Your secret weapon to land more FSBOs

Sure, we know the real estate business is tough. And continues to get tougher.

We hear it from our clients all the time – banks have gone overboard on loan requirements, consumers have let their credit scores go and some buyers have lost their minds when it comes to making a realistic offer.

You have our sympathies. We’re here to help.

For there is a silicon lining to every cloud and when it comes to FSBOs, nowadays smart real estate agents have a huge advantage. They possess a very compelling argument they did not have before.

You can thank Google for that.

Before the internet, you could approach a FSBO with all the right questions: How are you pricing your home? Do you have a CMA? Do you know what a prequel is? Are you going to be able to show the home at all hours?

But many stubborn FSBOs would just naively reply, “No thank you.  I can put my own sign in my yard and I can write my own classified ad and I can place it in the newspaper myself”.

And they could do that overnight. But the one thing you can’t do overnight is get to the first couple pages of Google with relevant keywords for any community.

That’s why it is so important to be sure your web site is search-engine savvy. And there is literally no better platform to do this than WordPress.

The company that can help you do this quickly is Home Junction Inc. and its real estate-focused, GeoTheme websites using the WordPress platform (www.hjwebsites.com.)

Not sure what WordPress is? You need to find out.

Here’s what one expert web developer wrote that says it all: “WordPress has done a better job of making it easy for non-technical people to update and contribute to a website than any other technology I’ve seen.”

Why is that important? Because while Mr. FSBO watched TV in his living room before deciding to sell his house, for months you have been aggressively updating your website with hyper-local content relevant to his community. Local blogs. Local maps. Local schools. Local neighborhood amenities.

So when a buyer searches for “Golf course homes in Potterville,” Mr. FSBO’s golf course home in Potterville is not going to show up (or if he happens to get it on the web, it will be buried many, many pages back in search Siberia.)

If you work it, your WordPress web site will show up. Prominently. Like a spider web catching buyers.

As you know, other agents are going to pound away at Mr. FSBO to get his listing. Many who are not web-savvy will ask the usual questions.

But you can appear at Mr. FSBO’s door with solid evidence of your expertise – screenshots showing him your position on Google for searches for his type of home in his community. You can demonstrate how you own his potential buyers.

Sure the signs and the ads in the newspaper are nice, but you will have stats verifying that 89% of homebuyers now start their search on the web.

That means he is missing out on offers, maybe decent offers, maybe multiple offers.

At that point, the odds could tilt strongly in your favor for Mr. FSBO to give you his listing and go back to watching TV on his couch.

Sure times are tough. But the tough get going with a Home Junction WordPress site.

To see how easy it is to implement a Home Junction GeoTheme WordPress site with the state-of-the-art SpatialMatch IDX and lifestyle search engine, click here.