Do You Think Floor Plans are Important for Advertising?
Our 2020 realMLS President, Mario Gonzalez, gives valuable insight on why having floor plans on listings is helpful with advertising.
Floor plans have been the backbone of New Construction homes for decades. I don’t know of anyone that has ever had a home built without consulting a floor plan first. So why is it that the normal “re-sale” housing market doesn’t use them? If the answer revolves around “availability”, “cost”, “speed of production”, or anything like that…things have just changed with FlōPlan coming to realMLS. So you had better catch up!
As the former President of the realMLS Board, I had the privilege of being in the early planning phases of bringing FlōPlan to our 10,000 plus members. Now for full transparency, I wasn’t sure how the adoption rate would go, starting with myself. For more brutal honesty, it took me almost 2 months to even attempt to use the extremely easy to use App and attempt my first one. It took me 2 minutes to watch the video on how to do it and about 5 minutes to perform my first recording with my own cell phone. Then, magically, I hit a single button and the next day the final product ended up in my inbox! Well, I have to say I was “impressed” to say the least.
To test the theory, I posted a photo of the floor plan and the home below on social media and just asked the question: “How important do you think floor plans are for advertising purposes?” To say I was “blown away” by the responses would be an understatement. 188 comments later (yeah, that was more comments than Happy Birthday wishes I received on Facebook) I was a believer in the power of this simple tool. We will be adding it to our sales (even in this market).
Additionally, we will be adding it to our rental homes to allow folks to better understand the space before wasting time on a showing appointment. We have no doubt it will be a game-changer in the property management space and will also help us stand out amongst the crowd in the sales arena. So my advice to you…DON’T DO IT…just kidding. That would be selfish. Give it a shot. See how ridiculously easy it is and see the feedback you will get. I bet you will be as surprised as I was.
Lastly, I would like to thank the realMLS staff and Board for making this available to all of our members. I have had feedback from agents outside our area that are asking me “how do I get that in my MLS?” So be thankful you have it here. I would also like to thank realMLS for subsidizing some of the cost of this amazing feature and allowing us this amazing tool for a reduced price of $12.00 per floor plan.
I too was skeptical in using this product but decided to give it a try. Yes only the time it takes you to roam from room to room is all it takes to record the floor plan and voila… in 24 hrs you have it, it posts automatically to your listing too. I highly recommend using this tool on all listings. The USA is the only country that has less than 5% of all resale listings without floor plans. The only drawback is no measurements are provided. That would be an improvement (most likely very costly) that I would like to see added to the system.
Kathleen Floryan, Broker Associate, eXp Realty LLC