Dan
McCoy of Team McCoy in Dallas was nice enough to send us a terrific
little article about updating their tours. We found it so important
that we decided to contact him for some additional information.
Dan was nice enough to send us the following text for our newsletter.
Here is an idea
that we use that may be helpful to other agents. UPDATE YOUR TOURS
FOR THE SEASON. We live in Dallas and the lawns are now green but
some of the listings that we put on in late Jan or Feb. still show
the front and back yards with the brown grass and leafless trees.
We have gone around and re-shot the fronts and backs of those listings
that have been on the market for several months so that a prospective
buyer viewing the tour will not think that the listing is stale.
If I was a
potential buyer, I would wonder what was wrong with a home that
shows a Christmas tree or a wreath on the front door as it must
have been sitting on the market for at least four or more months.
It's so easy to go out and shoot a couple of new pictures of the
outside and update your tour. Your clients will appreciate the extra
care that you're giving them and it really is not that time consuming.
You
may note that we attach a community tour to the end of each home
tour and in about another month, we will again shoot the community
tour to show the grass as green and the leaves on the trees. I will
keep both tours and as the seasons change, I will change which tour
I attach to the new home tour.
The
"Taste of Hackberry" is an annual event where we have
a gigantic block party with 30 restaurants doing free "tasting",
there is a live band, the fire department comes and puts up the
big ladder on the truck and let the kids sit in the driver's seat.
We had 2300 people come last year. I'll get some pictures of the
event and add it to the community tour as I did a couple of weeks
ago when the neighborhood had its annual garage sale. 85 families
participated in that event and it was very easy to add the garage
sale to the existing tour. As the year goes on I will add the Fourth
of July Parade, then there is the Halloween Party at the big neighborhood
park. These kinds of events help sell the community and they are
easy to add to the community tour. If the tour gets too long, I
figure the potential buyer can fast forward by going to "next"
rather than just using the auto play.
When we put
in a lot of text below the panoramic, I add some extra seconds to
the viewing time for that particular scene so the buyer has enough
time to read all of the text before the auto play moves to the next
scene. Again, it is very easy to do.
Our latest tour
can be seen By
Clicking Here. This is our 7th or 8th tour since we
got on the program in December and each one, we think, has gotten
better and easier. We have had a lot of fun figuring out what would
show best, getting the timing correct, and writing the text. In
each of our listings we now have a stack of business card CD's with
our picture, phone number, the address of the home all on the label
and the tour burned onto the CD. These have really been a hit with
our sellers and I have had to restock them, as they are popular
with buyers.
We are really
sold on the Visual Tour program and expect to get better and better
at it.
Dan & Debbie
McCoy
RE/MAX DFW Associates
Irving, TX
http://teammccoy.com
|
