You’re reading this because as a potential seller of a property in San Miguel de Allende, you are trying to decide who you should list your property with. We know you have options, so we’re sharing this information ) to help you understand why we believe you should list with us.
Let’s start out with a trick question.
We have some great Blockbuster
Video and Tower Records stock that we can sell you really cheap.
Are you interested? Of course not.
Why? Are people not renting movies or buying music anymore?
Sure we are, more so than ever.
But Blockbuster and Tower Records, who were industry leaders
just a few years ago, don’t even exist today because they did not adapt
and embrace the new technologies that would have better served their clients.
In the same way that technology has changed the way customers access movies and music, technology is rapidly changing the way real estate buyers are finding their homes. All of the facts below were from pre-covid statistics, and as you know, covid has only accelerated the shift to the internet.
How Does Realty Measure Up?
- Less than 1% of real estate buyers indicate they found their home via print advertising as compared to 24% in 2006. Yes you read that correctly. Less than 1%!
- Online Real estate related searches have grown 253% just in the last four years.
- 93% of home buyers search the internet to find their home as compared to only 63% in 2006.
- Realy San Miguel has been ranked #1 in Google since 2008!
- Realty San Miguel receives more website traffic than our top eight competitors combined.
- List your property with Realty San Miguel today and up to 1000 buyers will be notified of your listing tomorrow.
- RealtySanMiguel.com is the most visited website in San Miguel de Allende.
-
Realty’s Social Media receives more meaningful engagement than competitors.
- 11,000 combined followers
- 700,000 YouTube view
- Targeted Ad Placement
Technology has changed the real estate industry
In the same way that technology has changed the way customers access
movies and music, these trends represent huge changes in how buyers
shop for real estate and should be a priority to you as you choose who
represents the promotion of your property.
1. Realty San Miguel receives more website traffic than our top eight competitors
combined!
(Yes we know we advertise only seven, but since it is only an estimate of traffic,
we hedge a little in favor of our competitors.) Some may argue
this is not a fair comparison because of our webcam.
But our webcam only represents 6% of our total website traffic.
2. Realty’s Social Media Performance.
Realty San Miguel may not be first in the number of social media followers compared to our competitors,
however we believe that we receive much more meaningful engagement than anyone else
because we actually strategically post to produce results versus just throwing out links to our
properties for sale. We have over 11,000 followers and are active daily on Facebook via two different pages,
Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter, as well as YouTube, where our videos have had more than a
cumulative 700,000 views. We also regularly place targeted advertising within these formats,
which unfortunately is rarely visible to our sellers.
3. Realty’s Search Engine Ranking.
RealtySanMiguel.com has ranked number one for real estate searches in San Miguel for more than twelve years.
This isn’t by luck, it has been part of our strategic plan and requires continual work.
Google ranks sites based on over 100 different criteria and we continually invest in our web presence to
ensure that we maintain the number one position. Our site is designed for easy navigation on mobile devices,
which now represents over 38% of all traffic, is one of the few bilingual and secure socket layer’d real
estate
sites in San Miguel, not to mention is the fastest, most intuitive and user friendly of all our competitors.
4. RealtySanMiguel.com is the most visited website in San Miguel de Allende.
We’ve done exhaustive traffic comparisons to every site we can think of,
including tourism and government sites to see if someone else beats us, but they don’t.
In fact we have double the traffic of the second runner up which is not a real estate website.
5. Mailing Lists.
Although our numbers may not at first seem so impressive as compared to some of our competitors
who do have larger email lists and we believe ours is strategically designed to best serve our sellers.
Realty San Miguel has over 1000 subscribers to our daily Property Updates - our list that is created
when users click the “Notify Me Of Changes” button on our website.
These are not generic users who made an inquiry once and we have added them to
our email list without their permission. These are active clients who are searching for a property
and asked to be notified anytime there is a change within their search criteria.
As new buyers begin their property search they subscribe and then as they finalize a purchase they
tend to unsubscribe. So immediately after your property goes on our website, several hundred interested
buyers receive an email that includes your property, assuming your property is within their search criteria.
Every property we list goes out in these emails - not just a couple of select properties that look good
for a newsletter.
6. Print Advertising.
Frankly, the whole topic of print advertising is a frustrating issue for us. Several times a year
one of our agents competes for a listing and ends up losing it to a competitor because the seller
believed that Realty San Miguel doesn’t do enough advertising or doesn’t have the marketing reach
that a franchise has.
