Real estate agents must be proactive to stay ahead in this market. Here’s how to make the best listings for your commercial properties.
With the real estate market being more competitive than ever and new agents having a hard time making waves, you’ll want to take an active role in attracting sales. The saying “if you build it, they will come” no longer applies. You now have to work to be noticed.
Thankfully, there are simple ways of getting your commercial real estate listings out there to be seen.
Use Quality Photos
First impressions still matter, and this is no less true when it comes to listing your properties. Everyone now a smartphone with a powerful camera and endless editing options. You have no excuse not to post the best pictures you can to show your commercial properties in the best light.
An even better option would be to hire a professional photographer to take the photos for you. It’s a costly option. But, if it leads to better sales on your property, you can rightfully consider it an investment.
Add a Virtual Tour
Photos are nice, but they’re last-century technology. Today’s listings are all about multimedia options. To add value to your listing, consider including a virtual tour of the property. This short video will cover a full walk-through of the property. This is valuable information for potential buyers, who can see a more comprehensive picture of your property than a few cherry-picked photos can provide. It’s also useful for prospective buyers who can’t physically visit the property for reasons such as distance or health concerns.
Optimize Your Property Description
Text is timeless and important for your listings even in the face of new technology. Not only is it another way to present information about the property that may not show in photos and videos, but it makes your description more accessible to prospective buyers who may not be able to see your multimedia content.
Keeping accessibility in mind will help widen your listing’s reach, and it is an important factor in the current search engine optimization (SEO) guidelines. Following these is key to your listing’s visibility on search engines. Follow the current best practices for SEO, and you’re rewarded with a favorable ranking on search pages. Don’t follow these practices, or try to cheat the system. Your listing may be punished with a lower rank or no search page presence at all.
A lot of information can go into your property description, and it’s best to keep it to a certain standard of formatting for easy reading.
SEO best practices are a moving target. The big search engines constantly update their algorithms to stay ahead of how users design their web pages. So it’s best to keep a surface-level understanding of SEO guidelines and how they evolve, at a minimum.
Social Media Visibility
There’s no way around it. In order to be visible, your best option is to keep up a presence on social media. Everyone is on it in some form today, and social media is one of the first places people turn to for information about people, businesses, and even properties. It’s also where people go to ask questions and have conversations. Maintaining up a social media presence is the best way not only to stay visible but keep a favorable image in your prospective buyer’s mind. This means it isn’t enough to make a Facebook page and sit on it. To leverage social media effectively, you need to take an active role in management or hire a social media manager to handle it for you.
Keep in mind that not all of your audience will be in one place. The most meticulously curated Facebook page will mean nothing if the audience you want to reach is on Instagram. Part of building your social media presence will include finding the group you want to find you and knowing where you can find them. Here are some examples of a few commercial real estate companies that leverage social media well.
Look At Comparable Properties in Your Area
If you’re still stuck on how to craft the best commercial real estate listing, take a look at what your competition is doing. You can’t sell a property without taking cues from comparable listings in your area, whether you’re working on the initial valuation or marketing steps.
Looking at the listings for other properties will give you a good idea of what your audience will expect to see. So if you have gaps in your listing, you’ll be able to spot them and have some knowledge of how to fill them. Checking these listings will also help you make sure you’re on the right track with your property valuation, and if you’re charging too much or too little.
Be sure to take a look at properties that have already sold, especially if the sale was recent. Not only did their listings obviously work, but this will give you an opportunity to stand out for prospective buyers who may still be in the market for a property similar to what just sold.
About ProspectNow
ProspectNow has a comprehensive property database with millions of commercial and residential properties across the country. Real estate agents and investors can use the platform to find new properties for sale. You can also look at recent sales and comparable properties to compare their own listings. With a wealth of data points and unique analytics, you can identify likely sellers in the area and see if your property interests them. And finally, ProspectNow’s customer relationship management tools allow you to find leads to buy and sell properties. Contact them by phone, email, snail mail, or direct advertising all from the same place.
Do you want to close more deals and make more money? ProspectNow’s hybrid property database and customer relationship management tool helps you find, reach, and close on more properties than the status quo. Start your free trial today and find out how much more money you could be making.