The last month has seen numerous articles in the news reporting on just how poor and inaccurate so much of the online housing data is today. Between Zillow’s wildly erratic estimates of home values and seriously outdated listing information on the majority of sites from the big ones like Trulia down to individual Realtor’s websites and even the local print ads you have to be pretty lucky to call and actually find a property still available or that it is as it is represented. This presents a great opportunity for real estate investing businesses to stand out and offer a lot of value.
It is understandable to a certain extent that real estate agents and some real estate investing companies will put up any listings that they can get their hands on and just leave them up to try and attract more leads. The hope is obviously once a prospective buyer calls in that they can switch them to another property. Sometimes it works, but more and more it just makes buyers frustrated and leads to them hanging up. If they wanted general info, they would have already called and asked for a list right?
By just making sure that all of the ads and listings you post are up to date and are as accurate as possible you can make your real estate investing business stand out and become a reliable source for home buyers and others in real estate investing. Plus it could help provide some additional local press opportunities.
This is something very simple to do for real estate investing companies regardless of whether you are flipping houses or are rehabbing and either retailing or creating a portfolio of rental properties. For those of you who are licensed real estate agents you will find that in most cases you can advertise the listings of others in order to have more to offer, but just make sure that the data is accurate. This applies not only to whether homes are still available or not and the real square footage but also the current condition of the property.