Those of you who have been around awhile may remember that Realty San Miguel got its start relying heavily on print advertising. We started first with one page, expanded to two pages, and soon thereafter three, then for more than three years we were running five pages of ads. We did this then because it produced direct results for our sellers. It does not today!
So why do we keep doing it? Yes we do gain some brand recognition, but frankly, we reluctantly do it for our sellers. Even though it produces little or no direct benefit to them, sellers love seeing their properties advertised and we’ve had a hard time convincing them that it’s a poor investment of advertising dollars.
Choosing an Agent.
Have you ever tried to book a vacation rental or purchase something online? Were you shocked by the lack
of response to your inquiry or responses received several days later? This same dynamic happens in all
industries, including real estate in San Miguel de Allende, and is known as the 80/20 rule.
Meaning that the 20% who are the most engaged generally do 80% of all of the sales.
When considering what to look for in a listing agent in San Miguel, it is essential to work with one who is actively involved in AMPI and who is one of the 20%. Today well over 90% of all San Miguel listings are co-broker sold, which means there is more than a 90% chance that the agent who lists your property will not be the agent who will bring the buyer. AMPI San Miguel is very well organized and has created several great networking tools to help listing agents sell their listings - but they are only useful to the extent that the listing agent is actually using and taking advantage of them on a daily basis.
We can proudly say that ALL of Realty San Miguel’s agents respond quickly to our web inquiries and maximize the use of the AMPI networking tools to help keep their seller’s listings in the forefront of the agents who are currently working with buyers.
We Know You Have Options.
Frankly we think the best decision for every seller would be to list with us.
However, we know that every seller in San Miguel is also friends with several real estate agents.
So if you feel compelled to list with another agency, at least choose an agent/agency who cooperates
with Realty San Miguel and allows us to put your listing on our site.
When you do, on average, your property will be viewed by well over 200 buyers a month directly on our website and our affiliate sites, and hundreds of interested buyers will receive an email notification when your property is listed and again if the price changes.
There are a couple of agencies who don’t allow us to put their properties on our site. From our point of view they are intentionally choosing to limit the exposure to your property.
Taxes And Legal Risks When Selling. Beyond listing your property with a company who can give your property extraordinary marketing exposure and choosing an agent who will work hard to promote your listing, there is a lot more involved in selling your property than you may think. In the past ten years laws governing capital gains, banking, international money movements, and escrow accounts have drastically changed and frankly are in a constant state of flux. Finding an agent who, from the beginning, understands these issues and can minimize if not eliminate your potential capital gains taxes, as well as manage your transaction in order to prevent red flags from being raised with some government agency, is crucial.
Realty San Miguel is good at protecting our sellers. We have assembled a diverse and extraordinary team of agents to serve you. Our international team includes four broker-owners, current and former business owners, a marketing expert, a lawyer, builder, accountant, banker and auditor. Contrary to seeing one another as competitors, our team collaborates with each other to best solve our client’s needs. Instead of having a designated “closing specialist,” we firmly believe that every agent should understand the issues at hand. If they don’t understand the issues themselves, how would they even know that there is an issue that needs to be passed off to a specialist? At Realty San Miguel, you don’t just acquire an agent, you avail yourself of a collective of experts.
One Question To Think About. If you were looking to purchase a home in another state or country, what would you do? Wouldn’t you be like the 93% of home buyers and also start your search online? You wouldn’t go to your local real estate agent to buy in another city, nor would you look in the Wall Street Journal or any other national magazine. If this is what you would personally do, wouldn’t you want to have your property for sale listed with the company who would come up number one in Google and give your property the maximum exposure via the internet and social media?
No one can give your property more exposure to new buyers than Realty San Miguel.
We’re Not A Franchise For A Reason. Three times in the last ten years we’ve been approached by, and twice seriously considered affiliating with a high end international real estate franchise, but in the end we felt like they offered us and our clients way more clouds than they did actual rain. To have so many resources, we felt that their views on technology seemed to be little more than following the crowd and lacked strategic planning and investment in how real estate will evolve in the future. To join them felt a little like being offered an investment in Blockbuster in 2008. Not only did they not appreciate or understand what we have accomplished technology wise, the last one we considered actually wanted us to undo much that we have accomplished and be limited to their outdated digital formats. Obviously, we would rather be moving towards affiliating with a Netflix than a Blockbuster and chose to continue our own progressive approach believing that this is what will best serve our clients now and in the future.
Contact Us
If you are interested in selling your home, we would be honored to meet with you to evaluate your home and
your tax exposure without obligation.
Click here to contact us today!
