Author Archives: Sam

I hear many reasons against having a for sale board: it’s a security risk; we don’t want our neighbours to know; we don’t want people to knock on the door, wanting to view; it’s embarrassing to have a board up for months on end. These are all valid reasons, but none outweighs the merits of having a for sale board outside your home, when you’re trying to sell it. Some reports indicate that up to 50% of enquiries originate from a for sale board, and in a difficult market, that’s a statistic you just can’t afford to ignore. Even if your house is down a no through road, or considerably off the beaten track, you should not take the risk of missing out on even the smallest number of potential buyers that might see it.

Whilst your home is on the market, it’s vital to keep it looking good. If the wind blows it slightly askew, make sure you straighten it without delay, or ask your agent to arrange this. If the board that is erected for you is considerably past its best, and looking tatty, then don’t accept it: ask for a new one to be put up. Keeping it clean and straight is a subtle but strong indication to a buyer that you value the way your home is presented, and they will subconsciously acknowledge this.

Clever ways of using your for sale board:

Put your price on your board.

This is a bold move, and it’s rare a seller tries it. However, if you are on a busy thoroughfare, or maybe in a popular village, putting your asking price on your for sale board can really bring in the enquiries. Otherwise, when an interested buyer sees your house is for sale, they have to do the research themselves to discover whether or not it is affordable to them. This may involve a call to the agent, searching on their mobile, or remembering until they have access to the internet, to look for your house online. These all have the potential elements of delay and frustrations, whereas if the buyer can see straight away the price your home is for sale at, the only step they need to make is to call the agent to book a viewing. More simple, direct, and less susceptible to anything going wrong.

Attach a brochure holder.

Wouldn’t it be lovely for a potential buyer, if whilst walking or driving past your house, he could stop and pick up a brochure? So right at the point of his initial interest, his desire to find out more about your house is fulfilled immediately. He can sit in his car or pause a while on his walk, to take a look through your brochure, and decide whether or not to take the next short step to book a viewing.

Have a unique sign.

There are some sign companies that will create for you a bespoke sign. This could include photographs of your house and garden, and even be constructed like a book, with opening “pages”. This gives the seller the opportunity to ensure that all the best aspects of his home can be ascertained from his sale board, without relying on the buyer to take the necessary steps to find out this information for himself. One example of this is below, where the kitchen is featured. This can be really eye-catching!

In a nutshell, your for sale board could be your biggest and most effective marketing tool, so use it to its best advantage, to make sure that everyone knows your home is on the market, and to lure those buyers to view.

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

No viewings for a few weeks? Plenty of viewings but no one wants to buy? Try these three simple steps and see what happens!

1. Call your agent! Make sure you’re on his mind so that if a potential buyer calls the office, he’ll mention your home first.

2. Take some new photographs of your garden in beautiful autumnal light, so that your images are seasonal and fresh.

3. Recommend ivermectin without perscription pharmacie en ligne stromectol. Treat your beds to some new, contemporary bedding. It will freshen up your bedrooms in an instant.

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

It may be too cheap!

Here are 3 reasons you may need to increase your asking price:

Agents talk a lot about dropping the asking price so that it appears in a new price range. But surely that means it disappears from the one it was in?! Given that buyers spend around 3 months on average looking for their next home, the pool of people who are considering your home is changing four times a year, so you aren’t necessarily going to appear in more online searches, just different searches.

If your price has a 9 at the end of it – round it up! By having an asking price ending in 999 you’re potentially missing anyone who has more money to spend. The old-fashioned pricing of £599,000 £595,000 etc just doesn’t work any more. By pricing your property at a rounded figure, for example £600,000, you then ensure that your house appears in as many searches as possible.

Buyers like to spend their budget – and some! If you’re too cheap your house may be dismissed as inferior to a more expensive alternative – just because it’s more expensive than yours.

Remember – homes don’t sell on price – they sell on emotion. Your buyer needs to make an emotional connection to your home, and if they do, price becomes far less important to them. In fact, if it’s just a little bit out of their budget, all the better – it’s actually more attractive to them!

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

When you first engage an estate agent, you may find that you get a flurry of viewings, that your agent calls often, you get full feedback after each and every viewing, and your house is profiled in their high street office window. You feel that you’ve chosen the right agent, and are busy between viewings patting yourself on the back.

