Mike Gardner isn’t going to bother making a stand-alone site for one of his listings. All he needs for the luxury Malibu, Calif., mobile home, he said, is a Pinterest board.
“My marketing campaign now is to pay for ads on Facebook and Google and point them to this site,” he said. “I’ve decided to skip the traditional property site, as people seem far more interested in sharing this.”
Gardner recently created a Pinterest board brimming with exquisite photos of one of his listings. He said the board — which won out among last week’s #madREskillz entries — sparked two showing requests “within three minutes” after he posted it on Facebook.
And less than two weeks after he produced it, he said he is drafting an offer and has averaged a showing every other day.
Gardner originally decided to create the Pinterest board after observing how active his wife and her friends are on the image-driven social media site.
“I shoot professionally and knew that if I took some magazine-style shots and mixed them with wide-angle shots, I could create a ‘board’ that people would want to share,” he said.
Gardner chose to add a mix of wide-angle and vertical shots to the board, allowing him to showcase both the home’s intricate details as well as its space and surroundings. To do so, he used a digital single-lens reflex camera with a wide-angle lens and two flashes for the expansive shots, and a Samsung Galaxy S3 for “the detail shots … done in a style like what you’d see in a magazine.”
Gardner admitted that Pinterest isn’t necessarily the holy grail of marketing tools for all properties. A home probably needs to have impressive details that are worth spotlighting, he said.
But for those listings that boast some striking features, Pinterest can deliver some serious bang for your buck, he said. The boards are a breeze to create, not to mention free, he said.
And for his mobile home listing, it cost him just $6 worth of promotion on Facebook to garner 75 followers, generate a number of showings, and even attract an offer.
“This was even a lesson for me as a photographer to start thinking more about the details of the home,” he said.
Contact people mentioned in this story: Mike Gardner
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