Using Craigslist To Sell Your Home
by Erik Folgate
Filed under Real Estate
You have heard me talk about the use of craigslist for selling your home, and I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t try it myself. We have been trying to sell our condo for the past three weeks now, and we have had TREMENDOUS success with our Craigslist ad. In three weeks, we have had 6 quality leads and one bid on our condo, whcih we turned down, because the offer was too low. What’s the trick? There is no trick. Here is what we did:
- Wrote a quality description with all of the most important information just as a realtor would write on a flier or the MLS database.
- Put four bright photos of the most important rooms or features in your home. Craigslist only allows you to put four photos for free. I am not sure if you can buy extra photos, but I’ll look into it.
- Relist your ad every other day. Craigslist sorts by the most recent day, so you need to keep updating the ad so it shows up on the top of the list every day.
- Watch the buyers role in!
The great thing about these leads has been NO REALTORS. We said in our ad, “No Real Estate Agents Please”. If we end up selling our condo from a referral on Craigslist, we will have sold our home commission free and paid nothing to market it! Does that sound like a good deal? If you are unfamiliar with Craigslist, get yourself acquainted with this wonderful free classified ad website. You can not only sell your house, but you can sell your car, furniture, or old clothes. Try it and see what kind of results you get. If any of you have had good experiences selling your stuff or even your home on Craigslist, write a comment to share with everyone.
We’ve are buying a house as a rental/investment, and we just started listing it on craigslist. Thanks for the tips about pics & posting frequency!
I do have to say, though, that your exuberance seems a little… over the top? “4. Watch the buyers role [sic] in!” seems like a bit much for 1 bid in 3 weeks… though I guess I’ve never tried selling a home without a real estate agent, so maybe that’s what “rolling in” looks like…?
Well, I wasn’t basing it on bids. I was just basing it on the exposure that it’s giving our place, and I thought the amount of leads it has generated is impressive. We had someone else using a realtor in our complex and it has been shown twice. The word travels fast, too. Even if 10 people look at it and don’t put in an offer, they may have friends or family looking and tip them off about our place. Word of mouth is a powerful marketing too as well.
Craigslist is terrific for the individual selling almost anything. If you start using it regularly please learn how to Flag bad ads. CL was created for just the kind of thing you did, but there are more and more Businesses who want to hog up what they see as “free” advertising. While you reposted daily to keep your ad near the top (which is also against CL policy, but that’s a different discussion), the greedy real estate folks will spam (flood) a category with hundreds of ads for properties that may not even be their own listing. So the individual ad – YOURS – usually gets lost in the clutter. It takes multiple flags from several people (# is secret) to help keep CL ad space to what it was designed for – local, face-to-face, non-business transactions. There are categories for nearly everything someone migh sell and if you are in business, there is a Services section for business to post to.