on the photos to see examples of the WordsEyeTour. Click on this one we did in 2009. 
With the recent changes in mortgage interest rates, financing is not as easy to obtain anymore, a situation likely to continue for awhile. Fewer will qualify. The pace of sales has declined. Sellers of luxury properties will be looking for cash buyers and everyone will be looking for the difference that will get their property sold. Solid preparation and property marketing can make a difference, both for sellers and agents, but only for those willing to go the extra mile.
Get the house into photo-ready condition
Before you get to creating a website like ours to tell the home's story, or even just listing the house, you'll need to make it visibly appealing for photography and in-person showings. Photos will be the first-impression entries into your buyer's imagination. So, everything has to look move-in-ready. Nothing else will do.
Fixtures
Plumbing fixtures, door hardware, all of that stuff that people touch frequently needs to look and feel move-in ready. Yeah, maybe you shoulda replaced some of that stuff already, but when a house is your home you can overlook that view as invisible because you already love the place so much. It happens and now you're a seller. Dang! You missed your chance! You could have enjoyed that new stuff for awhile before this move happened. (Remember that when you're in you next home...) Just realize that the money for fundamental updates is not going to break the bank, and will likely be returned at sale time.
Wall colors and worn surfaces
Wall colors will be quite visible and will be a buyer turn-off if they are dark. If, in a weak moment you allowed a child to paint their room black and apply black-light stickers everywhere, well, you have some work ahead. That will not sell. Stickers have to come down and surfaces under them repaired (if necessary) before re-painting in a neutral color. Darker colors in most other places and surfaces will reduce your potential buyer pool and will need change. Put your eyes behind a wide-angle real-estate photographer's lens and use your imagination as though this was a house YOU were looking to buy. Make the changes necessary to make things desirable.
When a house has been lived in for a long time without changes, probably every surface will need to be accounted for. Dirt from hands accumulates unseen on doors and door and window frames. One workable (not the best, but...) solution is to paint the whole interior the same pale neutral color. One that will serve as a primer color suitable for new owner repainting. Walls, flat ceilings, baseboards etc., all the same neutral color. This will greatly help photography and staging so that the house shows interest through the photos in spaces that now-painted, appear to be larger because of the lighter color.
While this may eliminate some buyers looking for absolute move-in quality, others not afraid of doing their own color changes may welcome the neutral sub-surface to paint over. Worn carpets are tough because they are like that everywhere. Hopefully cleaning will make them presentable and you can offer a carpet replacement adjustment to the sale at the end.
Kitchens and Bathrooms
Kitchens and bathrooms can sell houses, or be the cause of non-sale. They can be expensive to re-do when very old. Countertops go a long way to smoothing this over. If the cabinets use dark woods or old oak styles, they can be painted over. You can't do that with countertops, so you may need to replace them. This is where we would recommend hiring a real-estate stager to come for a consultation. They understand the costs involved and know all of the local suppliers so you should get some quality information from them, and you will get their idea of a plan for the rest of your house too. Ask lots of questions and take lots of notes.
Caution: the material suppliers will offer you a savings for doing all the countertops in the house with the same material. That will be one good way to weird out your potential buyers, so don't go for this... Hopefully you'll not need to redo floors in these areas but if you've worn them down with a large family over time, they may need attention too.
De-personalize
This could be one of the more difficult things to do while you're still in the house, but you must remove pictures and other items of a personal nature - everywhere. Including that refrigerator... Buyers have a difficult time imagining themselves in the home with unknown someones looking back at them throughout the tour.
As former Realtors® we are reminded of houses we toured over the years that were abject failures in this regard. Galleries of relatives occupying full walls. Hunting trophy taxidermy throughout the house or covering walls. And then there was one collector of erotic art, placed in strategic locations throughout the house on tables, walls, window coverings and on and on. Don't be any of those guys.
Curb appeal
First impressions last the longest. Guess where those are found? Yep, outdoors - the gaze cast on the entrance, before anyone even walks in the front door. Please make any blemishes disappear. You don't need to go nuts doing this, just be looking with the same eye you will be using with properties you are looking for as your next home. Negatives that attract the eye can be focused on as buyers approach the door and can calibrate the eye toward criticism you don't need before they even walk in.
Dead lawns and plants can be improved relatively inexpensively. New plants and mulch can clean things up nicely, and if the lawn is dead there are services you can subscribe to that won't break the bank. If you've allowed things to go too far you can provide a years worth of the service as part of the package, allowing you to escape town on your move, leaving a happy buyer. Those services always stick a small sign in the yard, so you'll want to have the service leave a couple extra in case the wind blows one away. They advertise your commitment to care and can soften the effect of a yard in less than top shape.
Torn window screens or peeling window and porch coatings need to be fixed. There's gotta be a guy in town who can replace the screens. And paint? You can do this.
If they touch it it needs to be in decent condition, so when door hardware looks dead, replace it.
The back yard should look like a place where friends can be entertained, so use that perspective to update things adequately enough that the buyers are able to do this without embarrassing anyone.
Staging the house for photography
This is where you probably move some furniture out of the house into the garage, or pack it up for the move and put it into temporary storage. The rooms need to be opened up and space allowed to exist for light staging so that buyers can use their imaginations and see their things there instead. Think maybe like hotel room spare. You have no idea who is going to like the house, where in life they've come from, what their desires are so you want a relatively neutral house that speaks evenly to everyone. Remove hunting trophy heads, family photos, religious items. It's only for a little while and you can return to them with your new life in the new home of your future.
When staging for photography you can borrow smaller furniture for a day from friends and relatives. Move the big stuff out into the garage or have a crew of family/friends who can shuffle things between rooms while the photography is going on. A couple of fresh flower arrangements and a bowl of fruit will make an artistic difference. Perhaps you can have your stager come and direct the show while shooting.
You may be inside the search for your next home, so maybe you can feel some of what your buyers-to-be will be going through. A home is definitely something a person falls in love with. Their life, with their loved ones, will be inside the home, so there is an emotional component to 'home' for this. Buyers looking for a home will want to imagine and dream on these things. Your expertly created presentation of space, and repairs to places and features where the eyes fall, will come through in your WordsEyeTour of the home to help them imagine and dream on their new life there. Depending on present market conditions, multiple buyers may see what you've done and compete with offers. One good buyer is enough, but more would be so much better.
Maybe your new job insists you move before you sell and you have to empty the house. Your website can pick up the slack and showings continue with an empty house. Or you can rent some furnishing items from your stager so that the house is not completely empty for showings.
The WordsEyeTour website and how it works
We'll try to give you an understanding of how the site communicates, but the learning of the photography, graphics, writing, coding, hosting, web and graphic software technology is stuff you get to teach yourself. Hey, David did it and he's not the shiniest tool in the kit, so you can too.
Once the photography (you could hire a professional real estate photographer for this...) and seller documentation of features and details is completed the site writing and assembly can begin. A review of all values of the home will reveal a list of things to write commentary for. A rough list order is started with before beginning, but things flow through the head in random fashion and are written and then re-ordered later.
You must write in a conversational tone. This is vital and central to the presentation. Anything else pushes the buyer's imagination away. Sales pitch, superlative laden listing description text will not cut it. What you want is for the buyer's imagination to enter the home and never leave. A soft, conversational presentation keeps them engaged and they will keep the site open for long periods, like they come back and read a bit at a time and daydream about it in between.
Like a book where the reader assumes the characters vibe, feels their emotions, and internally voices their dialog - you'll want to give your house a voice that does not cause your buyer to question the information, but to instead contemplate it. And imagine their new life inside of it. This is the very soul of a WordsEyeTour presentation. You will want to take this to heart.
A seller wants that daydream to continue because the daydream is about their house for sale and not somebody else's.
Once a buyer finds "their" home, they want to be there. If it is conveniently on their way home from work, they will drive by to see it often. They get to see one live showing, but with the site they can be there often. If they live very far away, well, it is all they have and when they are comfortable there, they'll stay. The real estate listing cannot behave this way. There's not enough substance there to facilitate the daydream.
The photos and wandering text give something for the eye to move around within. Although there is a beginning and end, there is no need to be in any one place when the immagination is working inside a daydream. One could make a much sexier website, but it's not about a website, it's about a house and it's values. The website is only a place on the Internet where the house can talk about itself. Just words and photos in a wandering magazine format that everyone has seen all their lives. Easy to read and understand and nothing to push away a reader looking to fall in love with their next home. Memorable because of the potential home being described, where ALL of the focus must remain.
