Real estate flyers are now regularly delivered to letterboxes in an effort to attract more buyers and sellers. In such a competitive market, it’s challenging to stand out from your competitors. Here are some tips on real estate flyer design that really will make an impact.

Design for your target market

The flyers are not about you or for you. It’s about your customers or potential customers. So the flyer design needs to reflect this. This means turning “features” into “benefits. For example, instead of “We have 20 years experience in the real estate industry”, try a different angle like “With 20 years experience in the industry, you’re guaranteed expert advice and high selling value”.

Consistency and frequency is key

You know from your own experience that seeing the same advertisement over and over again will result in you remembering it. Your real estate flyers, brochures and newsletters should always be consistent in look-and-feel. More importantly, don’t expect a response from just one flyer or one brochure. Distribute flyers consistency once a month or once every fortnight. After the 3rd month, you will start to get calls and enquiries. The longer you do it, the more calls you’ll get.

Make an offer

An enticing offer works a treat to urge potential customers to contact you. In your flyer design, offer a free property report, equity check, or beat any commission rate in the market.

Strong call to action

A golden rule for all types of flyers, not just real estate flyers, is to have a strong call-to-action. There’s nothing less effective than spending money and time on a campaign where your flyer/brochure’s call-to-action is not clear, hard to find, or even missing! Whether it’s your phone number, email address, website or all of these, ensure this is clear, prominent and enticing in your flyer design.

Real estate marketing is a lot simpler than most Realtors

make it out to be. Some equate expensive products and

services with quality.

However, effective real estate marketing does not have to be

expensive, complicated, or sophisticated. Sometimes, plain,

simple, direct and to the point makes lasting impressions

that result in increased business opportunities and more

income.

One of the most effective real estate marketing ideas

involves Expired Listings. If you’re newly licensed, new to

a community or simply looking for a way to increase your

business you should aggressively pursue them.

Expired Listings are plentiful and always easy to find. All

you have to do is look at your daily MLS updates.

If you make them a staple of your real estate marketing

efforts by pursuing them consistently you should be able

to develop a steady stream of prospects and a solid income

within 3 – 6 months, depending on your local market

conditions.

Still, getting them is easier said than done. However, a

good real estate listing system can help set you apart from

other Realtors in a relatively short period of time.

Visit http://www.farmingexpiredlistings.com if you need one.

Below are some additional real estate marketing ideas.

1. Bumper stickers. Are you advertising yourself via bumper

stickers, yet? If not you’re missing out on a simple, cost

effective marketing strategy.

So, here’s the deal. It’s very simple. Have some bumper

stickers printed with your web site address and other

business information on it.

Ask your church, sorority, fraternity and/or other groups

you belong to to support you by placing them on their cars.

Many will be happy to help out, especially since it won’t

cost them anything to be supportive.

Also, make enough for family, friends and clients who are

happy with your services and willing to share how great they

think you are.

2. T – Shirts & Jackets. Real estate marketing via T –

shirts and jackets is not a new or novel idea, but how many

Realtors do you see advertising via this medium. Did you say

“none?” That’s what I thought.

So, have some t-shirts and jackets made with your web site

address and other business information on them. You, your

family and friends can wear them almost anywhere. Market

your business year round for a one time cost. When it’s too

cold for t-shirts wear the jacket.

3. Baseball Caps. Here’s another great way to get a lot of

free advertising.

Have some baseball caps made with your web site address and

other real estate business information on them. Heck, you

might as well spend a few more bucks and outfit your child’s

baseball team with them. It makes for great publicity and is

also a nice thing to do for kids!

Ask the parents for “quid pro quo” by asking them to place

your bumper stickers on their cars.

4. Envelopes, Stationary & Business Cards. These are the

mainstay of any real estate marketing campaign, and a must

for your marketing campaigns.

Make sure your web site address and other business

information is printed on all of your stationary, envelopes

and business cards. Leave a few wherever you go. Give them

out like candy, as they are doing nobody any good in your

pockets.

5. Magnetic Signs. Automobile signs are the “meat and

potatoes” of real estate marketing of most serious agents.

If you don’t already have some get some. No,not the generic

ones that your Broker has laying around, but signs with your

name, web site address and other business information on

them.

Place them on your car doors or roof. Take them off and

reattach them in different spots from time to time to avoid

fading your paint job.

6. flyers. Print flyers with your web site address and other

business information on them. Keep some with you at all

times and hang on bulletin boards or simply lying around to

be picked up. It’s a great, inexpensive real estate

marketing idea that reaches a lot of people fast.

