Improve Your Listings With These Apps and Tools

Nothing is more important than your listings. They’re your single-biggest marketing tool as a real estate agent — not to mention your first impression with buyers.

And while a vivid description and stellar listing photos are a great start, they’re often not enough for today’s digitally-savvy homebuyers — particularly those buying from afar. 

If you want to impress this cohort of the real estate market — or just better market your properties in general, then your listings need to go a bit further than that.

Fortunately, adding that extra wow factor doesn’t take a lot of work. Thanks to a few handy technologies, you can easily stage a home, map out its floor plan, or even create entire websites dedicated to a property that will be sure to wow any potential buyer — all in a matter of minutes.

Do you want to improve your listings and help your sellers fetch top-dollar for their homes? These apps and tools can help you do it.

1. Box Brownie, for virtual staging

Staging a home can do wonders for a listing. And according to most real estate agents, it brings in more cash, too (anywhere from 1% to 20% extra, a National Association of REALTORS® report says). The only problem? Staging isn’t easy. It takes time, effort, and investment — and many times, you’d need a pro to really make an impact. 

Enter virtual staging, which lets you add decor, furnishings, paint, and more digitally — directly to your property listing photos. In short? It gives your listing that polished, pulled-together look without any real work. 

Box Brownie is one of the many digital marketing tools that offer virtual staging (among other services). Padstyler and roOomy are options, too. 

2. Floorplanner, for digital floor plans

Every listing should have a detailed floor plan these days. Floor plans allow any potential client to evaluate a home’s space, assess whether it will fit their needs (or their furniture), and get a feel for the overall layout of the property.

With Floorplanner, you can create both 2D and 3D floor plans that are fully interactive. You can even add in furniture and other details for scope. Other floor planning tools include Roomsketcher and Smart Draw.

3. Animoto, for video tours and marketing videos

Video tours are an incredibly valuable real estate marketing tool, especially with younger buyers — or those looking to buy from far away. While you could hire a professional videographer to make one for you, that will usually cost hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars.

Animoto is a more budget-friendly option. The drag-and-drop editor lets you create slick videos all on your own — no pro necessary. There’s even a free music library you can use. Other video tools you might consider include Vimeo Create and Movavi. Professional marketing videos are a great lead generation tool and addition to your real estate website, Facebook, or other social media.

4. Matterport, for virtual walkthroughs

This one’s a unique tool that combines video tours with floor plans. It essentially lets you create a virtual walkthrough of sorts. Buyers can then navigate throughout the home digitally, exploring room by room and zooming in on anything they find interesting. It’s a great way to make your listing a bit more interactive.

5. Wix, for building property websites

Listing sites only allow for so much detail — and they’re not very attractive either. If you really want to give a buyer a detailed look at a property, you might consider creating a dedicated web page for it, too. You can add photo galleries, videos, tours, and more, and really go into detail with your room-by-room descriptions. The more real estate clients can learn about your property online, the more interested they will be in potentially purchasing the home.

Wix is one tool you can use to create these pages. The free real estate website builder lets you easily put together a polished, professional-looking site with just a few clicks. You can even create a customized domain name for the property. SquareSpace and Duda are other tools you might consider using.

6. ShowingTime, for scheduling showings

Adding a showing scheduler to your listings is always wise. It makes things easier on the buyer, and it’s a great way to bring in leads, too. There are lots of tools that help you do this, including Showing Suite and Instashowing, but ShowingTime is the gold standard in the real estate business. It even works directly with MLSs to make scheduling super simple. 

7. Boost, for fielding questions

You can’t always be on hand to answer questions or field calls from a potential homebuyer. But a chatbot? They can — 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Tools like Boost let you create handy, interactive chatbots to work with any prospective buyer when you’re not able to. You can have the bot field questions about listings, collect information, schedule appointments, and more. Other similar tools include Mobile Monkey and Convoboss.

Take your listings to the next level

In today’s hot market, sight-unseen offers have grown more common, and using every tool available is important as a real estate professional. Beefing up your listings with videos, walkthroughs, floor plans, social media marketing, and built-in schedulers can be a great way to capture this audience and instill more confidence.

Want more help boosting your business? Try these handy marketing ideas or consider choosing a niche.