Don't forget, Marketing is Making Things MEMORABLE
Equipment, Software and Services
The camera you'll need is not one with a billion pixel sensor. We use a Canon camera and 10-22 Wide Angle lens that is 10 years old. And it has far more capability than is needed. Photos for Internet display do not need bucketloads of pixels to shine. Less is what's needed on the internet - small files so that your page will load quickly. Prints need all of those pixels, but this is not print advertising. Which, by the way, does not market or sell houses. Print marketing may sell a Realtor to someone who does not know this, but seldom sells a house. There just isn't the coverage in print as only a few buyers will be there to pick up the print and hold it. Realtor collected data for years shows this.
Lighting. We use it. There's so much available and it all works. We use it for fill only to bring the image up to editing quality.
Tripods For cameras and lighting. We use HDR imaging with a light touch and need a strong tripod to hold the camera still. Lighting tripods don't need to be camera-strong, but they do need to be sturdy.
HDR imaging software. We use Photomatix for High Dynamic Range photography - all interiors - and have since 2005. The difficult thing to learn with this is how to apply only the lightest of touch to the process.
Photoshop for image sizing, drop shadow, and sprite navigation images.
Photography For Real Estate is a site where you can learn all about what is behind the lens and in the mind of the real estate photographer.
Your Phone?? For years, photos taken by agents using their phones were laughably awful. But phone cameras and apps are different now. As is the knowledge to use them properly. You know, they're shooting motion pictures on phones now. So it stands to reason you could use one for real estate photos. There's a course for that... On Udemy, find iPhone Photography for Real Estate. For the purposes of a WordsEyeTour, this could work for you. You'll need the phone with Pro camera capabilities for this. Apple has no lock on best cameras, either. Samsung, Pixel, and others can be even better. Look for one with ultrawide capability. It'll cost you, but far less than the equipment we use. Don't forget the strong tripod with leveling capabilities. And a remote camera shutter too.
Dreamweaver for website creation and uploading. You can get really fancy making a website with this thing, but it will not serve this purpose well to do so. Tricky websites will interfere with immagination because distraction is the enemy of daydreams. Keep it simple...
Domain Name Services Where you will buy your domain name and manage it's functions. We use Moniker and have for years. They have hosting available too.
A Hosting Service We use GreenGeeks. Very easy to use with step-by-step documentation for the few things you'll need. Learn the topic of hosting ahead of time before you dive in.
CPanel, which will be what a hosting service will provide you to manage your site's files.
HTTPS is something you will definitely want to employ on your site even though it won't be needed for exchanging any information or money with your buyer. You will want modern buyers who understand the Internet to feel comfortable with the security of the site as evidenced by the little lock image you may never have noticed next to the URL. It will tell them that camping is allowed here...
HTML and CSS is what makes all these characters display on the page as they do. If you're using Google Chrome hit Control U to see some of the source code for this page. The HTML anyway. The CSS is on a supporting page you can't see. But you'll get an idea of the kind of arcane coding you'll need to learn to get there. Remember, rusty tool David learned this stuff and so can you!
Your Writing Style This will take some practice. You'll want to write conversationally, giving your house the voice of the message to it's next owner, over the entire site. Think of the house as a person who is going out on a first date with someone and wants to establish a solid quality bond with them so that the relationship can continue on into the future. This can best be accomplished through sincere, meaningful conversation.
People can think of their home with pride and experience comforting emotions whenever they arrive there and can let their hair down and relax because it is their happy place. You want that quality bond to almost blossom into romance.
Writing authentically this way, with no appeals of any kind, will provide the buyer with a place to return to to experience "their" home as often as they want to. This kind of experience establishes "top of mind," where every marketer wants their clients and customers to be.
Before you write, you'll want to familiarize yourself with the US Department of Housing and Development's page on "Advertising and Marketing." Knowing what NOT to write can keep you out of trouble.
If you are a Realtor® considering this as a viable way to represent your clients (and we hope you are), you'll have to work hard to avoid falling back to listing description style writing. And it's unlikely that you will find any of the AI 'solutions' being offered to agents now that are capable of writing this way!