Print out a few hundred at a time and pay your kids to place

them on car windshields in grocery store and shopping center

parking lots on Saturday mornings.

7. Articles. Another real estate marketing idea is to write

articles. Writing articles is a great way to demonstrate

your expertise as a real estate professional while plugging

your real estate business. It’s also an inexpensive way to

increase your website ranking.

These real estate marketing ideas, anchored by a good real

estate marketing listing system, can help supercharge your

business and help you achieve the success you deserve.

So, the sooner you adopt these strategies the sooner you’ll

be able begin reaping the benefits of them.

Copyright © 2005, Lanard Perry

The true real estate agent is a professional who is dedicated to the task of matching listings to buyers. This person studies the area and knows all the neighborhoods in that area. A professional agent keeps up on the local news and is aware of what’s going on not only in the real estate market, but also in the school districts, issues at city hall and higher crime areas, just to name a few.

Of course, an agent’s main focus is on real estate. Keeping an up to the minute tracking on all listings is obviously essential and with the computer technology available now has become much easier. However, it still takes time and unless that’s all you do, the average person does not have that kind of extra time. That’s why a real estate agent is an asset to have on your side.

In addition to tracking listings, the agent is up to date on what is selling and at what price. Listing your house at the correct price to start with is absolutely essential to a quick sale. Your agent will know exactly what that price should be. As sellers, we become emotionally attached to our homes, which tends to distort our ability to be realistic about our home’s actual worth. The real estate agent has no bias toward your home and so can give you a fair market value evaluation. Remember, this is all this person does.

When it comes to selling property, advertising is huge. The real estate agent already has the advertising tools available including the signage, the newspaper spots and the MLS (Multiple Listing Service). The agent probably has a hghly visible office in a high traffic area and a list of buyers already looking. A real estate office is generally equipped for taking phone calls and receiving walk-in clients. They will take the stress out of screening buyers and setting appointments for showings.

Choosing the right real estate agent is essential to a quick sale. Do your homework before hiring an agent. Interview several agents and have each of them tour your home. Determine which one is best acquainted with your neighborhood or area. Don’t be afraid to ask tough questions about their knowledge of the market. After they go through your home, have them sell your house to you. Make sure they noticed the unique features and assets your home has.

There are some negatives for hiring a real estate agent. The most obvious is, of course, you will have to pay this person for these services. An agent will take a certain percentage right off the top of your final sale price. Many people feel this alone is reason to try to sell their homes themselves.

There is nothing wrong with listing your home for sale by owner. It just takes a little more homework, but in the end it will save you a lot of money. The most important thing to remember is to detach yourself emotionally from your home.

Many people are intimidated by the thought of selling their own home because of the paperwork involved. It’s really very easy – you just have to do a little homework. If the paperwork still seems daunting, call your attorney’s office and have them draw up the papers for you. You will have to pay for it, but it will still be much less than you would pay a real estate agent. There is also a new trend in the real estate market whereby agents are willing to assist home sellers with the closing aspect of the sale.

Even though a sale by owner will save the cost of the agent, be prepared to have out of pocket expenses. As mentioned before, advertising is essential to the sale of your home and advertising isn’t cheap. Your first necessity will be a highly visible lawn sign. If you’re serious about selling your house, I don’t mean a $0.99 paper sign off the rack at the hardware store. I am talking a large professional looking sign that can withstand wind, rain, hail and snow. It will also need a very sturdy letter size box with a lid to hold the flyers you will be creating.

Because most households have a computer or have access to a computer, printing sales flyers is a pretty simple process. The digital camera really makes it easy to produce professional looking material. Be sure your flyers include indoor pictures of your home’s best features. There are many free flyer templates available on line or stop at a home that’s for sale and grab a flyer out of the box.

With more and more people doing their house hunting online, advertising online is absolutely essential to a quick sale. However, the local newspaper is still the best advertising tool available when it comes to real estate sales. Newspaper advertising is not cheap, though, so this has to be considered into the budget when deciding to list your home by owenr or real estate agent.

If you want some free real estate flyer templates you don’t have to look any further than your own computer. Here’s how you can find quickly find a diversity of good ones if you use Microsoft Word.

Turn on your computer and click on the Microsoft Word icon to open up a new document. Once you do that click on “new document:, which will then give you drop down list of different types of documents you can create; flyers will be one of them.

