There was a time when we advised Realtors that their phone number was the most important element on their for sale signs. Now, it’s most certainly your web site address that should receive special attention. Here’s why:

If you were to read three signs with the lines below, which would be the easiest to remember?

I always tell my clients that they don’t need to include “www.” on their signs. Home buyers know it’s a web site when they read the “.com” or “.net” suffix. You should alway capitalize the first letter of every word in your domain. Domain names by themselves are not case sensitive.

We’ve all been tempted to use images found on Google & Yahoo image searches. Unfortunately, “borrowing” these images will almost certainly bring you copyright troubles. So, I turn to two of my favorite sources for images:

Open Clip Art Library is a great source of illustrations that can be freely used. All the files are available as PNG or SVG filetypes.

Dreamstime has a huge collection of royalty free images at very reasonable prices. I really like their wide selection of photography.

JR Screen Ruler is a very useful and compact utility that allows you to accurately measure anything on your screen. I use it all the time to measure space in various browser windows, size of photos and graphics.

Pixie How many times have you run across a site with a truly inspiring color scheme? Just don’t know how to communicate those colors to your web designer or printer? Run your mouse over any on screen object and Pixie will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values.

Inkscape is an open-source (free) vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. Professional graphic artists use vector graphics so logos & illustrations can be enlarged without loss of quality. This is especially important for sign graphics. You can also create Flash-like web content using Inkscape because was designed from the ground up to use Scalable Vector Graphics.

ActiveRain is, according to their website, “the largest and most active social network in the real estate space”. Launched in 2006, it’s present membership consists of 97,454 real estate bloggers. Unique in it’s Realtor to Realtor content, it is full of ideas and great advice. Sure, there’s some off topic posts, but it’s pretty easy to find members and groups that provide valuable real estate related content.

One of the best features is it’s specialized groups. You’ll find groups focusing on technology, marketing, referrals, regional content and company/brand specific private groups. I would encourage any real estate company to start a group for their agents – it could take the place of regular office meetings!

Brochure boxes (sign boxes, info boxes, flyer boxes) have been around for years. Our’s are affordable, durable and attractive. Top agents swear by them.

Here’s some tips on using this important marketing tool:

Home buyers shop neighborhoods, not newspaper listings. People prefer to do drive bys when house hunting. At this early stage, buyers don’t call to gather information. They expect a flyer. If there isn’t one, then they don’t call. (more…)

As a sign designer, I’m often asked for suggestions of good sign colors.  I answer with a question: what colors do the large independent real estate companies in your area use? Avoid those. Stay clear of colors used by the franchises. Go for unique. Color is a huge factor in how memorable your yard signs are to buyers.

The biggest mistake I run across is limiting yourself to one or two colors, picked from the 12 main colors of the color wheel. [Flash back to high school art class]. Our graphic artists and screen printers have thousands of colors in their palettes. They love creating color schemes if given the opportunity. Give them the freedom of using three or four colors for your signs…ooooh, they’ll be fighting each other to work on your sign design! (more…)