Sell My House Online

You can buy just about anything online now. Where before computers were a standard in offices and homes, people relied heavily on print advertising. Now you can reach a larger audience for less outlay using the Internet.

These days selling is not restricted to business; everyone is selling and people are not as nervous about buying from an individual.

Listing your property on the Internet means that instead of you going out to find interested parties, they will seek you out. Unlike delivering 1000 flyers into letterboxes, where the majority will be uninterested or even annoyed at receiving ‘junk mail’. This is the risk you take using only printed advertising.

However, it does depend on how healthy the property market is in your area. While print advertising may be enough sometimes, if you go with a professional real estate agent, they will almost certainly list your property online.

It’s safe to say that if you want to reach a large number of people between the ages of 20 to 60 years of age, the Internet is your best option. People 65 and over are somewhat more likely to rely on Newspapers and printed material for their information.

Unlike newspaper and flyer advertising which is usually restricted to your local area (unless you advertise in a state circulated or national newspaper, of course), when you list your property for sale online you are reaching people:

• In your area
• In the surrounding areas
• State-wide
• Australia-wide
• Overseas

By casting your net wider, you create more opportunity to attract the right buyer; especially in a slow market. An online property listing targets both home buyers and investment property buyers and means they can research online before going out to open-houses and auctions.

Ways to Advertise Online:

Now we have established that selling online is almost always a good idea, let’s look at the different options: 

• Professional real estate site
• Private sale website
• Ebay
• Facebook (or other social media site)

Ebay:

You may be familiar with Ebay, but did you know you can sell property there? Listing your property on Ebay allows you to sell well beyond your local area.

Selling on Ebay is something relatively new, which is exactly why it can work in your favour. Selling over the internet is becoming standard, everyone is doing it, so anything you can do to attract positive attention is good.

You might consider purchasing an Ebay For Sale Sign for your front yard to let people know they can see photos and details on Ebay. This can create a real buzz in your area because these signs are still fairly rare.

If people are excited by the Ebay sign, even if they just look up your property for the fun of it, there’s a good chance they’ll tell other people or even ‘share’ it on their Facebook or other social media page. This will give you even wider exposure.

These Ebay For Sale signs let people know where to bid, what the deadline is and give them a look at the inside of your home from the comfort of theirs.

Sites such as Ebay are very ‘user-friendly’ which makes them popular with buyers and sellers alike.

The professional real estate sites:

You can spot a professional real estate website straight away. It’s the one that’s attractive, user-friendly and does just about everything you could ask for.

On the professional real estate site, you will find handy tools that help you share your property listing - or help interested parties share it - on a variety of social media sites. You will also find options to:

Email it to a friend - You may need to fill in yours and your friends email address. If this is the case, you know the site managers are collecting your information. Other ‘email a friend’ options will simply make a new email pop up with the link in it, ready for you to send on.

Get directions – people can click on this to see a map of the area or type in your address and get directions to the property.

Print out the page – this function creates the ad in a new page; a print friendly version without a lot of the images and colour, saving you resources.

Save to Calendar – especially handy if there is limited time or an Auction date. This saves it to the buyers’ online calendar.

Share – this option allows people to post your listing on their social media page. That could be Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or others. You can even share it yourself to your own social media page. You will find that a thumbnail image will come up, as well as a brief description and a link to the listing.

 Other professional real estate sites have a range of interesting information to attract buyers to the page, including:

• loan calculators
• loan comparisons
• investment news
• information about loans
• home loan comparisons
• information on relocating
• landlord insurance
• visa information

Private Sale Website

There are many ‘private sale’ websites around. Effectively, they are sites used by people who are selling privately or want to do more to promote their property.

If you are selling through an agent, but have decided to help out and list your property on a private sale website, be very careful. If you have signed a ‘sole agency’ agreement, there could be legal implications for you. It’s best to read through your estate agent’s contract and make sure there is no ‘exclusion of private internet advertising’ clause before you sign up to the website.

An easy way to ensure you’re not doing the wrong thing is to simply let your estate agent know what you intend to do before you sign any contracts.