Get up in the morning, shake the sleep from your eyes as you drag yourself to the computer to check the responses to your property ad. Open your mailbox and... nothing. Yet you need to sell your house so that you can move into your new house and end the endless commuting.
It's lunch time. You call your real estate agent and ask how many appointments were made for viewing your house. He asks if you can all back later. You try the rest of the afternoon and no response. Most likely no appointments...
After the long commute home, throw your coat on the couch and jump behind the computer. Ah! A response. No, not a response, just spam. Damn! Oh well, might as well brace yourself for the next morning commute and hope that someone, just anyone, will bring out an offer for your house. Maybe you should lower the price...
Sound familiar?
Interestingly enough, the majority of house and real estate owners operate as above. For some reason a very passive approach is taken to actually selling one's house or property. We pay Realtors to market our property, we put a sign on the lawn, maybe we place an extra advertisement on the Internet and then... wait. Wait for a response to come in. Call the Realtor to see if there are reactions. Check our email. Check the ad to see how many views were made.
One of the few agencies that take a pro-active approach is
Re-Max. They place ads wherever they can, do neighborhood flyering, hold open houses and use any other means to promote your property to the masses. They use a push-marketing form for generating leads. In the main this has more success.
It is quite funny to see the amount of effort spent generating new leads, when in actuality, there are numerous sources of existing leads right before your eyes - that you didn't see. Seeing these requires a change of mindset. The correct mindset is: contact potential buyers/tenants, don't wait for them to contact you. It takes some work, some rolling up of sleeves, but you will be much happier doing this than waiting for the next response, and as well you will have found your buyer or tenant much faster than the "classical" way.
So where do you find these leads? Classifieds sites. This is the only place where persons looking for property to rent or to buy can advertise. More and more classifieds sites are started every day.
EBay has an excellent worldwide network of classifieds sites. Some local areas have very established classifieds sites that offer numerous wanted ads.
In lesser cases there are classifieds sites specifically catering to both property wanted and offered ads. You will come across these naturally by keeping the focus on classifieds sites that cover your area.
Khusan Real Estate Classifieds is one such site.
Toronto Rentals is another.
And a last tip - persist. It takes some getting used to this, but by persisting you become proficient in locating the wanted ads that will bring you to the buyer or tenant you've been looking for.
