Insights from a creative professional navigating a big life change.

It’s really happening, our house on Terschelling is officially for sale.

We had a few projects the last month before listing the house most of those were in the Sailors department, I’m not experienced in construction. However, I am experienced in marketing, so that became my department. I haven’t prepared or sold a house before, so this was something new and I did find that my marketing and design eye helped. Hiring a great realtor was also smart! Like when you hire a great consultant for your organization to reach new goals you’re only half sure of how to get to. (I can be that consultant sometimes 😉)

Choosing Your Expert

In the past, when I have reached out to businesses to organize something for our life affairs, they tend to switch directly to Dutch once the Sailor is in the room. The Sailor is a really terrible translator. He can translate the words just fine, he’s basically bilingual, that’s not where he drops the ball. No, he starts out strong, he translates the back and forth and then as he gets involved in the convo he just stops or forgets. I used to assume it was fine he would fill me in later, but then he would give me the basic notes and when I would ask questions he didn’t think to ask at the time that meant more follow-up. Or sometimes decisions would be made without my involvement. And you might think that’s okay, he’s taking care of things, however, when this consistently happens, it means I’m not involved or in control of very much. We try our best to be equal partners, but this is an immigrant side effect that compounds and makes me really annoyed.

We agreed that I would be the point person for the realtor so that The Sailor would have one less thing to deal with.

I contacted two of the Realtors in town and made it really clear in my email to them, that I would be the point person that all in-person conversations needed to be in English. If they got stuck on words, The Sailor could translate in the moment. That I was okay with Dutch texting / SMS messages as I could use a translator and I could write back in Dutch too. I can actually read some beginners Dutch and write simple sentences. I just can’t have a conversation in Dutch unless it’s ordering something at a restaurant, haha. Both realtors were happy to do this and I was relieved, it made me realize that maybe I should be asking for this upfront in the future when dealing with personal business affairs.

Lesson 1: Make it very clear what you need upfront, especially, so patterns you’ve experienced before can be mitigated.

We did an intial interview with both of the realtors and I had prepared my questions in advance, the Sailor had his questions too. We both leaned on our strengths, mine were more to do with the selling process and his were more about the technical aspects of the house. At the end we both liked one realtor quite a bit, she was positive, gave us an initial price point that aligned with what I was thinking we could market the house at, and she was open to our ideas for the selling process that might be a little different.

Market Analysis

Deciding on the price for our house was interesting.

At first, I had a number in my head based on some casual understanding of what houses in our area have been selling for in recent years. The Sailor had a much different number based on a little unease of what he thought other people might think our house was worth and I suspect some worry about judgement from the community. I’ve come to realize that the island mentality comes with a certain level of worry of how you or your actions will be perceived. Being at different price points between the two of us, meant that we were both eager to hear what the realtor had to say. She gave us an initial price point that aligned with my thinking in our interview and once we were done and ready to sign contracts and list the place, she had her official number. We needed to decide if we agreed with it.

That’s when I sat down and really looked at the current housing market. What houses were for sale in this price point, how did we compete with that, were we aiming to high, not high enough? I was doing a market analysis. I was no longer going off of a guestimate. I was using my work brain to see how might I market this product at this price point, would Marketing Michelle agree with this price point? What are the products advantages over the competition and disadvantages? Who would be our target audience at this price point?

The Sailor does not have a marketing brain, he’s a Sailor, ask him about shipping lanes and chemical tanks and he’s the expert. His idea was to market the house with the 95 or 99 effect. I remember learning about this in college. The idea is to give the perception of a discount or savings, when you list something as being $5.99 or $29.95 - we have all seen those sales in stores. However, listing products with a perceived discount is also subtly telling the buyer that it’s cheap or cheaper. Luxury brands never use this pricing strategy for this reason. They’re selling luxury and that does not have an implied discount or cheapness attached.

I explained to the Sailor about this pricing strategy and said, that I wanted our house to feel like middle-class luxury. Thankfully the realtors official number did not come with the 99 or 95 strategy. We trusted the realtors pricing, she’s the expert, and while I could find reasons that supported her number, it came down to trusting her expertise and experience in this market.

Lesson 2: You hired an expert, trust their expertise.

Advertising Your Product

In real estate terms, this would be called “Staging Your House”

I really loved this part of the process.

Most likely because I’m a creative person and my marketing work involves quite a bit of that visual storytelling.

Great creativity is only great when it understands the target market or audience it needs to engage. You can have beautiful visuals that might make no sense to your target audience. An example of this is I watched a reel on Instagram, it’s from a Tattoo shop and it was clearly teasing GenZ about their tattoo preferences, some trend. I did not understand that reel at all. I asked the Sailor if he understood the tattoo design, he clarified it a bit, but I still didn’t really get the joke. However, I’m not the target audience, I’m not GenZ and I don’t have a single tattoo. You might wonder why I even saw that reel, well I follow a different tattoo shop guy who makes funny pun tattoos and so I guess the algorithms think I have tattoos or am thinking of it.

For our house, I imagine that the potential house buyer has these qualities -

Young family with kids (we have three or four bedrooms, depending on whether you want to use the attic room)
Grandparents with kids (Dutch grandparents are very involved and many have their grandkids sleep over once a week or so)
Gardener, someone who wants a big yard to putter in
Dog owner (I imagine they have a dog)
Wants to live close to West (there are three villages on the island, we are closest to West)
Wants to be close to the forest

So that’s the target audience in my head. It’s not super detailed but gives enough of an idea of how I should stage our house.

