Tag Archives: Rightmove

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.

Do you know what a Rightmove Property Performance Report is?

Well done those if you do! But if you think it sounds like an investor report, you may want to read on. Particularly if you’re trying to sell your house, and you’ve never been shown this very useful report.

The Rightmove Property Performance Report is available to all those estate agents who use Rightmove.co.uk to advertise their properties. What this report can show is:

How well your property is ‘performing’ in terms of the number of times it appears in a buyer’s search on Rightmove
How your property compares with the performance of similar properties on Rightmove
These statistics over the last week, fortnight or thirty days.

Statistically, there is a direct correlation between the number of times your property listing is clicked on, and the viewings generated on it. So it’s really important that you get as many clicks as possible.

First things first, ask your estate agent for your Rightmove Property Performance Report.

This is data your estate agent has access to, inside the Rightmove console. If they are not using Rightmove, they will be able to access similar statistics within Zoopla, On the Market or Prime Location. Property listings with images and floorplans, that are updated regularly, have the best performance metrics on Rightmove and the other portals. This Report also shows the number of times your property listing was clicked on over the last 7, 14 or 30 days, together with a comparable against the previous period. Additionally, this statistic can be compared against similar property listings on Rightmove, so you can see whether your property advert is competing well or not. A ‘similar’ listing is typically what a searcher would see alongside your property when they search on Rightmove, and therefore could be considered as your ‘competition’.

If your home listing is not performing or competing well, it could be a strong indicator of the reason you’re not getting viewings on your house. Here’s my checklist to try, before you rush to reduce the price on a house that’s not getting interest:

Check your photographs – do they really show your home at its best, and are they up to date? If your outside images reflect a different season than the current one, ask your estate agent to re-photograph your house and garden. Then check your next performance report to see if your numbers have increased.
Revisit your property description. Firstly, draw up a profile of the kind of person you think is most likely to buy your home. Age, status, motivation for moving, and so on. Then write down a list of adjectives about your house that you think would most appeal to these target buyers. Look at your property description – does it need rewriting to incorporate these key words? Your agent can help you with this. I’ve changed property listings in the past to better appeal to a family, or to someone looking for a change in lifestyle. Words matter, so make sure your written description best sells the primary features of your home, to the person most likely to be attracted to those features.
Make sure your listing is complete – eg does it have a floorplan that can be viewed easily, even on a mobile? The best floorplans are colour-coded, able to zoom in on, and include a compass showing the direction of the sun on the house.

If these three steps still don’t improve your listing performance, try these tips:

Change the main listing property description to just one snappy headline. A question is always eye-catching: eg “wouldn’t you love to watch the sun go down sitting on this balcony?”
Change the main listing image for one which doesn’t show the property at all, but instead just the front door, or name plate.
Include some information in the front-page introduction, eg ‘The only home in the Lake District with a well in the downstairs toilet’ (probably best you make your statement truthful)

Before your agent makes any changes to your advert, ask them to produce a report as a benchmark, then compare it in say a week, with the new click-through rate to see if there’s been any improvement in it.

So, if you haven’t seen a Rightmove Property Performance Report before, call your agent right away and ask for yours. If they seem a bit clueless on the subject, you might want to think about finding a new agent. After all, this is the digital age, and informed sellers will always have the edge.

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.

Happy selling!

Sam

With Rightmove.co.uk consistently being one of the top ten visited sites in the UK, it would be fair to say it is the number one ‘shop window’ when it comes to viewing property. Now we all know that first impressions count but when it comes to selling property in the 21^st century, it is more important than ever. Let me explain…

When trawling through property after property on Rightmove.co.uk whilst looking to buy a new home, there is sometimes the odd one that jumps out at you. It may look a little brighter than the rest, maybe a touch more spacious than the others for the money but nearly always it will have been well photographed. This will probably get your initial vote and you will put it on your viewings list.

With Rightmove being one of the most viewed sites in the UK, lots of other people will also earmark this stand out property to view. Some will decide it’s not the property for them, but some will see it as the next home of their dreams and put in an offer. Had the property been photographed ‘like all the rest’, it wouldn’t have attracted as many viewings resulting in fewer offers, if any at all. Interestingly, there is a tendency to introduce gamification even into this segment, namely, a well-known developer of online games has begun to create a prototype that can influence and improve all these functions, which are discussed in this article.

As a property photographer I love the statistics I get back from the estate agents. On average, after I’ve photographed a property and the images have been updated on Rightmove’s site, the agent gets over 5 times more ‘click-throughs’ (people clicking on a listed property to see it in more detail). This translates directly into increased viewings, which brings in the offers, which in-turn sells the property. Usually, based on my average, in about 6 weeks.

