Ramshackle Home Isn’t Selling? Maybe Put Up a ‘Not Haunted’ Sign

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What do you do when your home has been on the market for a decade with no buyer in sight?

You get weirdly creative with your marketing efforts and hope they become an internet sensation.

That’s what real estate agent Jeff Mason did with the ramshackle home in Coeur d’Alene, ID, he was trying to sell. Mason decided a tongue-in-cheek sign acknowledging the home’s dilapidated state—including peeling paint and deteriorating porch—might be just the thing to finally close the sale. Or at least get people talking about the place.

So he got the owner’s blessing and slapped a plastic $10 sign with the words “Not Haunted” onto the “For Sale” sign outside the house.

See! It’s creepy-looking, right?

realtor.com

“I went to the homeowner and said, ‘You’ve been doing the same thing for 10 years. Let me take a little bit of a different angle on it,'” Mason tells realtor.com®. “The house is so run-down, I knew I had to make it stand out.”

This $10 “Not Haunted” sign has generated mucho buzz on social media.

Kaitlin Riordan, Taylor Viydo/ktvb.com

The result? “Two days after I put up the sign, it went absolutely viral,” he says. Photos of it were shared widely on Facebook.

So Mason went further. He rewrote the house’s listing description. Instead of trying to mask the home’s flaws with real estate euphemisms like “cozy” and “great bones” (that’s Realtor® speak for “small” and “needs TLC”), Mason wrote about the “sprawling front porch that can barely hold itself up, 3 bedrooms, 1 bath without a bath, kitchen has been fully removed for your convenience as there are enough restaurants downtown.”

All things considered, the 1,000-square-foot house is priced shockingly high at $300,000, so he poked fun at that, too: “You will be hard pressed to find a home in this condition at this price!”

“We wanted to mock those stereotypical real estate listings from Realtors who like to embellish,” he explains. That brutal honesty seems to have worked, because Mason says his phone has been ringing with inquiries about the house ever since he made the changes.

This is a gimmick that has worked before to generate buzz.

Three years ago, real estate agents in Clarksville, TN, posted a “Not Haunted” sign on the 1930s four-bedroom brick house they were selling.

“We were trying to come up with some creative slogans for signs to draw attention to some houses,” they told clarksvillenow.com. “That was one that seemed fitting for that house.” The house has since sold.

A Washington, DC, real estate agent also told the Huffington Post she affixed a “Not Haunted” sign to her property to get people talking, not necessarily to quash any rumors of ghosts.

Oh, and in the category of weird selling tricks: Remember the real estate agent who donned a panda suit in the listing photos and was then inundated with requests to tour the home?

So is the house in Coeur d’Alene really haunted? “I don’t know for sure,” Mason says with a laugh. “Buyer beware, I guess.”

The post Ramshackle Home Isn’t Selling? Maybe Put Up a ‘Not Haunted’ Sign appeared first on Real Estate News & Advice | realtor.com®.

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