relocatees or second home lookers (Kittery: flat fee, for sale, real estate)

[lynnbass]

hi there. Maybe some of you could suggest the best on-line resources for highly viewed classifieds. I know of craigs list and live deal and backpage, but where else would you reccommend? We need to be doing more effective marketing. Thanks for any advice!

[midwestmom]

Lynn,

Sorry I can't help with your question - your pic is stunning. Must be beautiful in the rest of the house too.

[dramamama6685]

Gorgeous...I'm not sure what would be best. The market down here is horrid. I work in HR Recruiting and am seeing a lot of realators come apply for workdue to the bottom dropping out of real estate. I am therefore, ill equipped to answer..probably shouldn't have posted this, but it's early and still on my first cup!

[Northern Maine Land Man]

You need a good Realtor. The second home market is much better than the primary residence market. Buyers with money are actively looking for rural properties because they are uneasy about the location of their primary residence if our economy really tanks. They refer to properties like yours as "bug out destinations". These folks can write a check for your property and never think twice about it.

[dmyankee]

Originally Posted by Northern Maine Land Man

You need a good Realtor. The second home market is much better than the primary residence market. Buyers with money are actively looking for rural properties because they are uneasy about the location of their primary residence if our economy really tanks. They refer to properties like yours as "bug out destinations". These folks can write a check for your property and never think twice about it.

NMLM is right. The second home market is showing no decline where I am. There has been a big influx of check writing semi retirees and yuppie types since 911.

If the crap really hits the fan, the contingency plan is to close off the Kittery bridge!

[lynnbass]

I have a realtor as I chose to do a flat fee listing to be on the MLS and the realtor does the closing paperwork (for 1/2 percent)and basically we do the marketing (outside of our mls listing). This will be our 3rd move in 4 years and the money we've given to realtors is staggerring. We cannot afford to keep giving money away especially when that amount is rarely earned. My mom was a realtor and I have friends that are, but please anyone take no offense, they are either too busy or are used to having to do the minimum to get their deal done. In this market doing the minimum will not get it done. Which is why- I'll ask again; if anyone knows the best on-line source for advertising a home for sale. It is a year round home but it does have a vacation home feel as it is log with incredible features (like central air-in Maine-unheard of,but nice!) as well as a full granite bathroom and shower and whirlpool tub (toilet has warm water piped in so as not to condensate and drip on the granite floor!). Do those things give you an idea of the attention to detail? Obviously the original owner/builder was from C.A.

[Acadianlion]

Originally Posted by lynnbass

I have a realtor as I chose to do a flat fee listing to be on the MLS and the realtor does the closing paperwork (for 1/2 percent)and basically we do the marketing (outside of our mls listing). This will be our 3rd move in 4 years and the money we've given to realtors is staggerring. We cannot afford to keep giving money away especially when that amount is rarely earned. My mom was a realtor and I have friends that are, but please anyone take no offense, they are either too busy or are used to having to do the minimum to get their deal done. In this market doing the minimum will not get it done. Which is why- I'll ask again; if anyone knows the best on-line source for advertising a home for sale. It is a year round home but it does have a vacation home feel as it is log with incredible features (like central air-in Maine-unheard of,but nice!) as well as a full granite bathroom and shower and whirlpool tub (toilet has warm water piped in so as not to condensate and drip on the granite floor!). Do those things give you an idea of the attention to detail? Obviously the original owner/builder was from C.A.

Why not hire a web developer to develop a web site all about your home? Stay away from the real estate community, and do it all yourself. Make your web site as attractive as possible with lots of pictures and descriptions of the surrounding area. Make sure that the web site descriptions have enough key words so that all the major search engines will instantly bring people to your website. For considerably less than any sort of real estate commission, you can probably do the whole deal yourself with far better results.

We will be selling our home next year. We will be doing our own marketing, and will not use a realtor at all, but will be using the web and other advertising methods to get as much market penetration as possible.

Realtors are not effective and they are incompetant as a general statement.

[Zymer]

Lynn, looks nice. When we were looking, we used mostly the MLS listings and some of the classifieds in the papers & Uncle Henry's. The ones that got the most attention from us were those that had links to lots of decently sized pictures of the interior and exterior, and the surrounding land, as well as details in the listing that gave the number of rooms, foundation size, overall finished square footage above grade.

If we could not easily determine the finished area, we skipped it. We also started skipping listings by particular realtors where the information in the listings proved to be something less than accurate (Don't tell me it's 30x60 if it's really only 28x52, and don't tell me there's 800 foot of road frontage when the reality is that the property is only half that wide but has the road splitting it).

The pic you posted looks nice. If the rest of the house is as nice and you are asking the price that I think you want, then you need to market it effectively to a wide audience of people who can easily spend that kind of money. Lenders have had a nasty lesson and I don't think they're going to be inclined to float loans the way they did in the past few years.

[lynnbass]

Thank you for the input. I think you are right- I often did not look further if the listing did not include pictures. Unfortunately through the flat fee deal our listing on realtor.com has only one pic. We do have tons of pictures available through brokerdirectmls.com/109651, but most people have not had experience with the flat fee listings and don't know where to look. I think I'll get in touch with them today and find out how to make the information more readily accessible.

[Zymer]

Very, very nice. I love the look, and all of the woodwork. I'm not an expert, but I would think that you would be looking for an above-average buyer so it logically follows that it would need to be marketed to that type of people.

I have no experience in that area but I just did a Google search using the terms "marketing", "high-end" and "property", it brought up more than 1.9 million results. Looking at the first page of hits it looks like you might be able to find some good advice in there somewhere.