Are you self marketing your own home? In the real estate industry, do-it-yourself listings are referred to as For Sale By Owner, or FSBOs for short.
If you have ever driven around a subdivision of model homes, you may have noticed that most of these properties have a “Flyer Holder” attached to the Property For Sale sign. These flyer holders usually contain a thick pile of sales brochures that advertise the home and highlight its most important features. Real Estate professionals recognize that individuals in the market for a new home will often drive around subdivisions in search of a home that catches their eye. A sales flyer is a way of advertising a particular home without the owner or agent having to be there.
Whether you are marketing your home by yourself, or are working with a FSBO marketing franchise, an effective sales flyer is one of the most important marketing tools there is.
Designing an effective sales flyer
How do you create an impressive sales flyer? If you have never designed a flyer before, it might be helpful to collect an assortment of real estate flyers from model homes around the area. Once you have a dozen or so flyers from local real estate companies, set the flyers side by side on the kitchen table and look at the various design elements. In a side by side comparison, it should be quite obvious which flyers are stand outs and which ones are dull as dirt. Pattern your flyer after those brochures that have a great deal of visual appeal.
As you begin to design your FSBO flyer, there’s also a few design tips that are well worth remembering. The most important tip is to stick with one font style throughout the entire brochure instead of using several. While multiple fonts may work for marketing soft drinks, fast food, and designer clothes to teens, it doesn’t look very professional on a sales flyer for an expensive home. Also avoid the temptation to use “cutsie” fonts and stay with clean, crisp fonts such as Times, Helvetica, or Palatino. To create variation in the sales flier, experiment instead with different point sizes (12 pt to 36 pt is an ideal range) or styles, such as bold or italics.
Components of an effective sales flyer
Properties listed with a real estate agency usually have a limited amount of information along with financing options. The idea behind the limited information is to encourage a prospective buyer to call the listing office for more details. For a person self marketing a property, it’s a much better strategy to supply more information. With a FSBO listing, a homeowner has one chance to pull in that drive by traffic, and that brochure really should cover all the splendiferous features of the home.
At the top of the flyer, include a bold title or statement that sums up the most important feature of your home in just a few words. What kind of buzz words should you use? Again, searching through the classified ads of your local newspaper should give you an idea of what kind of jargon local real estate professionals use when marketing a home. For this title, use an eye catching 36 point font size.
Beneath the catchy title should be a clean, crisp photograph of the exterior of the home, the address, and the sales price. These components combined should be large enough to fill up the top 1/3 of the sales flyer. The rest of the flyer should contain pertinent information about your home that a buyer might not be aware of by simply driving by.
This information should be organized in bullet format with the most important features at the top of the list, and least important at the bottom. A 12 point font size is preferable for this list of features.
What features do I include on my sales brochure?
Before organizing your features list, it helps to first write down all the features of your home on a piece of scratch paper. Include recent upgrades you have made, special landscape features, number of rooms, type of floor covering, and such things as appliances, heating and cooling systems, fire places, vaulted ceilings, custom fixtures, special energy features and so on. Once you’ve made up a comprehensive list, the next step is to group related features into a single statement. For example, a sentence describing your kitchen might read: Newly remodeled kitchen w/ custom alder cabinets, all new stainless appliances, tile back splash, Silestone counters, and Euro touches. This description can be used as one of your “bullet points” in the sales brochure.
Choose the most dazzling of these 15 or 20 of grouped features to include in your sales flyer. And at the very bottom of your brochure, remember to include your telephone number and a message number in 14 point font in bold. A larger and bolder font style will draw a prospective buyer’s eye directly to your phone number.
What about the back side?
If you choose to produce a double sided brochure, the back side should contain several photographs of the interior and back yard, plus secondary information that may help a buyer make up his mind. This information might include utility costs, school districts, and quotes from a lender.
When it comes to selling a property FSBO, a well designed sales flyer really is the best tool you have for marketing your home. A sharp looking flyer can make your property stand out from all the others a buyer may have driven around that day while doing the job of “selling” your home when you aren’t available.
