Promotion
- Is your property attracting interest?
- Getting lots of offers but no-one can go ahead?
- Getting lots of viewers but no offers?
- Getting lots of enquiries but no viewers?
- Getting lots of website hits but no enquiries?
- Not even getting above average website hits from traffic?
Which category does your property fall in? Let me or you estate agent know.
Presentation
There are 2 elements to consider with presentation. Marketing Presentation and Property Presentation.
Marketing presentation is a vital foundation of selling your property and this is why we make so much effort to provide individual property descriptions, high quality photographs and lots of information in our videos. If the marketing material for your property is either misleading or not targeting the right buyers, it is not going to be successful.
Think about who is the likely sort of person to buy your home - what will they be looking for in a property? Make sure the right attributes of your home are highlighted in the marketing. If you home has got steep hillside garden don’t target octogenarians! If it’s got lots of bedrooms, think what sort of person is going to place importance on having that mount of space, ie. Big family, B & B, peak period holiday let.
Everybody knows location, location, location is important. If your home has easy flat and level access with no steps make sure it is abundantly clear in the marketing.
Buyers might not know about the lovely dog walks along the river nearby unless it is clear in your details.
Case Study – We have sold a bungalow that had been the market for over 3 years on and off with other agents. The owner was suffering despondency and had nearly given up on her chances of selling because everybody said the garden was too steep. In fact the garden was hardly mentioned on the previous agents details. The garden was huge, well cared for and from the top you could see for miles towards the coast so we approached things completely differently – This was clearly not an older persons bungalow, with a family sized garden like this to play hide and seek in, it was going to sell to somebody of a much younger demographic. Needless to say we sold within months not years!
Internet Adverts
Everywhere looks its best with blue skies, white fluffy clouds and sunshine. After 12 weeks of marketing having a dull photograph is just not acceptable. Even if you started off with a sunny photograph, a summer shot when you are still trying to sell in the winter will make people think it’s been on the market for ages. Take another sunny photograph with the leaves off the trees now. Daffodils or snow and no leaves on the trees are a definite no no when you are still trying to sell in the summer.
I’m very happy to give your property a free internet advert review. It’s really a 10 minute job and an ideal place for us to start helping you. Please phone me or contact me through the box below and ask for an internet advert review.
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Property Presentation
This is much tougher because everywhere only needs to look its best for a few hours when we are doing photography or shooting a video. If you have been trying to keep your house immaculate for the past 3 months, for a viewing at an hours notice, the strain may be starting to tell!
Your property presentation doesn’t usually become an issue until you actually start to attract viewers. Without people seeing your property every 2 weeks it is probably a sign that you are way off the mark somewhere else. If you are getting viewers and no offers, how the viewings are being conducted or what the property presentation is like may be something to consider. We certainly ought to be looking very closely at feedback from the viewers that have been round.
Pricing
We know that you don’t want to reduce your price and that’s why it is so important to make sure presentation and promotion are tweaked up to their most beneficial effect when selling your home. We have succeeded in selling plenty of houses where other agents have failed. This has been achieved though more effective marketing and reaching a slightly different audience.
We have also found pricing is not only a sensitive issue with sellers! It is absolutely astonishing how sensitive the choice of asking price can be when it comes to attracting exactly the right buyer for your property. An adjustment of 5% can be the difference between having viewers when there has been no interest previously. An adjustment of 10% in the asking price can easily take you from no viewers to multiple full price offers!
Case Study – We had a fairly modern property which was rather forlorn and although we were getting viewers nearly every week nobody was interested because it was too much work for them – nobody actually told us it was too expensive though! The price was reduced by less than 10% and within a week we had 2 cash buyers at the full asking price. The moral is here that if you reduce your price enough you won’t necessarily have to accept offers less than the full asking price.
It’s a fact of life that some agents are tempted to overcook their price advice to get your property on their books. We even occasionally accept a vendors request to ask more than we suggested and after 3 months of marketing this error comes home to roost. Some agents are still reluctant to come clean on price for fear of losing their clients instructions, especially if they were the ones who were over optimistic on price in the first place.
Is it worth having a break from marketing and taking your house off the market?
We totally agree that if a property is marketed for an extended period of time and nothing is changed it will go stale. We wouldn’t usually recommend coming off the market, except in exceptional circumstances. Buyers can track the market easily on the internet and I have come across properties which have been taken off the market for winter and come back on in spring only for lots of potential buyers to have thought it had actually still been on the market for all of that time! If you need to make lots of changes to the property to improve presentation, coming off the market in these circumstances could be a good idea, especially if the changes you make are so radical that it means you can increase your asking price substantially!
Should I Change Estate Agent?
Changing estate agent could be a good idea if your current agent can’t give you satisfactory responses to some of the questions we have posed. However changing agents can be inconvenient and instructing a new agent who is not going to do anything different to your previous agent probably won’t solve any of your problems.
Appointing a new agent with a fresh approach with a fresh start and lots of enthusiasm to relaunch your sale effectively definitely could make a difference once you have your marketing mix of promotion, presentation and pricing identified.
If your newly chosen agent is doing something extra like special featured property adverts on Rightmove, YouTube property videos or they have had recent sales on properties like yours, then this might just be what’s needed to get you back on track to moving home sooner, rather than later.
If you would like an honest opinion please contact me using the box below.
By looking at the internet advertising for your home we will give you an honest first impression. The real test will be whether we think the internet advertising for your property portrays your house properly once we have had a look around ourselves. If your home turns out to be better than we expected we may have found the problem already!
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