3 Ways to Market Your Real Estate Listings Online in Canada
This post was updated on 09/05/2017
Question: once your new listings are live on the MLS, do you share them…
On your website? In a Facebook group? Via your newsletter?
If you answered yes, yes and yes, then you’re on the right track.
To drive even more traffic to your listings, we’ve got three different ideas for how and where to share them.
Craigslist
You’ve probably sold the odd household item on Craigslist. Or maybe you’ve looked around for sold out concert tickets.
But have you ever tried using the popular classifieds site for your listings?
Craigslist receives more than 50 billion page views per month! That’s an insane amount of traffic that could potentially land on your Craigslist post.
To promote your listing on Craigslist:
- Create an ad within the Housing > Real Estate for Sale and/or Services > Real Estate Services sections
- Come up with a catchy post title. Ex: “First-time buyers: your Toronto dream home is here”
- Add details from your listing, rewritten in a more casual, conversational tone
- Skip the real estate jargon
- Use lots of short paragraphs to improve readability
- Add your best photos
- Link to your real estate agent website
If you’re not seeing results, edit your post’s title, or take it down and repost it with different images and text.
Kijiji
Craigslist’s competitor is no slouch. More than one out of every three Canadians visits the site daily.
The benefit of Kijiji over Craigslist: it offers marketplaces for smaller regions that tend to be quite active. If you’re working outside of a big urban market, this could be a win for you. Real estate ads on Kijiji also have a slightly more polished appearance than on Craigslist.
The process of posting to Kijiji is nearly identical to that of Craigslist. The categories you’ll choose from are:
- Real estate > for sale: houses for sale
- Real estate > for sale: condos for sale
- Real estate > for sale: land for sale
- Real estate other: real estate services
Live Video
Live video streams are the latest and greatest in social media. Both Facebook Live and Instagram Live are attracting millions upon millions of views each day and driving major engagement and interaction.
Plus, to encourage the most traffic to each of these tools, Facebook and Instagram are pushing these streams to the tops of users’ feeds and notifying them when an account goes live.
Take advantage of that buzz by using Facebook Live and Instagram Live to share your listings!
Here’s how:
- Promote your live stream at least a day in advance, by announcing to your followers on Facebook and Instagram that you’ll be unveiling a new listing. To hook your followers, offer some sort of enticing messaging. Ex. “First-time buyers in Toronto, do I ever have something great to show you…”
- Go to the property to film your live video, so you can provide peeks at the home’s details. A video of you at your office is much less exciting
- Keep it short and sweet. Aim for five minutes or less
- Always, always include the link to your listing. On Instagram, tell your viewers that they can click your username to find the listing link in your bio. On Facebook, tell your audience that you’ll be posting the link in the comments below. After your Live video has ended, you can edit the video description to include the link
What other online channels do you use to promote your listings? Chime in below!
Last Updated on May 3, 2024 by myRealPage