Next, click on “flyers“. That will take you to a screen that says “event, marketing, real estate and other flyers.” Click on “real estate” and you’ll see a link that says “for rent or sale.” Click on it and you’ll have the following options to select from;

house flyer with tear off tabs
house for sale flyer with photo, map and floor layout

for sale by owner flyer, and
apartment for rent flyer, with tear off contact information

I’ve used these templates on a number of occasions and find them to be very useful, plus I save a lot of time using them. Designing my own is fine, but it’s always easier for me to create something new when I have templates to work with. What about you?

So, what’s left now for you to do is to personalize the flyers with the particulars of the property you’re advertising; then distribute them.

I love using flyers and am not quite sure why I don’t use them more often than I do. Happy prospecting and good luck with these and other templates that you come across.

In difficult real estate markets (such as today’s market), it’s crucial for agents to lean out their marketing costs, yet at the same time, improve their brand identity and become efficient and well-known as an agent.

One of the best ways to do this is by utilizing real estate flyer templates when creating marketing for their property listings. Real estate flyer templates are pre-designed marketing flyers, which agents open in an editing program like Microsoft Publisher or Adobe Photoshop, insert their property’s photos and description, then save and print for use in open houses and for various marketing efforts. Here are the top five advantages to using real estate flyer and brochure templates:

1. Unlimited Use – A successful top producing agent is constantly looking to promote their “just listed” or “just sold” listings. What better way to create marketing material then to have your own flyer template?

As soon as you list a property, just load up the template, drop in the photos and description text, and you’re set. Then, after you sell the property, simply load up the “just listed” template, change it to “just sold,” and change the price to the sale price. Now you have an excellent marketing flyer that you can distribute to your farm area to gain credibility and show off your latest sale.

2. Consistent Brand Image – A key characteristic of a top producing agent is familiarity. All of the top agent’s marketing material has a consistent design theme, a certain “look” that differentiates them from other agents in the area.

Agents that use plain flyers don’t create that signature brand image that the well known agents have. Consistently using a specific high-quality flyer template that is unique can help prospects in your area associate that look with you and allow you to cultivate a strong and recognizable brand image.

3. Lower Marketing Cost – Many agents invest large amounts of money each month for marketing services and programs only to end up not using them because they are just too complicated or time consuming. Other agents end up hiring designers or marketing assistants to help them organize and implement their marketing campaigns, which is also very costly. Using flyer templates, agents pay a one time upfront fee for the templates (often less than the price of one hour or work by a designer) and are able to use that template for the rest of their real estate career without incurring anymore design fees.

4. Easy Printing – Printing can be a major source of headaches for an agent, especially if they are trying to do it all themselves.

Worrying about bleed lines, file formats, and document sizes is not an agent’s specialty. The good thing about professionally created real estate templates is that the printing specifications are built into the template and are, therefore, already taken care of. Simply update the template with new photos and text each time you use it, and send it off to your print shop (or your own printer).

By using the same template each time you print, you can get any print discrepancies taken care of the first time you use that template, then just save it and re-use it over and over again. This helps you maintain consistent print settings which allows for easy and hassle free printing.

5. Fast Speed of Implementation – Another key characteristic of a top producer is speed.

Agents that consistently get new listing are fast with everything they do. Many times these top producers have a team that they delegate marketing and administrative work to, which allows them to get more things done quicker. If you don’t have your own team to help you, you can still match these top producers in speed by creating your own efficient marketing system using pre-made flyer templates. Once you get a new listing, take the photos and load them into your brochure template, and get them printed.

If you are selling real estate in any form then you need to know about internet marketing. Do not spend your time with marketing methods from the past. Do not deal with Realtors who are stuck using old marketing methods.

The marketing methods for today and tomorrow are on the internet. You need a web marketing strategy for any type of property you are trying to sell. If your Realtor doesn’t have one for your specific property, then you must get someone else to do it for you, or get a different Realtor.

Often I am asked what is included in when we do customized Total Web Marketing Strategies for real estate properties for sale.

Below is a sample list of the types of things we recommend you do for properties after creating a custom website apart from Realtor or FSBO websites.