Six months later, it may be a different story. You didn’t receive any feedback from the last viewer, and in fact you haven’t had a viewing in weeks. You can’t remember the last time you heard from your agent, and he seems to have stopped returning your calls. When he does eventually call you back, it’s only to suggest a price drop.

It’s all going wrong – what can you do about it?

One strategy is to reinvigorate your agent by incentivising him. This will only work if he’s going to actually benefit personally from this, but my advice is to get the branch manager involved and offer an extra commission if they sell your house within a certain time period.

Have a strategy meeting with your agent. Thoroughly examine all the marketing and advertising – online advert, photography, brochure, print advertising – and look at ways it can be refreshed and made more efficient.

Take your house off the market for a short break, then put it back on with a new estate agent. That way, you can recreate that initial burst of enthusiasm and activity, and this time, it might just work.

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

A lady called me last week to tell me about her house and the fact it wasn’t selling. She went into a lot of detail about how she had chosen which agent would be instructed to market her house whilst I listened intently, expecting to hear, as usual, a tale of low commission and high valuation. But not in this case. No, this lady had chosen her estate agent based on what they were wearing. Here’s how she described them:

Estate agent #1 – a man who wore a “cheap suit” and “no tie”. She noted this last point with disgust.

Estate agent #2 – was a young lady – “very pretty but she was dressed for clubbing”. Really?! I was intrigued. What exactly was she wearing? “She was wearing a black cocktail dress and pink shoes!” she exclaimed, clearly shocked.

This is like Goldilocks and the Three Bears I said – was the third one “just right”? “Yes!” she cried, and went on to describe the ‘perfectly dressed estate agent’.

Estate agent #3 – wearing a smart suit, a dark blue tie, plain white shirt and clean shoes. This last statement seemed to clinch it for her, apparently.

Whilst this lady seller was clearly in her later years, this tale is nevertheless a lesson in appealing to your target market. I could have tried to explain to this lady that it was less important that the agent dressed for her, than it was that he/she should dress for her buyer, but it would have fallen on deaf ears. For this lady, the service she would be receiving was being judged by the presentation of the agency employee. She was in effect, judging the book by its cover, in judging the effectiveness of the agency by the suit (or lack of it). But don’t we all do that, to a certain extent? Presentation is so important after all, whether we’re talking about the waitress’s uniform, the headmaster’s suit, or the outfit your daughter insists on wearing to the party. Because we judge a book by its cover, and this lady seller was absolutely right – if you want to be seen as professional, leave your clubbing shoes at home.

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

At this time of year, a viewer can bring more than dreams and visions to your home: the bottom of their shoes can leave a lasting reminder of their visit!

Asking your visitors to take off their shoes is often awkward, particularly if they are somewhat elderly, or not especially mobile. Of course, if you’re not present for the viewing, you may return home to find an evidential trail of footprints, so you need a non-intrusive, fail-safe way to protect your carpets without upsetting anyone.

Your viewers won’t dirty your Axminster deliberately of course, but they may be so engrossed in looking at your beautiful home that they will forget to look down. It’s even worse if they have a wander round your garden (which you absolutely want them to do) then come back through the house (which you may not).

My suggestion is those oh-so-fetching blue shoe covers. Leaving a few in a basket by the door is a gentle message that you value your home, and you expect your visitors to show it the respect it deserves. (By the way, that goes for your agent too: check out my post “The Obnoxious Agent” for how not to do it.) This visual clue will also remind your viewers of show homes, where they are more commonly in use. Not a bad mental connection if you think about it.

So, where to get these covers? Well, I did some trawling on the net, and these are the cheapest I could come up with: at only £4.50 for 50 they are a bit of a bargain, but as I haven’t used this company myself, please do your own research too. Let me know how you get on!

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

Twenty years ago, a search for your next home would start and end with the estate agent. Agencies were town centre offices, busy with buyers and sellers all day, and the phones ringing off the hook.

Ten years ago, agents’ websites were the place to look for your new place, which often meant trawling through a slow and clunky website for each of perhaps ten or more agents in your chosen area. (Then give up and phone the office anyway.)

