Tale of the Email Subject Line
If you’re like me, you get upward of 500 emails every day. Once upon a time, I used to hate getting so many emails, because of all the Spam (junk email), such as the countless offers of “Genuine Viagra” (don’t these people know who their sending this too?), offers to buy an MBA or PhD, the “Canadian Pharmacy” deals, the announcement that I have money waiting for me somewhere in Africa, and other similarly useless ads.
Then, some months ago, I saw an interesting trend developing in the subject lines in emails I got from other real estate people; it was the growing number of subject line statements that contained the words, “REDUCED,” and “SHORT SALE”, and “FORECLOSURE”, and “MAKE AND OFFER,” and the like.
After a while, I started noting that a larger and larger percentage of my emails were from real estate sales agents doing email blasts trying to motivate other agents to show their listings. I also noted, that as the percentage of emails with these subject lines from real estate agents grew, so were the number of unsold listings in our multiple listing system.
In fact, by 7:00 AM today, I already received 120 emails, of which about 50 were from real estate agents with the distressful subject lines.
So, what does all of this mean?
Well, if the “Subject Line” statement is any indicator of the state of the local residential real estate market (which it seems to be by correlation with the growing number of unsold listings in our mls), it seems our market area is still in a downward trend.
You might want to give it a try, just for giggles.
I’d like to know if you see any relationship between the number of emails with distressed subject line statements and the number of unsold listings in your market.
I look forward to hearing from you.
