The Purpose of Advertising in General

Every home seller likes to be assured that their listing agent or the real estate company will run ads featuring their home. Newspaper ads could be large display ads with lots of listings or small classified ads featuring just your property. Ads may also appear in local real estate magazines and, most importantly, on the Internet.

Of course the agents and companies will run ads featuring your house, but not for the reasons you expect.

You see, the main job of advertising is not to sell your house directly. Advertising creates emails and phone call inquiries. Some of those callers become clients of the agents answering the calls. This builds up a pool of homebuyers looking for property in general, all represented by real estate agents. Multiply this by all the agents and companies who also advertise homes, and this creates a large pool of home buyers in the market at any given time – all of whom are represented by local real estate agents.

The agents representing those home buyers should know about your home because it is listed in the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and has had a broker open house or flyers sent to all the local real estate offices.

The agents match up their clients with appropriate available homes, one of which may be yours. Then they show the homes to their clients, who eventually make an offer.  That is how your house gets sold.

In recap, ads create a pool of clients, one of which buys your home. Ads do not usually sell your house directly.