Real Estate and Timing

When I first began my internship I was really excited and optimistic.  There are so many possibilities when it comes to advertising, especially when advertising real estate.  I immediately came up with a long list of advertising possibilities.  I had a lot of ideas for new advertising strategies, and changes that could be made to the current efforts, as well as ways to more effectively use the mediums traditionally used for advertising real estate.

One important lesson I’ve recently learned is that timing can be very unpredictable.  The broker I am working with has one specific property he is highlighting.  It is the largest property he is currently working with.  It has been on the market for a decent amount of time, and the broker has really been working hard to sell this property.  I was in the process of getting this property posted on a local real estate blog on a popular magazine’s website.  This blog does feature advertising; however they stray from advertising individual brokers and individual properties.  Through many emails over the course of several days I was able to come to the final stages of advertising this property on the blog.  Sure enough, when I was ready to close the deal, the house was no longer available.  It was very frustrating to discover my work had essentially been for no reason.

When conducting a more traditional campaign, there is a set and determined timeline.  While there may be changes to this, you generally know when your deadline is.  I discovered the hard way that there really is no timeline with real estate.  A property can sell at any time, making it very hard to create an appropriate advertising schedule.