How can your property for sale to foreign buyers stand out (Part 2)

Let’s look at possible mistakes in your property description and what they can do to your ability to attract foreign buyers.

There is a report Mistakes in Home Listings Bother Buyers published by Redfin, an American real estate company, and it states that 43% of more than 1,200 people surveyed said that grammar and spelling matter to homebuyers as they would be much less inclined to tour a home if its online listing contained misspellings or improper grammar. (It was about listings in English, but we can spread the results to any language of your potential foreign buyers of course.)

This is not even about such factual mistakes as wrong home, rooms and lot sizes, addresses and phone numbers, etc., that might make your listing completely useless or at the very least might scare some potential buyers away from you as an unreliable partner in the future deal; but we concentrate on language mistakes that make your property description hard to understand or look comical or strange or even stupid and become eventually fatal for your sale in the target market of the foreign buyers.

As we have a talk in English here, the author cannot give you direct examples of real Russian property listing mistakes found on Russian real estate portals, but will translate back into English and here is one of them:
“This resort осeаnfrоnt luxury 4 star must be experienced first-hand and I am sure appease even underlines for travelers.”

Well, a nice property maybe, but such (apparently machine translated) pearl will definitely kill any deal for the posting agent who paid for the listing hoping to get results from the advertising money spent. The agent for this property apparently do not know Russian and relies on the real estate portal to post the listing for the Russian buying market without checking how exactly the offer looks like for the foreign market.

Although not all mistakes are that bad, but anyway almost any error can blow up a sale. Your castle may not sell, no matter how grand, especially in any foreign market where buyers first thoroughly look through the internet listings as they are not able to jump in the car immediately to go and see your property.

So, if you as a realtor are going to spend your advertising money to promote a property for sale in the foreign market, spend it wisely – your listing should look for the foreign buyers as naturally written, without mistakes in facts and language.

Poor description = lazy realtor.

(To be continued)

Happy blog reading,
Olga Kellen,
The Amazon Author
International Marketing Consultant and English-Russian Translator

Copyright © 2017 by Olga Kellen
All Rights Reserved

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