Matt Kellam, broker/owner of Help-U-Sell Keystone Realty in Chambersburg, Penn., takes a two-pronged approach to serving his clients and marketing their homes: tried-and-true basics and modern technology.
He opened his office in May 2005 and has learned a lot in the years since. “The basic Help-U-Sell system works,” he says. “Don’t try to fix something that’s not broken.”
One exception: He prefers to host open houses himself in order to capture buyer leads.
Personal contact is important to Kellam. He makes a point of keeping in touch with clients, past, present and future and encourages new Help-U-Sell brokers to do the same. “Be sure to be accessible to buyers and sellers,” he says. One of the benefits of running small office is that people can reach him directly on any given day. He’s also planning to put more energy into staying connected to previous clients and centers of influence this year.
For Kellam, the personal touch leads the way in client relations, but the Internet rules when it comes to property marketing. When he started out, he followed everyone else into print advertising, soon realizing that online was where his office needed to focus. Now, he’s creating video tours to help his sellers attract buyers. Having spent 20 years in radio, he says, “multimedia doesn’t faze me.”
Kellam films each house with a Sony Cyber-shot camera and uses Windows Movie Maker to edit the video. He records the audio separately using a headset and then adds the audio track to the video. He uploads the videos on YouTube and links to them on his site under the Virtual Tours tab on the property pages. One of his recent property videos shows both the exterior and interior and gives information about recent remodeling, last year’s property taxes and room dimensions.
He’s planning to phase out static virtual tours in the near future.
How do you use video in your marketing mix?