Selling Your Sold Listings

This article originally appeared on LinkedIn.

As real estate agents, we don't hesitate to publish and market listings for sale. After all, how would anyone find them? It's one of the first things organised when listing a new property. What we don't think about, is selling the sold listings, putting the same effort into selling your success of previous achievements to gain new leads.

Of course, I am not talking about actually selling a sold listing. This is about selling your self. As the market toughens and finding listings becomes a more difficult process, additional effort needs to be placed into prospecting for new opportunities. There is no better way than marketing yourself, your own portfolio. Telling the world what you have done in the past and the success you can bring the client.

So what does this mean exactly? You can't (and shouldn't) republish sold properties as current stock on the property portals. Which is actually quite a silly move for many reasons, it makes you look bad, it is simply wrong and you're actually marketing to the wrong audience... these are mostly buyers.

The best means to market your sold listings is via social media and your own online professional identity. Social media is a great place to market what you have done in the past and in some cases, social media is the only place for your sold listings.

Here's why social media is key to marketing your sold listings:

• Nearly all prospective sellers are on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter & LinkedIn. A seller is 10 times more likely to research a real estate, agent before awarding the sale, on social media than any other platform.
• Social media lets you control the message. Such as "I sold this remarkable property last year. The vendor was spectacular, helping out as much as they could @vendor-name" - not only are you marketing your success, you are also ensuring a close relationship with your past sale. At the end of the day, who doesn't like to be spoken about positively!
• Listing on social platforms also improves your Google search rankings. As content is king in the world of online, the more positive messages you can get out there, the better your performance will be. Social media allows for this very inexpensively.
• LinkedIn is your online professional profile. Yes, LinkedIn is more aligned to your peers and work efforts, such as your resume for getting a job, it is also very useful for prospective new sales leads. LinkedIn is more successful with commercial sales over residential, but it does come back to my point of increasing your performance on Google and other search engines.
• You need Coicio (Co-See-O) to publish your professional image for the typical consumer. As LinkedIn is perfect for your peers and getting a new job, Coicio represents your professional profile for the consumer. Coicio is a new and growing platform that not only helps you manage your listings on social media, so you only need to enter them once for all social media networks, you can control your professional image and be the trusted source of sales in your area. Prospective sellers trust Coicio, which is why it is so incredibly important to have a Coicio profile.

So, sell your sold and market your success. This will make sure you are on the top of the list when a prospective seller is looking for a real estate agent in your area.