Sample Custom Internet Marketing Plan

- Website Marketing

- Onpage Optimizing with Keywords

- Search Engine Optimization

- Search Engine Submissions (Over 200 search engines)

- Authority Sites Back Link Development

- Email Marketing Campaigns to Targeted Buyer Groups

- Automatic Followup System – Setup & Maintenance

- Custom Flyer Creation & Distribution

- Buyer Contact List Building

- Video Marketing of Your Property (20 online video sharing sites)

- Audio Marketing of Your Property (30 online audio sharing sites)

- Press Release Distributions

- Google Local Search Engines Setup & Optimization

- Creation and Promotion of a Listing on Google Search and Google Maps

- Local Internet Directory Submissions

- Blog Creation & Blog Postings

- Real Estate Forum Postings

- Social Account Creation

- Social Bookmarking Submissions

- Article Directory Submissions

- RSS Feed Submissions

- Content Management

- Website Content Writing

- Graphic Design

- Property Branding

- Online Promotions

- Pay Per Click Advertising Setup & Maintenance

- Podcast Production & Marketing

- Webpage Sales Copywriting

- Web Traffic Analytics Setup & Analysis to Determine Website Traffic Sources

- Ongoing Monitoring to Determine Most Effective Channels for Marketing Your Property

After working for two postcard printing companies (and dealing with many more), I’ve learned quite a bit about the challenges real estate marketers face when using direct mail postcards. I’ve also learned the best practices of real estate postcard marketing, the kinds of techniques that can increase your response rates.

The problem is, many of these challenges and best practices do not get communicated to the individual real estate agent using the postcards. It’s not that the postcard marketing companies are being deceitful. It’s just not in their best interest to share certain facts of postcard marketing with their real estate customers.

So I would like to fill that educational void. I’m sharing this information to give you a realistic picture of real estate postcard marketing today, and also so you’ll know how to get the best possible return on your postcard investment.

Here are three things real estate postcard companies won’t tell you (but probably should):

1. Postcard Marketing is Hard

You may be under the impression that marketing with real estate postcards is easy. After all, you just fill in the postcard template with your information, have the postcard company print them and blanket the area with your message, and then sit back to watch the leads roll in? Right? Wrong. If it were that easy, every agent who ever used real estate marketing postcards would be a success story. But clearly that’s not the case.

Real estate postcard marketing is not a simple, one-size-fits-all approach. It’s a numbers game, a game of attrition. The more mistakes you make along the way, the lower your end numbers (responses) will be. If you don’t optimize every aspect of your real estate postcard campaign — from the initial idea to the final offer — you will probably be disappointed with the results. The problem is, most real estate postcard companies cannot offer their customers the individual attention needed to maximize their results. After all, they have logistical limitations. With a dozen or so staff and thousands of customers, how could they offer such individual attention?

So, you’ll have to educate yourself about the many aspects of real estate postcard marketing. You can arm yourself with this knowledge before you even approach a postcard printing company. That way, you can bring the marketing strategy, and let the postcard printer do what their best at (printing and mailing your postcards).

2. Bad Mailings Do Not Get Better With Time

“Be patient and persistent. Success will come after a few mailings.” If I had a dollar for every time I witnessed a postcard company use this line, I could pay off my mortgage. Well, almost. Some postcard companies will tell you that a failed postcard mailing (one that produces zero responses) will get better with time and repetition. They’ll convince you that you’re staying “top of mind” with your audience, and that eventually these people will wake up to your message and contact you.

Sorry, but that’s not likely.

It is extremely rare that a weak postcard mailing gets better simply by repeating it. Repetition is not a cure for a bad postcard campaign. Usually, it will remain a failure, no matter how many times you repeat it. But here’s the good news. If you start off with the best practices of postcard marketing, and adapt them for real estate purposes, you will enjoy good response rates from the beginning.

A postcard mailing that produces zero results should never be repeated. If you repeat such a mailing, you are wasting time and money. Such a mailing should be modified until it does produce results. Then it can be repeated (and tested, adjusted, optimized, tested again, and so on).

3. Templates are Usually Less Effective Than Original Postcards

Sure, real estate postcard templates are easy to use. You just select a template, plug in your name and photo, and you’re off to the races. Right? But here’s the problem with postcard templates (and you’ll realize the logic of this after I explain it). When you use a real estate postcard template, you are making your postcard look like every other real estate postcard. That’s exactly what templates are — a stock layout used by many people.

Now ask yourself this: “If my postcards look like those of other real estate agents, what happens to my ability to stand out?” You already know the answer. It kills your ability to stand out!

In his book Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, marketing expert Seth Godin uses the analogy of brown cows. Brown cows are certainly not unique. They are everywhere. And as a result of their common appearance, people hardly notice brown cows. But what if you passed a purple cow standing in a field? You’d notice that cow, wouldn’t you? That’s because a purple cow is remarkable. It stands out and generates buzz.

Real estate postcard templates will not get you a purple cow. They produce brown cows, the kind of thing that’s common to the point of being invisible.

* You may republish this article online (unaltered), if you retain the author’s byline and the active hyperlinks below. Copyright 2007, Brandon Cornett.