What does it cost you to have a listing?

How many Real Estate Brokers track their expenses to the week or day to have a listing in house?

According to Realtor.org, a survey of practitioners from all across the US the average cost a Listing Agent spends on a listing is $682.00 for marketing a listing in the $250,000-500,000.range, whereas they spent an average of $1,742.00 on homes in the $500,000 to $1,000,000 range. This is the Listing Agent cost.....the Listing Broker must add administration cost, institutional marketing such as Brokerage branding, website marketing, dues, etc. National average is approximately $50.00 per week per listing for up to 100 listings held in the office for an average of 3-6 months.

What are your costs? How can you get a handle on these costs? Let's look at more "Smart Money" ideas.....

The article goes on to say the Broker and Associate both consider their websites, internet marketing sites, Realtor.com, Craigslist and Google to be the most effective marketing for their listings. Nearly 40 percent said they used 5-10 different destinations in their listings...while 25% used 10-15 different internet marketing destinations.

They also thought, 92.4 percent of them, that their Seller's wanted newspaper ads. Newspaper ads, while quite costly, were successful in only less than 10% of the sales of the listing.

Now, let's talk about getting more bang for the buck! Realtor.org also published information that "The Better the Property Photos, the Higher the Sales Price, in October 2010. Comments from 23 Realtors confirmed the idea that the most successful Listing Agents establish a level of quality and service that not only increase the average sell price, lessen the sale time but increase their listings numbers. That attention to detail produced more sales and decreased marketing costs in the long run.

Should you run out and buy a more expensive camera....learn to use the software to create good photos and video? What is your time worth. Perhaps your most cost efficient method would be to leave the photography shoot (average time on a shoot 30 minutes to 1 hour plus drive time, another 30 minutes to 2 hours to tweak the photos and load them up to software). A professional photographer will cost an average of $100.00 to $150.00 for 12-15 photos. A subscription for unlimited virtual tours and internet marketing to 10-12 syndicated sites including Realtor.org, Craigslist, YouTube, Google is only $1.00 per day....which on 30 listings would be 3 center per day....for 100 listings, you are talking 1 cent per day. How is that for Smart Money?

For a complete list of all the features on TourFactory...contact me.

Linda Beber