We normally have the Blue room as a guest bedroom because we don’t have kids but for selling, we turned it into a kids room. Since, I’m a big kid at heart, we already owned those penguin sheets and other fun items. We simply made that room look like it belonged to our imaginary child. 😀

My office could be both a kids room or an office space, so we kept it as an office but made up the built in bed so it still has dual purpose.

I bought flowers for the staging. We planted flowers in the garden so we knew we had some blooming colour. There was a drought in April and half of May, we were very worried that the garden wouldn’t look its best. But then a week before photos and the week of photos, there was rain and the Rhododendrons bloomed and the grass became green again, and our garden bounced back to life. We lucked out!

The realtor also checked the weather app and messaged me on the one sunny day to do our outdoor photos, thank goodness she thought of that, because it rained on the day we had initially planned. Another point for trusting the experts.

Then it came time to take photos. The photographer asked us to wrangle our boys, Zorro decided to have his old man zoomies and kept walking into the rooms being photographed. I actually was pretty surprised that the photographer didn’t want the cat sleeping on the couch or the bed, or in any of the photos. I thought it helps my target audience see their dog in the house.

Admittedly, I love a touch of humour in my marketing strategy and I absolutely believe that involving animals will always amplify your reach or engagement, because nearly everyone loves cute animals. The photographer also loves cats, she has 5 of them! So I’m sure if she thought cats in the photos would be good, she would have left them.

Lesson 3: Trust the experts, even when their vision in execution is slightly different than yours.

I had fun ideas of marketing our house with Pablo in each room showing it’s purpose. Like a photo where he’s sitting in the kitchen with a wooden spoon in his mouth. I did not pitch this idea to the photographer or the realtor team. I trusted their expertise. And honestly, I’m not sure Pablo would be an easy model, he’s actually a little impatient when the camera is in his face and not that well trained for modelling.

But AI can make my dreams of Pablo selling our house a reality, so I present to you, my vision of our realtor photos 😂

Launch Your Campaign

Everything was organized and the last step was to officially post the house for sale.

Launch our marketing campaign.

You can check out the listing by clicking here.

That first day, another part of my Marketing brain surfaced, the metrics tracker. I don’t get to see all the background metrics of the realtors website however, I could see the social media (specifically Facebook) engagement. I will admit, I was refreshing the realtors facebook post multiple times in the day to see how many people had liked our house, how many shared the house, and how many were commenting and what they were saying. The comments being what would normally give this marketer an idea of audience response, were the comments positive. I couldn’t tell, language wasn’t my friend but also they lacked emoji’s, 😂, that usually gives you an idea of mood. For instance, one person commented, “Wow” but that could have been Wow that’s an amazing house or it could have been Wow, what are they thinking selling it at that price? (even this last one could go both ways).

Throughout the whole getting the house ready and listed, the Sailor had multiple little panic attacks. Normal stuff, where everything feels overwhelming, you just need to vent, and have your partner reassure you that everything is on track and going to be great. This is a hard move for the Sailor, he’s saying goodbye to his island. You can read more about that journey in my previous blog - How did you decide where to call home?

I had my first panic, that day, the day everything went live. We were lying in bed chatting just before sleep and I laid it all out there, how I was trying to gauge the response from the Facebook and I couldn’t. My marketer brain couldn’t get a read on how people were responding. That I wasn’t sure, if we would need to change our tactics, if we nailed the launch and it was going as planned, I didn’t know and it really bothered me. If you think the Sailor reassured me, you would be wrong. He was also anxious because he’s been anxious this whole time. But he did settle me down and we both agreed that it had only been a day, not even 24 hours and we just needed to be patient.

When we woke up the next day, the realtor had already messaged me saying she had three viewings for that afternoon. And we jumped out of bed to do a mad cleanup and restaging of the house. The Sailor took the “no animals in the photos” extra seriously and also packs up all the animals and their stuff (kitty litter, food dishes, scratching post, toys) and we hide out at his parents until the viewings are complete.

With that new data, 3 viewings after the launch day, I felt much more reassured that we (the Sailor, the realtor team, and I) did everything right for selling the house. The response is positive.

Lesson 4: At the end of the day, when you launch your campaign, there’s still going to be a day of hope and prayers before you know what the audience response is. Be patient and trust you and your team did your best.

Wrap it up and move on

This is where I could talk about selling the house, maybe the emotions and marketing experience that comes with accepting an offer. But we’re not there yet. It’s only been on the market for a week.

Maybe logically some folks would be house shopping after selling, we did it the other way around. We have already bought our next house. The official move in date is at the end of August.

Here’s a little teaser about the next house…

We realized when we were house shopping that we learned a few lessons from our island house which helped us pick our new house -

We loved having a big back yard and garden
No more projects (when we bought the island house it was a fixer-upper, we didn’t want to do that again, we wanted something more done)
We wanted a place with a covered outdoor sitting area, like a veranda or garden house or patio
A quiet neighbourhood where the cats would be safe to be outdoors too
A private yard space
Solar panels
The same number of rooms or similar living space, we don’t need a huge house but it is nice to have my own office
Loads of light and windows (our island house has so much light and the windows are great for plants, we need that again)

And the new house checks all these boxes. It’s a really fantastic place and in September when we’re officially moved in, I can’t wait to share it with you.

Lesson 5: Take lessons from your old campaign and implement them into the next one.

Staging, Strategy, & Staying Calm

Choosing Your Expert

Market Analysis

Advertising Your Product

Launch Your Campaign

Wrap it up and move on

Red Flags In Job Interviews

Dear younger me…