General perception holds that the Internet has made it much easier to find a home to buy and to market a home for sale. It is true that online listings now make it easier for consumers to pre-sort available homes by location, price, and number of bedrooms and baths. However, by limiting the home search to these features, buyers may inadvertently eliminate the house that could be their perfect home.
This is because, ultimately, buyers buy a home that aligns with their lifestyle.
Buyers set specific search criteria for their “ideal” home
In July, I was working with a couple in Eugene, Cindi and Ed, who had sold their large family home. They were in search of a replacement home that would facilitate their plans to live more simply.
“We knew that we wanted to get out of the hills,” Cindi explained. “We also knew that we wanted to have room for our daughter and her partner when they visited from Chicago. My husband’s health issues required we move closer to medical support. And we needed space for our camper, requiring RV parking availability. Because of this we started our search in the Coburg Road area for homes with three or more bedrooms.”
Last week, Ed and Cindi closed their purchase on a house with two bedrooms in the Hayden Bridge area of Springfield. They were delighted with their choice, despite the home’s differentiation from their initial search criteria.
The features of their “ideal” home are often more arbitrary than buyers realize
If we look at Cindi and Ed’s criteria more closely, this makes sense. They did not truly need three bedrooms, so, if it were the right floor plan, this was not a requirement for their next home. Furthermore, the Coburg Road area was not the only location that could meet their need to be close to medical care. In addition, though the home they purchased did not offer RV parking, it was a corner lot, which allowed for a pad across the back where they could park their camper. Buyers like Cindi and Ed purchase homes that support their lifestyle.
Home sellers can present the lifestyle opportunities offered by their home using the power of staging, photography and marketing messages. These elements combine to help buyers envision how their family could live within a home and identify it as their right fit. Great marketing involves creating that vision and providing insight into the opportunities the home provides its occupants, especially because consumers rely heavily on online photos when considering a home for purchase. Therefore, preparation of the home for sale is critical to optimizing the transaction.
The power of psychographics in marketing homes to buyers
Historically marketers researched who the consumer was, using demographics, to help market a home to them. Today, we also study why consumers buy, a metric called psychographics. Psychographics is the analysis of consumer values, interests and attitudes to create a consumer profile, which allows us to best market the features of a home to fit the way potential buyers want to live.
Those buyers who feel that a home matches their unique lifestyle will be willing to pay more for it. So, by offering insights as to how consumers live and what they value in the products they purchase, I can help sellers better market their home to match those values.
When I’m working with a seller to optimize the sale of their home, the conversation focuses on viewing the home from the perspective of the next owner. It is my job to interpret the lifestyle possibilities offered by a home to the right consumers through my marketing.
In sum, it’s important to list a home’s base features (number of beds, baths and square footage, etc.), but to find the perfect buyer for your home, be sure also to visually and verbally present the home with the end user’s lifestyle in mind.
Contact Marcia
To learn all the steps to selling smart, contact me. As a Principal Broker at Windermere Real Estate of Lane County, I will be happy to offer my expertise to help you successfully market your home to home buyers in the Eugene area.