This Week's Poll Is Up

Although a little late this week, the weekly poll is finally up and ready. To cast your vote, simply direct your mouse to the upper left hand section of the blog and click away.

This week's topic is home magazines - you know the ones that you get for free at Kroger and Food City? Home sellers certainly want their homes advertised in them and Realtors definitely spend a lot of money to do so , but in this day and age, when everyone and their mother has an online home search, are they still effective, and if so, who do you think they benefit?

And out of curiosity, have any of you out there actually either a) found a home you wound up buying in one of these books, or b) sold your home as a direct result of an advertisement in one? If so, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Link Round-Up: Creative Home Marketing Edition

How do you make your house stand out from the crowd when your market is flooded with properties?

1. Have an essay contest. [KNS]
2. Sell raffle tickets. [cbsnews]
3. Don't just sell your house. Sell your life. [Chicago Tribune]
4. Make your purchase price to die for. [Post-Gazette]

Property Marketing, East Tennessee Style

All you non-Realtor types out there probably don't know about MLS E-Flyers. The concept is simple: instead of sending out 100s of paper flyers to agents all over Knoxville to market new listings or price reductions, you pay some money to an online service like MLSflyers.com, make an E-flyer and send it out to every member of the Knoxville Area Association of Realtors. Yes, it's kind of spam, but a) it only spams Realtors, b) it sells houses and c) it saves trees, so we deal with it.

So, one of my first tasks of the day is to click through these flyers that have accumulated in my inbox overnight. Usually they are pretty standard. Occasionally they here unintentionally hilarious. Here is a headline from an E-Flyer I opened up this morning:

SELLER WILL GIVE BUYER A $1000 WALMART GIFTCARD AND ONE YEAR SATELLITE TV!!!

Not mentioned in the flyer, but perhaps easy enough to guess is that this "home" is also very portable: