It’s easy enough to market your property to prospective buyers who know your neighborhood, but how do you do this when you want to attract out-of-town buyers? With over a quarter of potential homebuyers looking for properties outside of their hometowns, there’s plenty of reason to focus on expanding your reach beyond your doorstep.
However, you do need a different strategy to reach them and grab their attention, and these suggestions are an excellent starting point:
1. Photograph & Video Your Property Throughout the Year
First things first, you need to give potential buyers a good idea of what your house and garden look like all year round.
To do this, you can take high-quality photos and videos during each of the four seasons. Then use this content to create a comprehensive portfolio of your property that showcases it in every kind of weather and lighting. This helps out-of-town buyers envision what it’s really like to live there and builds confidence in what they’d be investing in.
2. Provide Utilities and Cost-of-Living Breakdowns
Your listing should offer prospective buyers an idea of how much they’ll spend over and above their mortgage payments to live in your neighborhood.
One way of doing this is to provide a basic cost-of-living breakdown. This should feature overall utilities costs, basic food items, gas, public transportation, basic healthcare in the area, property taxes, and discretionary spending, such as the cost of movie tickets or gym membership.
It’s also helpful to go into more detail about utility costs. Let potential homebuyers know the average cost of water, electricity, natural gas, and other necessary and optional services. These could include trash and recycling collection, sewage, and internet and cable or streaming services.
3. Create a Neighborhood Guide for a Full Year
When someone purchases a house, they’re investing in a community, so your listing should go beyond just describing your property. Creating a neighborhood guide for a full year will help market your area and your home.
The guide should include a list of regular events and festivals, as well as various amenities and unique features or attractions. Additionally, include a description of the dynamics in your community, homeowner’s associations, and other local bodies, community initiatives, and the crime rate. Giving prospective buyers a sense of what living in the area is like can add to your property’s appeal, as they’ll see it as the ideal base for their lifestyle.
4. Add Custom Maps to Your Listing
When looking at properties, most buyers pay attention to the time required to commute to schools, work, shops, and other destinations. To give buyers from out of town a better idea of your location relative to various amenities and attractions, it’s an excellent idea to add custom maps to your listing.
When creating your maps, highlight and label your home, schools, public transport links to airports, bus stops, highways, and subway stations, as well as malls, entertainment venues, local attractions, parks, restaurants, and places of worship.
5. Use Social Media to Market Your Property
Social media offers you the power to reach billions of people around the world, and you can use it to increase the chances of your target audience seeing your real estate listing. Start by thinking about the demographics of different platforms, so you know which ones to use, then create content that suits the buyer profile.
- Facebook has many users between the ages of 30 and 49, making it an excellent choice for real estate marketing. The platform allows you to post listings, interact with prospective buyers, and create open-house events.
- Instagram’s popularity among 18- to 29-year-olds makes it an excellent choice if you want your listing to reach first-time buyers. Showcase your property’s top features by posting short-form Instagram Reels and Stories.
- YouTube is a great platform for posting search engine-optimized content for a wide age demographic, and it’s ideally suited to longer video walk-throughs or virtual tours of your house and garden.
6. Increase Discoverability with Geotags
Using geotags to tag your location in your posts makes it easier for potential buyers who are searching for property in your area to find you. Ensure you include a neighborhood or city tag in your property and open house event listings, as well as in other related content on Facebook and Instagram.
To boost visibility, you can also geotag your YouTube property videos by including the city and neighborhood names in the title, description, and captions. You should also add relevant hashtags that highlight the location and key features of the home. This helps your video show up in search results and recommendations for people actively looking for real estate in that area.
6. Work with an Experienced Real Estate Agent
Choosing a real estate agent with experience in working with out-of-town buyers can make all the difference. These agents understand what remote buyers are looking for, from detailed property descriptions to strong visual content and flexible viewing options.
They can also guide you in tailoring your listing to appeal to a broader audience, offer insights into buyer behavior, and develop a marketing strategy that includes targeted online advertising and outreach across key platforms.
7. Be Flexible with Viewing Options
If you’ve marketed your property well, there’s a good chance some prospective buyers will be willing to travel to see it in person. Since out-of-town buyers may be working around tight schedules or long distances, flexibility is key. Offer a range of viewing options, such as private showings for those who can visit, or live video walkthroughs for those who can’t. You can also arrange a video call using a webcam to answer questions face-to-face and give a more personal, real-time experience of the property.
Being accommodating not only makes it easier for serious buyers to explore your home, but it also shows that you’re proactive and easy to work with, which builds trust and can help move the sale forward.
Pitch Your Home to Sell It
Buyers in other towns or regions don’t have the benefit of being able to view property in person or take a drive around different neighborhoods, so they’re understandably cautious about buying houses they’ve only seen online.
By taking the right approach in your listings and marketing efforts, you can help them see your property not so much as your home but as theirs. Giving them a sense of life in the area and clearing up any concerns they might have will encourage them to imagine what their lives would be like if they lived there, resulting in genuine interest that could lead to that all-important sale.
