How to sell available homes fast

10/30/2025 Sofia Feeney

Meredith Oliver, the founder of Meredith Communications, shares a five-step plan to close before year-end.

If you are staring down a list of completed homes that need to close before December 31, you’re not alone. Builders across the country are feeling the same year-end urgency and with home shopping slowing dramatically between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the window to move those homes is closing fast.

Using appealing terminology to describe these homes is essential. We recommend calling them available homes, quick move-in homes or move-in ready homes, not “inventory” or “spec” homes. Your beautifully finished homes deserve focused, personalized marketing one home at a time.

Go “Uber Micro” With Your Marketing

When you’re under pressure to sell, broad campaigns won’t cut it. You need to go micro ultra-focused, home by home. Our “Uber Micro Marketing” strategy targets three to five specific Available Homes per week with classified-style social posts on Facebook and Instagram. Each post should highlight the home’s best features with a clean, simple layout in short headlines, not paragraphs. While including strategic emojis and bullets and key information buyers need before they click. Load as many high-quality photos as possible, or even better, post a video reel showcasing the home.

Then boost each post with a $200–$250 budget spread over five days, Wednesday – Sunday. Continue by emailing your database with the same content and uploading your Reels to YouTube as Shorts. Each home deserves repeated individual promotion across social, YouTube and email. Don’t skip this step. This consistency is what drives traffic and leads.

Sell at the House Level

Lifestyle and location matter, but the decision to buy an available home is made first and foremost at the house level. Buyers fall in love with a specific home and homesite. Audit every community and every listing individually. Some may be performing fine, while others lag. Treat each one differently.

Give every home a persona. Is it a “young family starter”? A “work-from-home haven”? A “lock-and-leave lifestyle” home? Match your visuals, copy and even staging to that persona. This approach helps your sales team quickly connect the right buyer to the right home and gives your marketing a human touch that’s impossible to ignore.

Price Competitively

There’s a difference between competitive pricing and discounting. Competitive pricing positions your homes where they belong in the search results that buyers see. Deep discounts, can undermine your brand and create confusion.

Conduct a thorough market analysis. A few thousand dollars can determine whether your listing appears in a buyer’s filtered search. Here’s the truth; purchase incentives have stopped working. The only thing consistently moving homes right now is competitive pricing. Buyers are responding to straightforward value, not gimmicks.

Keep Your Foot on the Marketing Gas

Now is not the time to scale back. Website traffic across builder sites is still 20–40% higher than last year, indicating that buyers are out there researching even if they’re not converting yet. Stay visible. Maintain or even increase your digital spend on Google, Meta and Zillow. Keep your email campaigns running consistently. As my Builder Town Hall co-host Kerry Mulcrone says, “We get paid for the first mile, but the magic happens in the second mile.”

Audit, Refresh, Repeat

Finally, audit everything as if you were an Editor-in-Chief reviewing the next issue of your own magazine. Check every listing, every photo and every floor plan. Does each available home look as good online as it does in person? Add virtual staging. Are the home photos fresh, the descriptions accurate and the calls-to-action clear?

Even the smallest detail, a missing photo or outdated map pin, can cost you a lead. Remember, you are competing with Realtor.com, Zillow and MLS, all of which specialize in professional listings. Your website listings must look as good as the listing sites. Your web listings are living, breathing assets. Refresh them regularly, rotate featured homes and make sure your content tells the home’s story beautifully. The clock is ticking, but there’s still time. The key isn’t marketing more homes, it’s marketing smarter. With a focused, disciplined and home-by-home plan, you can sell your available homes before year-end and start 2026 with a clean slate.

At Meredith Communications, we’ve helped builders do precisely that, sometimes moving 30+ homes in just six weeks using this approach. Don’t wait for buyers to find you. Meet them where they are on their phones, in their inboxes and in their feeds with personalized, persistent and purpose-driven marketing.

By Meredith Oliver. She is the founder of Meredith Communications, a digital marketing agency specializing in home builders. She can be reached at meredith@creatingwow.com.