Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Bandits!

When I first read about bandit signs I couldn’t get an idea of what they were. Imagine a normal family, in Italy, that wants to get familiar on how you invest in real estate in the US and buys two dozen books, all from apparently reputable authors. And then this thing about bandits signs comes up. And it can’t be just a printing error because author after author keeps mentioning them.
It took me a solid week to figure out what they were and probably another month to understand why on Earth would you use them and where the name came from. They are basically a form of curb advertising that is free (except for the cost of the signs and of placing them) and that can be against local city regulation, although they are very much tolerated in many places.

Me, Alex and Stefano turned into bandits with our bandit signs!

One trick about using them , as I found out, is to place them on Friday evening and get them back on Sunday night: then nobody complains. But who could imagine I would have been using them myself? They are very far from the advertising methods we use in Europe, they simply don’t exist there. Usually, when you sell a house in Italy, you are allowed to put a sign on the side of the very building and that is pretty much it. When the building is an apartment complex, as it is often the case in big towns, then you can often see several signs posted one next to the other on the side or at the entrance of the building, and they need to be a standard size, they look pretty much the same and, let me say it, they just don’t work. An alternative is to see behind the shop window of an Italian Realtor’s office.

Italian "bandit signs" placed on the side of the building that contains the apartements for sale -courtesy of splinder.com.

For example, when I sold my house in Milan, in May 2008, just before coming to the US, we used the side signs and we used local Realtors and none of them worked. We had all kind of people walking in the house to visit and nothing happened. Then we turned to the Internet and started to promote our apartment using also flyers and voilà we had the house sold in a few weeks. And it was sold to an Italian family who lived in France (Versailles) and had to return to Italy for work. So even before coming here I was well cognizant that the modern marketing techniques used in the US real estate market are superior and can be effective everywhere.

The Salvation Army Store, saved me by providing inexpensive furniture to "dress up" the house before the action.

In the current one week campaign I am preparing, I am using Internet ads (Craigslist, Backpage, Kijiji) flyers (see the Web page that looks like a flyer http://www.clearwaterhouseauction.com/, and bandit signs. The bandit signs get placed right before the auction on the intersections in a radius of 1 mile or more leading to the house and they have the purpose to alert the neighborhood and the passing traffic that there is a house for sale by the owner and that it is a good deal.

A rapid tour inside the Salvation Army store looking for something nice.

Today I have bought the materials to build my signs so to be ready for next Friday. I have also toured the closest Salvation Army store to get some inexpensive furniture to dress the house up a little bit.

My car is fully loaded and I am ready to go!

It is quite an adventure and such a change from the marketing style used conventionally for selling houses in Europe. My kids are having fun too. Alex and Stefano became instantly bandits, with their sign in full display.

Roberto Mazzoni