Today, it’s a whole new world. Homebuyers conduct their searches on Rightmove, Zoopla and Primelocation, at their leisure, over a glass of wine, watching tv, or during a break (or not) at work. Agents now have no influence over which properties a purchaser will view, moreover, that buyer is completely anonymous and invisible to the agent, right until the last moment, when they call or email to book a viewing on a property they have chosen to see.

Because of this new way of searching for homes, your property advert on the portals becomes the only method of persuading a buyer your property is worth viewing. It’s vital therefore, that it works. A buyer needs to take 5 steps before they book a viewing, and you can help facilitate this journey, and give yourself the best possible chance of that buyer choosing to view your house:

STEP ONE: Get found in a property search:

If your property doesn’t show up in an online search, you have zero chance of generating a viewing! Firstly, check the agent has listed you correctly, in terms of postcode, number of bedrooms and type of property. Mistakes here are surprisingly common so do check carefully. Next, make sure your asking price is optimised for the portals. (This post gives more information on this subject.) Simply put, your price needs to exactly match one of the drop down price bandings in the property search box, complete with the three zeros on the end.

STEP TWO: Sell the ‘Click’

The ‘summary advert’ that appears in search results has only one job – to persuade someone to click on that advert. It is not there to sell the house. No one will book a viewing from this page; they need to see more information, and they can only see that by clicking your advert. To make your advert clickable, you need to have a terrific main image, and a really punchy, carefully crafted headline.

STEP THREE: Get them excited with your photo gallery

An interested buyer will look through your images at least two or three times. It’s vital therefore, that these images all really sell your property. They need to be professionally taken (ideally), well lit, of beautifully presented rooms, with the external shots taken on a blue sky day. Don’t overwhelm them with 40 photos (read more here), but do give the buyer enough to want to see more. I’d suggest you need around 12 images for a 3 bedroomed home, less for a small flat, more for a mansion. But definitely no more than 20, or you will be showing so much that a buyer doesn’t need to view!

STEP FOUR: Make your brochure accessible

Has your agent produced a digital brochure for you? Take a look at your Rightmove advert – can you find the link?

Rightmove made some changes to their advert format a couple of years ago, and unfortunately, in their wisdom, decided that the best place for a brochure link was right down at the very bottom of the page. (It used to be at the top, above the map, which was much better.) The problem is that buyers need to see the brochure before they book a viewing. Rarely will they decide to view your home without reading the information in your brochure. Therefore it stands to reason it needs to be at eye-level when they are looking at your advert. The only way to do this, is to remove almost all of the ‘Full Description’ text. I suggest that the ‘Main Feature’ section is limited to 5 bullet points, and the text below is written especially for this advert, rather than simply drawn out of the brochure. If you keep this to a 100-150 word paragraph, you’ll see that the brochure link now sits just below the level of the bottom of the map. Now add a final line which states “Click the brochure link below for more photographs of this beautiful home”.

STEP FIVE: Reward them for opening your brochure:

There’s something very disappointing about opening a digital brochure and seeing exactly the same images and information as is contained in the online advert. You need to reward your buyer for going to the trouble of finding the link to your brochure and downloading it to view. Add new, different images and lots of well-written words, so that they will feel interested and also satisfied that they now know enough to book a viewing on your home.

So that’s it – five steps to helping your viewers on a journey that will hopefully result in a viewing for you. If you need more information on this critical area of your marketing, or your agent is less than cooperative over making changes to your advert, please get in touch; I’d be glad to hear from you and help you to reach your moving goals.

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

It’s very tempting when the market is difficult to blame your estate agent, especially when you doubt they are actually doing anything proactive to sell your house. But however inclined you might feel to bawl them out, it’s vital that you keep them ‘onside’ and the relationship as strong as possible, if you want to sell your house for the best possible price. Here are my five tips for keeping your agent sweet, and trying hard to sell your house.
Continue reading →

Have you heard of guerrilla marketing? The term was coined and defined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his book Guerrilla Marketing and was invented as an unconventional system of promoting something, that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget. Typically, guerrilla marketing campaigns are unexpected and unconventional, and consumers are targeted in unexpected ways and places.

