A little advice to property marketers from Josh Flagg, LA real estate wunderkind and star of Bravo TV’s Million Dollar Listing. As posted on JoshFlagg.com:

The way I market homes is like marketing products.

I get prospects to fall in love with a property on the smartphone’s screen first, which creates the desire for people to see it in person. By creating a demand for each house as its own unique property, I make the desire for the house irresistible. As people see the listings appear on social media, they see that the open house is like a social event that entices them to want to go socialize and potentially get the house of their dreams. Each house is marketed individually.

Mastering Direct Mail
A lot of people (including myself) feel that direct mail is a waste of time for most agents. However, I’ve mastered it over the past decade. The key to direct mail is repetition. The problem is that most agents don’t have the spending power to compete. I don’t just send a mailer each time I sell a home, I send them repeatedly to the same locations. In fact, my mailers go from the beach all the way to Los Feliz, twice per month. If you don’t have that kind of spending power, that’s fine…just make sure you pick a neighborhood and hit it over again and repeatedly. Don’t just send out a single mailer to the next location in which you sell a home. Sending a mailer once means nothing. You’re just throwing away money. People need to see repetition.

To LA Times or Not to LA Times… That is the Question!
A lot of my clients enjoy the physical process of reading the paper. A morning cup of coffee and a fresh copy of the LA Times start their days like clockwork. Since this is still true (even in 2018) I place a lot of ads which have a high success rate.

I differ from most people advertising in the LA Times in that I make the most of each ad. I get the double page, full-color ad, which is 99% of the time the most visually attractive thing in the paper. People’s eyes naturally fall on that page, and that insures that my ads get seen!

And then there is the argument regarding if people even look at the LA Times anymore and if advertising there pays. The answer is no one really knows, but I’m willing to take the chance!

Virtual Video Tours/Social Media/ Digital Technology
There is not enough time or manpower to feature every single client’s house on Million Dollar Listing. In order to make the most of each listing, I create exciting virtual tours for properties that I share on major platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube.

I even have my own Flaggship Studios where we have high-quality equipment and talented creatives to help produce videos. We then share them all over the Internet and to be viewed by the ideal buyer for the property. We make actual movies about our properties rather than plain old-fashioned virtual tours. We make real, actual films. Very few people go to the time and lengths that I do to make these movies, which I really believe showcase the home in a new light.

Social Media Advertising
One of the biggest sources for traction is through sophisticated ad platforms on Facebook and Instagram. Showing off these pristine houses gets a lot of attention to casual social media users.

I also have a highly dedicated and talented team that works with me to target ads to people with behaviors and interests that are in alignment with the types of clientele who can afford premium properties in places such as Beverly Hills. We create fun videos, capture email addresses of buyers, and then follow up with them to schedule in-person tours to view your property.

I spend thousands of dollars in marketing for each property, which insures that each home is seen. This also extends into our email marketing campaigns, which are highly effective at marketing the homes that I’m listing. We invest hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on advertising our brand online as well. For instance, sometimes you will see a Josh Flagg advertisement pop up on Facebook because anytime someone goes to JoshFlagg.com the website captures this person’s email address and remembers this person. That way, a few months later, this person may see a Josh Flagg advertisement pop up casually. 
We also spend tons of marketing on SEO so that whenever someone googles ‘top real estate agent’, my name comes up at the top of the list. This is also very helpful for agents to know. Spending money like this will be very useful for you. There is such thing as spending a lot of money, but there is also such thing as wasting a lot of money, and this is money well-spent.

Email Marketing
One of the most important things for any business to focus on is growing his or her email list. It makes it so much easier to reach out and connect with thousands of people in just a few minutes a day. I’ve learned some of the savviest marketing techniques from the best online marketers in the world. In fact, I have over 50,000 emails of clients, partners, developers, and luxury real estate agents around the world. So when I have a listing, I work hard to make sure that people will see it.

Blogging
In addition to being able to blast an email out to 50,000 people, I also regularly blog. While I most likely won’t be blogging about your home specifically, I use my blog as a source for driving traction, and getting more eyeballs on my website. Additionally, I have a dedicated following of readers who read my blogs every time that I post. I share content that educates prospects all over the world. This helps people understand my perspectives, strategies, and gets them excited to work with me (and buy from me).

My Luxury Website
My website gets hundreds of thousands of visitors every year. We have measured that it is the second most visited private real estate agent website in the world, with 97,000-107,000 hits a month on average. What does this mean? Of all the agent websites in the world more people go to JoshFlagg.com than almost anywhere else. 

In terms of international marketing, the website cannot be beat! Our largest markets are the United States, China, Japan, England, Canada and Russia. We haven’t gotten North Korea yet but we will!

During the times when the show is on-air, my name and website gets Googled at very high rates, which is great for exposure for a seller’s home. This means that thousands of people will see the property. I showcase a property on various sections on my website, so as buyers are “shopping” they see this prospective property.

My website is state-of-the-art, which increases the amount of time that people spend on the site, which is always a selling point that I share with my clients. Especially if their listing has been on the site for a few weeks, I can reassure them that it will get seen because of the advanced capabilities of my site. I use only the best resources and tools to track where people click, what pages they spend the most time on, and how they interact with the site itself. I have a team of excellent marketers behind me that can tweak my copywriting, website design, and site usability to make sure that I’m optimizing my conversions.

All of this combined makes my website an ideal place for buyers to find properties.

As a real estate agent, I always tell people to put their marketing dollars here! Your website is the first impression people Googling top local agents will have of you. And if your site is not impressive, too confusing, or not engaging, people are going to skip and go onto the next.