How to Make a Home for Sale Flyer Using Marketing Psychology

Want to sell your home right away, for the highest profit to you? Discover how to improve on the Realtor's number two sales tool--right after the sign--your sales flyer.

Most real estate agents use a sales flyer template which showcases their listings using out-of-date marketing strategies. For some reason, agents don't follow successful Internet marketing sales-copy techniques. They put a pretty house picture in the middle, list the home's features, and finish with a big picture of themselves. But, buyers don't care what your agent looks like! They want to know why your house outshines every other house in the neighborhood. Buyers want to know what your house can do for them!

Internet marketers learned how to grab your attention and motivate you to buy, NOW. How do they do that? They emphasize benefits to the reader. Not features of the product. Internet readers want to know, right away, "What's in it for me?"

The purpose of your flyer, to motivate home buyers to look at your home and to remember it, requires that you spend some time thinking about what's in it for your buyers. Why would they like living in your home? What makes your home better than the other houses for sale in your area?

Marketing Psychology turns features into benefits.

1. Think about why your large back yard benefits the buyer. Instead of saying "large back yard," give a reason to care, such as: Room to play in your large back yard.

2. Why is your patio unique? Does it have a built-in barbeque? Then list the feature as a benefit: Entertain in your private park with built-in barbeque.

3. Why does a buyer care about paint? No painting needed, fresh paint throughout.

4. Why does a buyer care about new kitchen appliances? No worries, all new kitchen appliances.

5. Great neighborhood? Why? Easy walk to top-rated elementary school and city park.

What's so extraordinary about your house?

Copyright (c) 2005 Jeanette J. Fisher. All rights reserved.

For a full report on sales flyer marketing to sell your home (or houses), visit Jeanette Fisher's Sell Your Home for Top Dollar--Fast. Learn about decorating to attract buyers. Professor Fisher teaches Design Psychology college courses and professional real estate seminars. She is the author of books on home staging, credit for buying real estate, and investing. http://www.sellfast.info/

Fixing questions? Visit Dollhouse to Dollars blog: http://sellfast.blogspot.com/.

Also: David W. Higgins, David Bohnett and more.

Reality TV star and singer Heidi Montag has been hiding out by the beach this summer at a Malibu place she rented for $25,000 a month, according to the Multiple Listing Service. But she moved on in late August, and the gated contemporary is back on the market at $5.5 million.

A Long Beach couple struggling with mortgage payments find out their home's been auctioned off by Wells Fargo when the new owner's representative shows up on their doorstep.

Mike and Ellen Kahara knew times were tough. They'd run up about $30,000 in debt on their credit cards and had fallen about $8,000 behind on their mortgage payments.

The 1960s Buff & Hensman-designed Wong House has a pool, a walled garden and downtown and ocean views.

It seems as though actress Scarlett Johansson had no sooner sold her old place in the Hollywood Hills than she and her husband, actor Ryan Reynolds, closed on a house in Los Feliz for $2.9 million.

Completed a few years ago, a Normandy-style estate was built to look a century old.

Glen and Linda Keane felt guilty about tearing down the O'Melveny family home. After all, John O'Melveny was part of a group of Los Angeles businessmen who formed Lake Arrowhead Co. in the 1920s and oversaw the lake's development into a popular resort destination.

The mortgage giant quietly launches the HomePath program, which offers subprime-era terms for buyers: minimal down payments, no appraisals, no mortgage insurance and lower minimum credit scores.

If you're a buyer with little cash or a small-scale investor looking for a deal on a foreclosed house, a little-publicized national lending program could be just what you need this fall.

How some of our previously featured properties have fared in the sales market.

Buff & Hensman-designed beach house

Lenders lose an estimated $310 million annually in undervalued short-sale transactions, according to a study released in August.

Question: I am fed up with my homeowners association and successive boards for sabotaging owner requests for records and refusing to fix maintenance problems in common areas that directly affect individual units. I believe I have no other choice than to sue the association and the boards. What are the steps I have to take?

Keeping tenant out over concerns of illegal activities may be viewed as a 'constructive eviction.' Such moves as changing the locks to prevent access can bring significant penalties.

Question: I own a couple of houses that I rent out for extra income. Unfortunately, they are not in the best part of our town. I have a tenant living in one of them who may be dealing drugs or doing something else illegal because the police have arrested him several times. Every time he is arrested he makes bail and returns to the house in a day or so. Even though he pays the rent on time, I realize that I can't continue to allow him to live in my house. My plan is to change the locks the next time he is arrested, so he can't come back into the house. I know that I need to protect his property inside the house if I do this, but my plan is to move his belongings into a storage locker. I can't afford a lawyer to file an eviction case, so this is my only alternative. Will I be OK if I do this?

July's increase from June in the National Assn. of Realtors' gauge for previously owned residences follows two straight months of declines and a report that sales of such homes dived 27.2%.

An index of home purchase contracts for previously owned dwellings unexpectedly increased 5.2% in July over June, the National Assn. of Realtors said Thursday, a modest note of good news for the U.S. housing market.