Sell Your Home for More: With Social Media

By Kurt Opray

In 2012 Kurt Opray became the first person in the world to notably utilise social media to help sell his house. The activity he undertook netted him a staggering $135,000 or 15% over his asking price. This book details exactly what he did, why it worked, and how you can easily do it to.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483504421

Book preview

LUCK!

PART ONE: How all this came about.

At any one point in time, on average over the past 10 years in Australia there are between 30,000 & 40,000 houses up for sale. 99.99% are marketed, or presented to the market in exactly the same way. A copywriter jams together a string of superlatives that leaves many home owners wondering if they are in fact selling the Taj Mahal. A photographer shows up at the end of the day to take ‘Dusk photographs’ with a wide angle lens. This achieves two purposes; the house with its inside lights blazing brightly enough to confuse migrating birds fits perfectly alongside every other A4 photo flyer in the agents window, and the wide angle lens makes the bathroom look bigger than the Melbourne Cricket Ground. The agent then organizes a board to be erected out the front of the house, 100 or so of the aforementioned flyers, a few (or more) thousand dollars of newspaper ads and finally puts the photos & copy, (the same photos & copy that is on the board, in the flyers and newspaper ads) on a few online directories. Now the happy vendor, with their house in the same ‘for sale’ uniform as the 30,000 to 40,000 other houses it is competing against is ready to go! Or are they?

Late in 2011 my wife and I joined the ranks of the uniformed vendors and put our house in the inner Melbourne suburb of Northcote up for sale. After some investigating and interviewing we settled on an agent and in an impressively organized fashion duly got our ‘uniform’. In Melbourne most houses are sold at auction. As we were putting our house up for sale at the beginning of the year we would have a longer than usual timeframe to present our house to the market. This was because Christmas presents a distraction with which even Real Estate agents cannot compete and then everyone is on holidays in January. This extra time was good as in simple terms it meant we had more time to attract a throng of passionate buyers!

The purpose of pretty much everything a real estate agent does prior to the auction is twofold.

1. To ensure that as many interested people as possible become acquainted with the house being sold.

2. To whip interested buyers into a frenzy.

So here we were in late December with some 6 or so weeks to attract as many interested parties as possible to our auction. Our uniform was on and it fitted OK, what I really wanted though was a badge on our uniform. A huge bright flashing shiny badge that nobody could miss. What could we do to stand out from the crowd a little? Or better still, a lot!

I am fortunate enough through my job to come into contact with some highly intelligent and innovative people. An individual who personifies this statement is John Newell from Magilla enterprises. John is one of those guys who doesn’t just overflow with enthusiasm, he positively explodes with it. If humanity kept a leaderboard of people who were the first to do something that subsequently became the norm for everyone John would be right up at the pointy end. I’m also convinced that John never does anything the same way more than once, he is on an eternal quest to improve everything.

John’s particular passion is very close to my own heart, digital marketing. Knowing that he recently sold his house and taking an educated guess that there must have been an angle that he explored, I gave him a call. The conversation went something like this:

Kurt: Hi John, how are you

John: Frustrated, I hate Google

Kurt: No you don’t John

John: That’s true, I just wish they wouldn’t go changing their search ranking algorithm just when I had it nailed down and delivering me off the chart results

Kurt: Ahh, a fresh challenge! Well, given a few dozen cups of coffee and half a week I bet you’ll nail the new one

John: [grumpy sounding moan], to what do I owe this call?

Kurt: You recently sold your house, what did you do in respect of marketing it?

John: Built a website, Google optimized the hell out of it and sold the house inside 48 hours, the agent couldn’t believe it

Kurt: Can I buy you a cup of coffee tomorrow?

What John had done was to build a website based on the free Wordpress platform (more about Wordpress later). He had then ‘tuned’ the website so that anybody searching for property in his area found his website either at, or as close as possible to the number one spot. His website contained photos, videos and extensive descriptions of the property. Much more information than the ‘uniforms’ supplied to most other vendors by their agents. It was however John’s gift for snaring that golden number one search result on Google that sold his house inside 48 hours. He simply made sure that he captured the attention of exactly the right people. Nobody searching online for property in his area would miss his house. Then when they found him (which was very easy) he provided a hell of a lot more information than everyone else was providing. Even today