Properly placing your signs is the most important way to
prepare for your sale; without clear signs, people won’t show up. You want your directions to be as unambiguous
as possible, the potential buyer should not be required to guess at all.
You should plan out where you are going to place your signs
before you head out to put them up. The
goal is to funnel potential buyers from the busiest streets near you house, so
you should have signs in both directions for these streets.
For this post, I’m going to be using a simplified version of
my old neighborhood as an example. The
widest lines represent multi-lane arterials; these are the roads with high
traffic volume from which you want to siphon potential buyers (lettered
streets). The lines of medium thickness
represent multi-lane non-arterials; these streets don’t have any houses and are
used to enter the subdivisions. They
usually have two lanes in either direction but may narrow to one lane in some
instances (numbered streets). The
narrowest lines represent the residential roads. These roads have only one lane in each
direction and are fronted with houses (unnamed streets).
The main streets from which you want to attract your buyers
are marked in red below:
In this example, as you can see, the main streets surround
my house on three sides. This isn’t
always the case; some neighborhoods only have two directions from which it
makes sense for buyers to approach. Some
have four and, occasionally, some have one.
From the arterials, you want to get your buyers going in the
direction of your house. You want to
route your buyers along non-residential roads for as long as possible because
they have to drive slower on residential roads, making it seem like it’s taking
forever to reach your sale. Depending on
where the driver is coming from, you should funnel them along different routes. For example, if the driver is on A Street, I
would have him or her B Street or C Street to 1st Street. If the driver is on B or C Streets, I would
have him or her take 1st Street to the sale.
This leads us to the issue of where we actually place the signs. As we discussed above, we want to lead people away from the arterials, so we are going to need signs on the arterials and all the other streets traffic directed to our sale will take to get to the sale. This is probably confusing, so I created the following series of illustrations to demonstrate what I mean:
This image is more complicated than the last one. In this case, the blue arrows represent traffic redirected from the arterials towards the sale. In the case of B and C Streets, the eastbound and westbound traffic is redirected onto 1st Street. In the case of A Street, southbound traffic is redirected onto B Street and northbound traffic is redirected onto C Street. In cases where lines share arrowheads, traffic is merging (for example, southbound A Street traffic is redirected westbound on B Street and merges with B Street's westbound traffic).
We have now identified seven intersections at which we need to place signs: the four arterial intersections, the intersection leading into the neighborhood, and the two intersections within the neighborhood. We are not done. While we have delineated a path for people outside the subdivision, we haven't made it clear for people living within the subdivision (the purple areas) that there is a sale:
This leads us to the issue of where we actually place the signs. As we discussed above, we want to lead people away from the arterials, so we are going to need signs on the arterials and all the other streets traffic directed to our sale will take to get to the sale. This is probably confusing, so I created the following series of illustrations to demonstrate what I mean:
In this first image, the blue arrows represent traffic flowing in the arterials. We need to figure out what path this traffic needs to take to be redirected to our sale.
This image is more complicated than the last one. In this case, the blue arrows represent traffic redirected from the arterials towards the sale. In the case of B and C Streets, the eastbound and westbound traffic is redirected onto 1st Street. In the case of A Street, southbound traffic is redirected onto B Street and northbound traffic is redirected onto C Street. In cases where lines share arrowheads, traffic is merging (for example, southbound A Street traffic is redirected westbound on B Street and merges with B Street's westbound traffic).
Once traffic is directed onto 1st Street, it becomes an easy matter to direct it to the sale. Be sure to direct both northbound and southbound traffic into the subdivision or many of your potential buyers will miss your sale. Also be sure that the route through the subdivision is clearly marked; you want it as simple as possible. Nothing should be ambiguous, mark every turn. You do not need to mark for people to go straight unless they may be going straight long enough to think that the signs they saw led to nothing (meaning they were from a sale from a previous week). In very few subdivisions will there be a straightaway long enough for this to be necessary.
We have now identified seven intersections at which we need to place signs: the four arterial intersections, the intersection leading into the neighborhood, and the two intersections within the neighborhood. We are not done. While we have delineated a path for people outside the subdivision, we haven't made it clear for people living within the subdivision (the purple areas) that there is a sale:
We just have to direct traffic out of the neighborhood towards the sale. Only five intersections need to be addressed:
From these five intersections traffic will be directed to 1st Street to the sale.
I was going to continue this post to discuss where to actually post the signs at the intersection but I think that will wait until the next post. I guess my three week series is going to be at least four weeks.
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