What are the best practices for choosing and creating an effective open house flyer or a property listing flyer for your real estate agents?

With the glut of free downloadable templates available to lenders and real estate agents online, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by choices. Do you pay for professional flyers? How do you choose among the different free options?

First, design it to your liking.

When evaluating a real estate property flyer system for your agents, make sure there are multiple layouts and color options to choose from. Often free downloadable templates force you into choosing from a smaller number of templates with limited color options.

Keep it simple.

Don’t overload the homebuyer with too much information and graphics. The goal is to communicate the property’s main features and affordability by customizing your rates and products for that specific property. Get your message across in a clear and concise manner and offer useful information (for example, interactive payment and affordability calculations). Make sure you’re displaying enough information to entice the prospective buyer — and nothing more.
Keep it dynamic.

Select a property flyer system that generates the flyer dynamically – from the MLS – instead of using a simple downloadable template that requires you to keystroke property information. Not only will you avoid errors, typos and potential compliance issues, you’ll be able to build it faster with drag and drop features instead of fill-in-the-blanks.

Write attractive titles.

Share information in the header that will be sure to draw immediate interest. This website compiled a large list of headlines by topic. Don’t be afraid to get creative and break the mold.

Select the best imagery – just don’t go overboard.

If the headline is the key to igniting interest, the visual is the key to sales. Select the most appealing component of the house. The front of the house may be beautiful, but what about the unique features of the home, like the split-level deck or the fireplace?

Affordability is everything.

Prospects can’t be buyers if they can’t afford the house. Make your specialty financing and property-specific payment information visible from the get-go. Using interactive rate calculators in the property flyer and the MLS listing will weed out buyers early that cannot afford the house, or attract new buyers that were unaware of special financing offers.

Make it accessible.

Every real estate agent has no cost access to RatePlug’s dynamic property flyer system – when you connect with your agents on RatePlug, generating open house property flyers from their MLS listings is easy.  RatePlug is the leading mortgage marketing platform for lenders – now offers real estate property flyer templates for agents through the RatePlug Agent Dashboard – which is available in more than 70  MLS networks. The RatePlug Agent Dashboard is available at no-additional cost to agents as part of their current MLS membership.