When we were down in Adelaide visiting Tamara’s family I had a look through the real estate section of their newspaper and I thought that it was very interesting how they advertised some of the houses. Instead of having actual photos of the house they instead used an artists rendition of the house (like the one bellow).

I found this curious because it really tells you almost nothing about the house, other then how the artist thinks it should look. In my previous two posts I wrote a bit about how you can word a house advertisement to give a different perspective on it, but this is a way to back that up with an image as well.

Most of these ads that I looked at on-line tonight include no actual photos of the houses, only artists renditions of the facade and then usually a drawing of the house plans and maybe the house lot.

queenslander

Originally uploaded by cringe.

Here is a great example for my last post about What the Real Estate Ads Really Mean.

This is the sort of house that would be advertised as a “fixer upper with character” in a “nice neighbourhood”, as you can see that the house next to it isn’t so bad…

We’ve all read the ads that say “Needs a little TLC” and “A Great Fixer Upper”. If we’ve been looking at houses for a while we know that really means “Floors, walls and all wet areas need renovating” and “May need significant structural work to avoid being condemned”. That may be a slight exageration, but we all know that it’s not far from the truth.

When we were looking around for our first house we got sucked into a lot of those sort of homes. Thankfully wisdom prevailed and we didn’t actually purchase one of those homes. We ended up moving into a suburb about a 15-minute walk away from my work into a house that needed a bit of cosmetic work, but nothing too major.

Below is actually a pretty good article about what real estate agents do to sell their own homes, as opposed to someone elses home. It also talks a bit about what words to use in writing ads for selling your home, and what words to avoid…

• Wired Magazine: Cracking the Real Estate Code

I came across an interesting ad on my web-site the other day. Someone was actually using Google AdSense to sell a house.

I think that this is an interesting way to sell a house and I wonder if the person was successful in selling it. There probably wasn’t much use showing it to me, since I am in Townsville, so I really have to wonder if it was a successful campaign or not.