Tina Haisman needed to stand out.
Her family’s home at 11471 Persimmon Court had been on the market for three months and had been shown to about 10 prospective buyers with little fanfare.
“We’ve had people come to look at our house two and three and four times and tell us they loved it but they would go back to Canada or something and say ‘Oh, we’ll be back in a month,’ ” Haisman said.
Haisman, 37, her husband Paul and their two young children moved to the Chicago area for Paul’s information technology job. The family became frustrated with the failed attempts to sell their 2,280-square foot, four-bedroom home, which is located in Gateway and listed for sale at $269,900.
“The problem is there are so many homes,” Haisman said. “People have plenty of time to search and that sense of urgency that used to be there when you were shopping for a home – that you better make a bid on it if you want it or you’ll lose it – that sense of urgency is not there.”
So Haisman, owner of Tina Haisman Public Relations, did what any PR pro would do. She began strategizing ways to draw attention to the 19-year-old dwelling.
To help them come up with a marketing idea, Haisman and her husband decided to first create a list of what they liked about their home – a brainstorming technique some real estate agents suggest to sellers prior to showing a property.
Paul typed up his ideas and e-mailed his version of the list to his wife. When she read his top 10 selling points, Haisman completely disagreed with her husband on the home’s best features.
“As I was reading it I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. I would change half the things on here.’ It was not what I thought at all,” she said.
The couple realized how differently men and women sometimes view a home’s attributes and decided to each create their own top 10 list. Whereas stellar landscaping, a split floor plan and vaulted ceilings made the cut for Haisman, her husband focused on technical aspects such as the new roof, cable wiring and hurricane panels.
“My top 10 list is more about the beauty of the home,” Haisman said. “My husband’s list is more of the functional, practical, manly man’s list. I don’t think a woman would care as much that you get free hot water from the air conditioning as a guy would.”
The real estate agent the Haismans were working with at the time posted their dueling top 10 lists to their home listing on Realtor.com. The agent created a flier about the husband and wife’s selling points for the home and e-mailed it to agents on the Lee County Multiple Listing Service. Several local agents applauded the creativity and asked if they could use the husband-wife list idea with their clients.
Haisman then sent press releases to news outlets near Boston, Minneapolis, Detroit, Chicago and Columbus, Ohio – areas traditionally home to Southwest Florida snowbirds.
The day she sent the release, 30 people viewed Haisman’s home listing on Realtor.com. More than 70 people interacted with the media release – meaning they saved it to their computers, printed it or clicked on links within it. It received approximately 40,000 headline impressions, or the number of times people viewed pages that included the headline for the release.
In addition, Haisman – who was reading Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” at the time, which discusses, among other things, the importance of storytelling in business and marketing – created a blog in an attempt to create a personality for the home she and her family lived in for nine years. On her blog, Haisman posted home photos and has written about everything from winds the home withstood during hurricanes Charley and Wilma to the fun of neighborhood block parties on Persimmon Court.
“I wanted to tell the stories so maybe people can envision their family living there and creating their own memories,” she said.
The mother and public relations professional tweets about her home and blog, posts information about it on Facebook and has asked some friends to post the information on their Facebook pages as well.
Marla Martin, spokeswoman for the Florida Association of Realtors, called the Haisman top 10 lists “very creative” and she said she hadn’t heard of that tactic before. Still, Martin said she is not surprised by the family’s marketing efforts.
“During the boom years, you almost didn’t have to do anything because the homes were moving so fast,” she said. “Now, our members report lots of creative things for sellers.”
Those efforts include holding signs along roadways to promote open houses and an increased use of social media sites and YouTube videos to advertise homes on the market. Sunni Hammermeister of Sellstate Realty Systems Network, who signed on as agent for the Haismans last week, has even seen people offer cars and boats with the sale of their home.
As they continue to aggressively market the home on Persimmon Court, Hammermeister said it has a good chance of finding the right buyer. Haisman, who plans to create a second media release soon, also remains optimistic.
“Hopefully, these things will help us stand out,” she said of her PR efforts. “We’re trying to be positive in this economy and proactive and take action instead of just complaining about how horrible things are.”