Posted By Justin Razmus on Aug 9, 2012 | 4 comments

Before you say I’m crazy, let me tell you that I have done this two different times, and probably will do it again. And both of those weekends I had well over 500 people walk through the property I was marketing. Let me tell you the story. Even if this idea won’t work for you I sure hope that it sparks some great ideas.

(Click here for a free Ebook I wrote on selling more real estate fast)

How I Got a Huge Crowd of People Into My Listings.

It was a few years back that I did this. At the time I was flipping a couple of houses. One of them was listed, and the other was in the construction phase. Oddly enough they were only about two blocks away from each other, although that really makes no difference to this story. Sometimes I ramble… Anyway, I was having lunch with I guy who’s house I had listed. We’d meet up from time to time and kick business ideas around. That’s what people like me do for fun! So I told him about the projects I was working on, the two houses I was flipping. We talked for awhile, and he started telling me about a couple things he had going on.

Him and a couple of partners started a company that handled estate sales for people. They would go in and help appraise the items in the house, set everything up, and then handle the marketing to get people to show up on the day of the sale. Then he said something that made me start thinking…

He mentioned that usually when the sale is done they buy whatever is left over for a package price, and just put it into storage. They were selling a lot of it on Craigslist and Ebay and then just meeting the people at the storage unit when they wanted to pick it up. So I asked him if he would like a place to set up all of his stuff where he could have a big sale. He thought about it for a minute, and of course he said yes. I had two completely vacant houses in a nice neighborhood that I wanted people to see. He had a ton of estate items in storage that he needed to put someplace for people to see.

About a week later he brought over a huge trailer of estate items and set them up all through the house. They put items in every single room. They used some antique furniture they had to stage most of the rooms. The house actually looked really cool. I printed up 200 brochures with information about the house for them to hand out. My friend told me to be ready Saturday morning because there would be a line of people just waiting to get in. And holy shit, I got there at 6am Saturday morning (it was scheduled to start at 6:30) and there had already be at least 30 people waiting to get in.

One of the guys that ran the sale stood at the door and handed one of my brochures to each person as they walked in and let them know that everything in the house was for sale, and the house itself was also. He also had one of those “counters” where you press the button each time a person comes in so you can keep track of how many showed up. I thought that was a great idea. Well, day one wasn’t even complete before all 200 of my brochures had been handed.

By the time the weekend had wrapped up, nearly 600 had been through the house. 400 brochures had been handed out. I had about 20 calls in the next few days. My first question to him was “When can you do this at my other house?”

This is just a great example of thinking outside the box. It’s also a great example of partnering with someone else in a different industry to achieve results that benefit both of you. Even though this idea won’t work for every property, it should really get those wheels turning in your head. There has to be thousands of other ways to cross promote one of your listings to get people through it. Let me know if you have tried anything that has worked well for you. The crazier the idea, the more I want to hear about it.

(Click here for a free Ebook I wrote on selling more real estate fast)