Use the tour style of writing your way through the house. Compare with your list of values, features, and details to make sure you aren't missing anything. Then go over it again and again and again. And once you mention a value or feature, don't write about it again because repeats look like appeals and will raise suspicions...
Use some of our examples below to get into it Just click on the photos
We, Shelly and David, come to this vocation from successfully using long-ad marketing as Realtors® in NY, and knowing how much "home" means to those who have experienced one. The experience and knowledge of how much a place called "home" has meaning for life and how personal it is to search for one. Active buyers are inside the right mindset to realize they're seeing a presentation appreciated as a respectful way to describe a home to real people who are searching for their next one, and the new life they want to experience with it. And, their imaginations can easily relate to the soft storylines describing those values and characteristics.
Along the way down this page you'll see additional photos of houses we've done for sellers. As on the one above, the photos are also links out to the message part of the sites done for those homes, so click on one you want to see.
This first one is our house and was our proof test of all we've learned over the five years of creating WordsEyeTour for residential property marketing. We had to put our work aside and give up our home to move back to CA to take care
of the parental units who were not eating well enough and were turning gray. We spent 6 months finishing up what we started on the house, and put it on the market two weeks before Christmas as a For Sale By Owner, because our licenses would lapse before the sale could close. That's right, two Realtors® sell as FSBOs. And it went quick. Very Quick. Less than one week. Three offers to choose from. Yep, go ahead and click the home's photo...
A WordsEyeTour site gives a home a voice that communicates with their next owner. A presentation capable of firing imagination leading to the discovery of an important value perhaps not previously thought of, or even something else not directly written about on the page. That's buyer imagination at work. Imagination enabled by TIME engaged in consideration. Discovery and its surprise leading to a buyer's realization of something, that for you as a seller, may just have sold your former home.
This discovery cannot be accomplished by reading an MLS listing. The best information in the listing might be (should be) the photography. The description is never adequate at 200, 400 or even 1000 words as it is a block of text in a presentation format that is not very memorable.
But instead, the MLS listing could contain a link to an unbranded WordsEyeTour site. One a buyer can read before they come to see your house in person.
We learned over the years we've used the Tours - that buyers were reading them well. They would go through a house conversationally using the wording we used on the sites without our prompting, so it was evident that not only were they reading, they were also learning well enough to commit the information important to them to memory. The sites easily provided value for the buyers. And they certainly provided value for our sellers. Win, win, win.
The business of real estate sales is a curious animal.
The workforce is trained in sales methods. Marketing messaging for residential properties is contained within the MLS listing. All listings, regardless of price or values, get the same identical format listing space. The difference between listings is the quality of photography and writing of a few words of listing text.
Let's compare...
Now, compare that residential listing to new construction and development. There is a real intense need for salespeople there because the product is actually specced by the buyer, who needs to know details on choices they want to make. Detailed brochures with great photography and descriptions capable of motivating choices. And then you have residential property marketing with none of that. Why the difference? Sellers deserve more than this. We are presenting a better way to do this. It does take more work, but it also balances the value proposition of a real estate listing.
Buyers have no choice but to engage a salesperson because they have the one thing a buyer can't do without. The salesperson has access to the key. For reasons of security this can be an important thing for a seller.
For a seller, the buyer's agent commission paid at the end of their transaction pays for "marketing." How is that? Simply that the commission motivates that buyer"s agent to bring "their" buyer.
What does a seller give up for that?
Without a WordsEyeTour, the buyer's agent knows very little of your house's values and why they may be important for their buyer. They and their buyer walk into their tour houses knowing only what the MLS listing shows. The sellers get the buyer's presence for only a few minutes.
There are soooo many more houses to see today!
Is this enough to motivate your buyer to change their life in your former house? Think it through before answering yourself. Had they been more well informed before seeing the house, with a presentation they likely read several times because it was talking of values and characteristics and communicating with them over enough TIME to think things through. A WordsEyeTour style site can do this for you. Ahead of time so the buyer can think it through. They might be far more suitably prepared ahead of time with information putting your house in front of any others they might see.
This is what a seller expects, isn't it?.
This might be why you are now here at WordsEyeTour.