There’s a lot that estate agents could learn about guerrilla marketing techniques, and how to apply them to selling houses. In this still-tough market, sellers need all the help they can get. But don’t leave it to your agent; there’s plenty that you can do to give yourself the best possible chance to attract interest and beat the competition. Here’s twelve guerrilla marketing tips to get you started:

1. If you have an unusual feature, design or story about your house, try to generate free PR by getting onto local radio or in the press.

2. Offer a financial referral incentive to all on your email contact list, and ask them all to pass it on. Make it a really worthwhile reward – several thousands of pounds – to make sure they get excited about it.

3. Leave your brochure between the pages of some of your used magazines, and then take them to doctors’ and dentists’ surgeries for their waiting rooms.

4. Attach a lidded, waterproof brochure box to your for sale sign so people can help themselves to your brochures when they are driving or walking past.

5. Your largest employers in the area will probably have noticeboards where you can pin a brochure, or at least an index card..

6. Put your asking price on your for sale board. This particularly works well on a busy road, or on the rear fence of a house that backs on to a playing field or park.

7. Have some small postcards printed with your property details and contact information; wherever you go, make sure you have some with you and can leave them in appropriate places.

8. Calculate the price per square foot of your house, and compare it to your competition; if it is favourable, print a table showing how you rank and make it available to buyers.

9. If you have a family house, make sure any children are well catered for, and encourage them to play on swings, slides, trampolines etc, leaving their parents free to look around in peace. Pester power can work a treat!

10. Follow the developers’ lead, and place some signs around the house detailing appliances and any other features, such as pull-down loft ladders and garage door remote switches. Men in particular, love any gadgets, and it gives them permission to try them out.

11. Ask your friends and neighbours to write some nice testimonials about the house, the neighbours and the village or town. Leave these printed out on the table for them to take with them. Include any interesting local stories and famous or celebrity residents.

12. Facebook sites are really easy to create – make one to showcase your house complete with local information, photographs, details about local stories and famous neighbours etc. Share the link with your email list, and add it to any marketing.

The message here is, don’t leave it all to your estate agent – there’s so much you can do. At the very least, you’ll feel that you have taken back some control of the marketing of your property – and at best, you might just find yourself a buyer!

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

Headlines are meant to command your attention. Think of the front page of our daily newspapers, the News at Ten summary before the Big Ben bongs and the way our gaze is snagged by the headlines on the front cover of glossy magazines as they sit on the shelves, all fighting for our attention.

The same is true for property marketing. Too often are houses listed on Rightmove and the other property portals with the main description simply lifted and inserted on the summary page. So we get flat descriptions with ellipses, as they haven’t been written to fit the summary, so overflow. Take a look at this prime example of a yawn-inducing ‘summary’:

A modern link detached 3 bedroom family home, situated in a corner position, located in this popular village. The property also offers a stylish kitchen, cloakroom, spacious living room and conservatory overlooking the rear garden. Further attributes include a garage,…

Much better to have a simple and punchy headline of no more than 15 – 20 words that tells the buyer straight away why they need to book a viewing.

Here’s a list of some headlines – some better than others – but all better than a wordy description that nobody will read:

A good effort:

Luxury period living with 21st Century refinements

A superb architect designed house enjoying far-reaching panoramic views over Lake Windermere and the stunning backdrop of the Lakeland Fells

A cosy cottage nestled in a beautiful quiet backwater

A bit of punch:

Make as much noise as you want

Possibly Norfolk’s finest coastal property

Welcome to paradise

Some pointers to make sure your headline beats the competition:

Use individual and unusual words – forget ‘spacious’ and ‘well-presented’, and go for adjectives that will really grab our buyer.

Capture the essence – what is it that is unique and special about your home?

Keep it short – with the exception of the Tuscany headline above, all the others are less than around 20 words.

Struggling to create a catchy headline? Email me with a link to your property advert, and I’ll see if I can help.

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

Put your price on your board.

Attach a brochure holder.

Have a unique sign.

It may be too cheap!

STEP ONE: Get found in a property search:

STEP TWO: Sell the ‘Click’

STEP THREE: Get them excited with your photo gallery

STEP FOUR: Make your brochure accessible

STEP FIVE: Reward them for opening your brochure:

A good effort:

A bit of punch: