When you are ready to sell, how will you advertise it?

A sign in the yard won't give you much exposure.

Newspaper listings can become very expensive, depending on your locale.

For example, I renovate houses in Nashville and Huntsville. Nashville has 1.25 million population in the surrounding area, while Huntsville has about 360,000. But the difference in newspaper classified costs is 3 - 4 times as much for Nashville.

Thrifty Nickel (American Classifieds) and other weeklies are much cheaper, but I get very little response from these ads.

Short, pungent 3-4 line ads are adequate in most classifieds, although I have run picture ads with a digital reproduction which got lots of attention.

However, even the real estate agents I know tell me that they generally get very little newspaper response which convert to sales.

So, how do you get good exposure?

You can't fly an airplane banner or a hot air balloon over the city. A megaphone won't cut it.

I have found that signs in the area and even all over town are my best source of advertising.

Of course, you often run into codes prohibitions of signs. Sometimes Codes runs campaigns to get all the signs off the right-of-ways. In Nashville, they can get real nasty, like charging $50 per sign illegally posted. But usually these campaigns run cold, and Codes employees are employees (who are lazy and only do what they've got to do), so your sign blitz is always a gamble.

(It's interesting in Nashville, that our sign prohibition does NOT apply to political campaign signage, which makes the law discriminatory. Wow, you oughta see some intersections at voting time.)

And grass-cutters for the city remove signs in the summer.

Yet, I find that small signs are the most effective means of exposure available.

I make up “for sale” signs and distribute them around the neighborhood at the intersection of major thoroughfares. I get a cheap glossy art paint and wide and narrow tip paint brushes, and hand-letter the information. (Art paint stands out at a distance better than magic marker lettering.) The crudeness of hand lettering - so long as legible - attracts more responses than professionally-lettered signs. Strange, but true.

And I paint these signs on cut pieces of unmarked bathroom tileboard available at Home Depot or Lowe’s. An 8 x 4' sheet costing about $11will cut into twelve 16" x 24" signs. A few 1 x 2" lumber strips can be made into sign posts, trimmed at an angle for driving into the ground. I assemble these posts with hex-head bolts and nuts. The cost is less than $1.50 each!

If you have chosen a good neighborhood, you will get lots of calls from your small signs. Sometimes I get about 3-5 calls a day. The quality of calls vary. And I print up a 3 page flyer with interior and exterior pictures, with a list of amenities, and place in the mailbox for pickup (a Federal violation).

I have also used professionally-lettered signs. Sometimes I have found little sign-screening shops that produce these signs for $1 - $2 each.

When small signs are inadequate to sell a house, I have to resort to listing a property with a real estate agent in order to get it on MLS. There is no doubt that the real estate industry has us beat with MLS. When a property can get attention on MLS with a network of hundreds or thousands of agents scrambling to sell a listed house, they win hands down.

Advertising your property is a necessity, unless you devise a way for pre-selling your houses before renovation starts or is completed. And there are ways to do this, too. This approach requires no advertising.

Dr.Phil Speer