Thanks for the tip on using Google Presentations. This looks like it would take forever in Photoshop!

Just awesome...

Why thank you Cesar :)

Oh yeah, using Photoshop for this stuff is overkill. Even programs like Canva are great for this kind of simple image editing.

However with Google Presentations you can manage a large amount of slides and order them easily. Then you can just save all the images and upload them directly to any real estate platform all in order!

hey!

 

thanks, very informative, will soon get your course.

quick question: my sense of flow has expected the green behind the houses to be shown directly after the slide you mentioned it?

 

Million thanks for sharing this info. I believe your kopywriting course teaches Google presentations.  Real estate copywriting is a good niche.

Awesome example, thanks for sharing. It's helpful seeing real examples in different industries!

Nice idea to add captions to the images! You asked for other ways to improve the listing. When I look at pictures like these I often get a lot of questions in my head:

Privacy wall. You mentioned that there is on side, which immediately makes me think "Is it possible/allowed" to build on on the other side as well.

Shared backyard. Pets running around in the shared backyard is nice if you have pets and like pets, but there are plenty of people who don't. They probably don't want the neighbours dogs running around their backyard or even into their house/patio ;) This raises even more questions in my mind about the shared backyard.

Outdoor images. I know it's hard to affect the weather, but a grey/rainy/wet day is not perfect when you want to make a house look great! ;) Perhaps mention something like "On a sunny day the lovely colour of the house really pops!" If it's ok to joke maybe even something like "The house looks great even on a rainy day ;)" or "Sorry for the weather ;)"

You mentioned in one slide that there are no neighbours behind the patio. Great, but then I immediately want to know if there are any neighbours who can see into the bathroom windows ;) Perhaps it would be better to skip this comment all together instead of making the reader conscious about the other windows?

Regards,

Henrik

The fundamental crux of real estate is that margins are abnormally high, supply is high, and costs for a realtor are very low.  A sale on a $300k house with 7% commission is $21k.  There aren’t many widgets you can sell with a $1 Facebook ad that bring in $21k. There is also an unlimited number of houses to sell for someone really good at selling them.

As a result the entire game is customer acquisition.  While everyone focuses on selling houses (optimizing this listing), the opportunity is in capturing all the people who might buy or sell a house at any time in the future (every person in Austin).  By building a relationship with them, they come to you before they have a house for sale or before they want to buy.

Because each sale is so valuable you have a customer acquisition budget in the thousands per customer.

So if we were doing a part two to this article we would focus on optimizing ads for David himself rather than any specific house.

- How to buy real estate for 23% less

- This simple checklist will save you thousands in...[realtor fees, closing costs, etc]

- 8 warning signs that....

- How to get the money for a new house when the bank turns you down

- New government program provides cash for first time home buyers

- Your house may be worth thousands more than you think

You provide something useful, funnel them into an autoresponder, the usual deal.

Then when they’re just thinking about buying or selling, they call you rather than their uncle’s cousin who might be a realtor.

Next because you need other realtors to sell your house, selling houses quickly being important, you might do similar things to make other realtors aware of your listings.

The best guys I know have an email list that goes out to other realtors with their listings.  Each week the realtors tour his new listings all together before the listings go up.

 

 

Random thought. Add a neg to the images, just one. Like the downstairs powder bath:

"Downstairs bath, a bit small, but nice tile finish." It gives an honesty, we all know it is not perfect.

Hmmm, not quite sure what ya mean by that Christoph? Clarify a little, I'm down to change something if it looks wonky :)

Hey Siti, it definitely is since the average purchase price on houses is extremely large!

This is also why real estate agents can afford to blanket entire zip codes with direct mail drops just to sell a single unit.

You're welcome Mitchell! Lemme know if there's other industries you'd like to see :)

Bahahhaha great suggestions Henrik!

Yeah my biggest qualm with this set of pictures was the bad outside pictures (I don't believe those were taken by the professional photographer, just someone's phone on a rainy day).

Adding those captions would definitely make it better!

And yeah, the patio thing is a difficult one. It's not ideally completely private....but I also didn't want to "overly sugarcoat" as that borders on lying.

