How Using A Virtual Tour and Dedicated Web Site Will Sell Your Home or Condo Faster

With all of the new properties coming on the market, especially in the peak Spring and Summer, months how can you differentiate your property and get it the attention it deserves from agents and buyers? Everyone puts pictures on the MLS and prints flyers, but how many agents go the extra step of shooting a Virtual Tour and building a dedicated web site based on your address?

In any real estate market, but especially in a resort market like Incline Village at Lake Tahoe where the primary selling season is compressed into only 4 months each year, you need to do everything possible to get the attention of buyers. Shooting a Virtual Tour and building a dedicated web site using the address of your property as the domain name will make your property stand out from the other properties for sale in your area.

By having a dedicated web site that uses the physical address of your property, it helps to reinforce in the mind of the buyer the location of the property. With all the real estate that buyers look at on the Internet, this simple method can help to separate your property from all the other listings. People easily remember addresses, they don't remember the cryptic number of a virtual tour. It only costs about $6 a year to keep a domain name registered, so why not register your home address and then when you go to sell your property in the future you will already own the domain name that matches it.

You might be thinking, why don't I just wait until I put my home on the market and then my real estate agent will do this for me. First, if you live in a condo not a house, there is probably only one street address followed by individual unit numbers. People will easily remember the short 3 or 4-digit street address, they won't remember the hyphen or underscore or how the unit number is exactly indicated.

More importantly, it's your address, you should own the domain in case the first agent you list your property with does not sell your home. In that case, you own the domain name for your address and when you get a new agent you already own all of the content on your domain. You can send a thank you note to the first agent for writing the copy and shooting the photos, but why should you have to start all over if the original listing agent failed to sell your property? Homes and condos for sale in Incline Village and other resort markets can sit for more than a year and go through 2 or 3 listing agents before they finally sell. Better to be proactive and own your address as your own domain than leave it up to chance.

A good real estate agent will shoot several nice photos and build pages on their own web site for every listing so that buyers can see a lot more information than what is provided on the MLS. The more places on the Internet that an agent showcases their listings, the better exposure for the property owner and the likelihood more people will stumble onto your property than through just Realtor.com.

It is also important to have a high quality Virtual Tour shot by a professional company that specializes in this type of service. Companies such as The Tour Factory use special software that allows the video motion to move smoothly and clearly even over a dial up connection. A regular video streamed over the Internet uses way too much memory and takes too long to download, even with a high-speed connection. Far better to spend the $120 to $250 for the Virtual Tour and let them use their special stitching software that turns a bunch of still photos into the appearance of a seamless video.

The link to the Virtual Tour should appear on your local MLS, Realtor.com, your agent's web site and the dedicated web site with your address as your domain name. This ensures that every piece of text and graphical information is available in multiple places so a prospective buyer can find it more easily.