How to attract the out-of-town buyer

It had to happen. Americans send a ton of money to China for its products and now it’s starting to come back. Chinese citizens are buying a bunch of properties in the US, many times with cash.

That’s cool, very cool. For one thing, money is flowing back into the US. Secondly, this infusion of foreign buyers is bringing the American real estate market back and that’s good news for real estate professionals and homeowners.

According to the National Association of Realtors, Chinese buyers accounted for 18% of the $68.2 billion that foreigners spent on homes from March to March of 2013. Seventy-percent of the deals were cash.

And it’s not just the Chinese. Europeans and South Americans are hopping on planes with cash and scooping up properties as well.

After all, one of America’s best products is America.

Here’s the opportunity. You have out-of-town buyers coming into a market who probably know very little about the neighborhood.

With a real estate map-based search tool such as SpatialMatch, you can impress these out-of-town buyers that you use the BEST spatial technology on the market and you can help familiarize them with all the key locations and amenities in any area.

Find out what type of property they want. Pull up the MLS listing on SpatialMatch.

Now use the map-based platform to show them all the key locales surrounding that property.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Foreign Buyer – here are where the schools are located in relation to this listing. (Many foreigners are also moving their families to the US for education purposes. That’s another great American product – our educational system).

You can also point out to them where the major transportation arteries are located and how they feed into major employment areas – business parks, hospitals, malls, etc.

What about fun things for the family? Show them where the parks are located. Here’s a Chucky Cheese and here’s the 16-theater movie plex, right next to the bowling alley.

They want something specific? Say a community college. With a distance slider included in the search functionality, you can point out the distances to each location as well.

Now, don’t you think an out-of-town buyer will be wowed and very grateful for this demonstration of hyperlocal knowledge? Think about it, they don’t really know where anything is located and this will be a major concern of theirs, as opposed to someone who grew up in the neighborhood.

Okay, you might say, the Chinese or anybody from overseas is buying homes in my town. After all, four states account for 58% of all foreign sales – Florida (23%), California (17%), Arizona and Texas (both 9%).

You don’t have to hope for someone to fly over here from a foreign country with a briefcase filled with dollars. Mr. and Mrs. Home Buyers from Town A 60 miles away are going to have the same concerns.

Show them you are the agent or broker with the hyperlocal knowledge AND the hyperlocal tools. That establishes you as a pro in their minds.

And it takes a big load off of their minds trying to figure out where everything is located.

After all, isn’t that one of the basic benefits offered by a real estate professional –  peace of mind?

Get a geo-spatial hyper-local tool to help out-of-town buyers. SpatialMatch is easy to embed into your website and it will give you and visitors to your website access to millions of bits of local data – schools, businesses, boundaries, restaurants, hospitals, etc.

To learn how you can add SpatialMatch real estate map search to your site quickly, click here.

To read about the influx of Chinese home buyers, click here.