First-Time Homebuyers, this ones for you!

19 03 2009

Bain

 

 

 

 credit

Looking to buy your first home, condo or townhouse?  Or, haven’t owned property in the past three years?  Now you can benefit from the governments new and improved first-time homebuyer tax credit, part of this year’s stimulus package.  Learn more here about this extra credit, and contact me for more details.

 

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Tyler J. Echelbarger

206.799.3877

TylerEch@cbbain.com





Is your Agent a Dinosaur? The Evolution of Real Estate Marketing

1 03 2009

I often ask myself why the majority of real estate agents continue to market like they did in the early 1980’s, dumping thousands of dollars into outdated, tired marketing plans.  I have concluded that it is because, number one, many agents are just plain lazy, number two, agents are creatures of habit and resist change, and number three, they do not fully understand how the industry is evolving, the new tools available to them, and are unable to communicate to their buyers and sellers anything other than what they have always done.

DID YOU KNOW???

·        Roughly 88% of buyers first find their home on the Internet.

·        Buyers are 900% more likely to find their home on the Internet than in the newspaper.

·        Buyers are 3400% more likely to find their home on the Internet than in a real estate home book.

(Source: 2007 National Association of Realtors, Profile of Home buyers and sellers)

 

Where home buyers first heard of their home newspaper 1

NEWSPAPERS

I am about to touch on one of the big reasons newspapers are going broke.  Simply put, circulation is down, readership is down, and they are losing millions of dollars a year in real estate ad space because it is an outdated marketing tool.  According to the Belo Corporation consumer surveys conducted in 2006 and 2007…”Barely 10% of the Tri-County population receives the Seattle Times/P.I. and only 1.5% of that 10% reads the Classifieds section”.  The result is that newspaper advertising to sell a house is practically hopeless.

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