Should You Advertise Your Property In The Newspaper? (Ep105)

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The over the last 5-10 years the Internet has completely disrupted at the newspaper and the print media market. Today I talk to Sam Towns from Petrusma Property about whether or not it’s still effective to put advertorials or adverts in the newspaper to market your property and whether it’s worth the extra expense as an owner selling your property.

For the full interview click here.

How Important Are Newspapers In Advertising Properties For Sale?

Most reflections that I hear from people that are selling in the Sydney, Melbourne or across Australia markets are that newspapers are dead. That’s definitely not case for us in Tasmania, newspapers are massive in our budgets and in what we promote.

A lot of that has to do with getting people to the open homes. What we’re finding that if we just advertise an open for inspection on the internet, we’ll get a relatively small show up of buyers.

But if we put that a showcase of a property in the newspaper we’ll find a much better turn up in the open home. There will always be genuine buyers come to open homes and we want those genuine buyers to see other buyers, looking in the property, interested in the property and feeling like this is a house that everyone wants.

So part of my job is to make sure there’s open homes full of people. Newspaper is really important part of that. The other thing we find in newspaper is, a size of the add makes a big difference on people’s perception of value.

So, I’ll have a $1.4 million property advertised with a decent size ad but equally I’ll have a $300,000 also shown with that same sized ad, with the same pride and the same care taken on the ad because it’s all about the a buyers perception of value.

If they think “that looks like good value for the money” then they will engage with the property so we want to make sure that if we got a price on a property that it looks like it is worth it.

If buyers are very cool towards the property (because of a lack of other interested buyers), they might make an offer – but it will probably be a lowball offer.

I’m selling a house as we speak, I’ve got a number of offers today, the first open house is tomorrow, and I’m going to be going to the owners tomorrow afternoon with all of the offers and presenting those to the owner.

If the buyers that I’ve had through thought that they were the only ones interested, those offers would have been on the lower end whereas as it is, they may have to really compete and really put the best offer forward to make sure they give themselves every chance to buy.

Signboards

Our boards use photos and full gloss images and the other thing that we have done is we have got QR codes on our sign. Decent size QR code so you don’t have to wave your smart phone in the direction of the sign, it immediately picks it up and send you to the dedicated mobile website which means that then you can flick through all of the photos, through all of the description, you can see floor plan, you can tap on the video, watch it on the net from the sign because of the size of the QR code you can do it probably from your car and still have that work.

We probably get 40 or 60 scans a week, it is decent. Every form of print media had QR codes on. You are always taking the print media which is a static media and directing people to online and QR codes just mean they don’t have to type in the URL and fumble over the website, they just scan the code and they are there.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Blue Horizons Property – Corr and Helene have already helped hundreds of investors invest in positive cash flow properties with high growth potential in the Surat Basin in Queensland. Don’t invest in the wrong area. View their featured listings for their latest properties.