Dan

How to Advertise Your Property For Sale on CraigsList

In this article, I will discuss another great way to increase the exposure of a property that you are trying to wholesale and, if you decide to do it the way that I recommend, will continue to build your buyers list. I am talking about advertising your property for sale on CraigsList.

If you have read my other real estate investor articles you know that I am a huge fan of CraigsList for real estate investors and this is just another example.

If you have a property under car to donate to buy and you need an investor buyer so that you can wholesale it for a quick assignment fee, then after sending the deal out to your buyers list this is arguably your next best strategy (especially if you factor in that it is free). While the quality of contacts hosted call center by mailing a postcard to absentee owners is much better, CraigsList gives you a great free method of getting your deal out in front of both retail and investor buyers.

Here's what I recommend:

First, use two-step marketing... I do not recommend listing every possible detail about the property, photos, video tours and everything else in the CraigsList ad itself. Instead, I recommend using your CraigsList ad like you might a classified ad: give just enough info to get them interested in clicking through to your website.

Once they are on your website you have two choices: use a squeeze page or give away the info. I usually prefer to use a squeeze page. What's a squeeze page? It's a page that requires someone to give you their name and e-mail address, which adds them to your deal notification list, in order to get access to the details about your real estate deals.

My squeeze page tells people that they will be requesting info about great real estate deals and requires that they give me their name and e-mail. If they submit their name and e-mail AND confirm that they want to receive info on deals from me, I then send them, via e-mail, info on the deals I have and they continue to receive notices on my future deals until they opt out.

Of course, you could just show the property information instead of using a squeeze page, but I would rather try to get someone on my deal notification list first.

I usually put my ads in the Real Estate For Sale section of CraigsList and I re-list as frequently as I can while still being in compliance with CraigsList rules. It is NOT enough to post it once and forget about it. To be effective with CraigsList you need to post your property and then remove it and repost it several days later to bump it back to the top to be noticed. The top postings get a lot more attention than ones that have dropped off the first page of results.

Also, you may want to test title variations and ad body variations to see what gets you the best response. I am constantly trying new ones myself and find the difference between response rates can be huge.

Best wishes as you hone your marketing techniques for selling deals and building your buyers list through Craigslist!

James Orr is a professional real estate investor, marketing expert and founder of the LearnToBeRich.com">LearnToBeRich.com on-line investment game.

He works with a network of real estate agents, brokers and real estate investors across the United States through the AnalyzedDeals.com">AnalyzedDeals.com website.

posted by datdk @ 4:38 AM