I think if a house comes with a downside (depending on whose viewing it), it should be known. This way it won't waste everyone's time.

Thanks for the feedback Henrik!

Hey Allen! You're 100% right in a way, and David does have a pretty awesome referral network of in-person people....and YES, that is probably 90% of a good real estate agents job!

However these real estate platforms extend that range. If someone is looking to buy in a certain neighborhood and doesn't already know David, then if he has a great listing it can capture some of that attention.

And yes David has a list going out already, but these listings on huge real estate platforms have such a crazy huge reach that it's always wise to ALSO go after some of those eyeballs :)

Wow Doug.....that's actually a REALLY good idea!

That's always something I was thinking about when making these images: That some descriptions can seem "too rosy" which makes people skeptical.

It's like when realtors use euphemisms to make crappy things seem better:

Cozy = "This house is small as fu**!"

Charming = "This house is old and gross!"

Quiet Area = "This house is in the boonies!"

Unique = "This house is weird looking"

Thanks for sharing, this makes all the sense in the world -- but response is what really matters, not what we think. It will be interesting to learn what change in response he receives versus other comparable listings.

Hey Alex that's true, although a bit difficult to gauge sometimes (you don't get very advanced statistics from these listing platforms).

However in the real estate world 1 extra lead can often result in HUGE profits if a sale is made, so putting some extra effort into these listings is always wise.

Generally the most "saved" listings on these large platforms have professionally done photos and good descriptions.

Finally, improvements to the same ol same ol listing wording: love it! Comments:

The caption for the "kitchen lighting included" threw me off: I was more interested if  the pool table is included and could be moved to the basement! Never heard the term "Jack and Jill". I don't like pics of toilets. The backyard with no private yard is discouraging, I would not buy it for that reason, so add if fencing is allowed.

Add picture of front door, it just seemed 'off' that I couldn't see the private entryway that was mentioned.

Fantastic to see how easy this is, thanks for doing this!!!

 

Thank you for this post. Can you make the same about hotels. I mean, how to improve hotel descriptions on a website like booking.com

Glad you liked this method Carolyn!

One of the main lessons I've learned as a copywriter is that you want to attract people to your product who would be a good fit, and ACTIVE REPEL people who are not a good fit.

So we could sugarcoat how the backyard looks and such, but then people would visit the house in person (which costs us time and money), and then never purchase, which WASTES our time and money.

However on Zillow or other platforms, it costs us zero time/money to show the true colors of this house. So this ad did it's job correctly: It repelled you from wanting to buy!

But for the right person where this is a good fit, it will attract them :)

Good idea Alex! Not sure if that's another post we would do at the moment, but I imagine the process would be almost exactly the same:

1.) Get great photos of the property.

2.) Put text descriptions on the photos.

3.) Tell a "story" within those photos of why that hotel is a wise choice.

Also on hotel websites, I think reviews are probably an EXTREMELY important factor. So while a great description always helps, the reviews are often more trustworthy than what the hotel itself claims it offers.

Good points by Allen, however, you can have a bunch of people in your network, but if you don't have the reach, in other words, a system to engrave your message in front of all those people, you won't scale your business after a certain point.

Yes - you can create relationships, and yes - they can all call you, but in the end, you need business coming to you through scalable ways, which is where listing platforms provide value!

I would love to think of all the things that Neville showed in this post as "home stretch effort". It is sooooo essential because it is the conversion step.

For e.g. think of email list that you have built, now you have this new listing with you. You create a beautiful email and send out a blast to your list.

What next?

Crickets..........!

This is why you need images and copy in your email that converts. (Holy grail of businesses - conversion)

 

Very true Vivek, a COMBINATION of marketing avenues is always better than just one.

Outside of the physical relationships a person is able to maintain (generally just a few hundred) the internet is a fantastic way to massively expand that reach, and this should help that reach just a bit :)

Nice presentation. Your first image. Do you teach anywhere in your courses how you actually make these images as you do a lot of them. I can see the benefits of being able to make your own main image stand out from the crowd, or any image.

Cheers