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.

If, like me, you spend many happy hours browsing Rightmove, you can’t have failed to notice the fact that some properties are featured at the top of each page of search results, and others are are given added emphasis, with a grey box, clickable photos, and a red badge. The former is what Rightmove calls a “Featured Property”, and the latter a “Premium Listing”.

‘Featured’ listing

‘Premium’ listing

There are three types of listings on Rightmove: Regular, Premium and Featured. The Regular version sees your property marketed on the portal. The Featured Listing sits at the top of the search results and is highlighted with a blue banner top and bottom, so it stands out, whereas the Premium Listing appears in search in price order, but is a larger box with a big green banner. The cost for a Premium listing is £50 per property, whereas the Featured property spot is a bigger investment, at £180 per month. If you’re using a full-service agency to market your home, this cost will usually be covered by your agent, if they use these features. If you use a DIY agency, like PurpleBricks or Yopa, for example, both Featured and Premium listings are available at extra cost.

Is there any benefit to you or your agent paying the extra for Rightmove added features?

We’ve tested these features in our own agency, AshdownJones, and whilst we found the views and clicks on our enhanced property listings did increase, the number of actual viewings did not. It seems unlikely to me that using one of these upgraded listings would refresh interest in a house that had been on the market for a prolonged amount of time, and when a home first goes to market, it often has a flurry of interest anyway, so an enhanced listing would be a waste of money.

I’m sure there will be other estate agents – and Rightmove themselves of course – who will argue it’s a worthwhile investment, but it hasn’t proved to be for us. Instead, we focus on creating the best possible showcase of a home on a Rightmove standard listing.

Lifestyle photography, professionally-written copy and a beautiful brochure will all motivate quality enquiries and encourage serious viewings, much more so than paying for an enhanced listing. In fact, I’ve seen some pretty awful listings on Rightmove in the Featured or Premium spots, which is just lazy marketing, in my opinion. After all, there’s little point in paying for your shoddy listing to appear in a Featured or Premium spot if it’s not going to appeal to the right kind of buyers in the first place.

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.

Today’s post is by Andrea Morgan from Citrus Content.

I remember when I first got interested in property, I had moved back home and decided I enjoyed my own space and wanted my first home. I went to viewing after viewing, nothing caught my fancy. One day I was driving down a street and my mum said, that house would be perfect, I agreed. Spookily the house went on the market the following week, I viewed and bought – job done!

Life with property has not been as simple as then but one thing that has increased is my passion for property. My family think I am so funny and always joke about it calling me “Kirsty”, but yet who do they come to for property advice? After joining twitter Rightmove asked me to write a blog about being a Rightmove Addict, have to say I was honoured. Since writing my Rightmove Blog, it came apparent that there are hundreds of ‘me’ out there.

What I mean, is people who search on Rightmove or other property sites for not just buying, but for dream houses, to look at the local market, just to see what a particular property looks like inside. People who can spot a show home sign a mile away, not the big development signs but the little yellow ones. People who look in estate agent windows when passing, make note of properties that go on the market in their area and people who are property potty.

Some people commented on my blog that they were annoyed that I was looking at property online with no intention to buy. Online property sites have allowed greater access to the market, it has increased peoples passion about property. I wouldn’t mind the world looking at my house online as it only takes one to buy.

I have now many twitter friends in the property industry and some very likeminded people. Its great as I can listen to differing opinions to the market and see other peoples ideas of a great property. Tuesday’s Rightmove Crush is great fun, and I have now found myself researching properties the night before.

So to all you addicts out there, don’t struggle with your addiction on your own, there are others out there who will enjoy the journey with you. So come and join the gang, share your highs, your lows, your ideas and most of all, share your love for property.

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.

In these days where most anything we want to buy is but a click of the mouse away, do we really need an agent to sell our home? There are plenty of virtual estate agents out there ready to take our money and promise a sale at a fraction of the cost of an estate agent, but what are the potential pitfalls we need to be aware of?

You can’t get your property advertised on Rightmove and the other property portals without an agent of some kind. An agent is defined as someone who crucially will visit the property to take measurements and a written description that they will stand by legally, and can be held to account for if necessary. The property portals will not take responsibility for this, so an agent is needed. Private seller sites are not the same, and these will not put you on the property portals, so beware.

They are much better at selling lower priced properties. These tend to be the more usual terraced homes, city centre flats, suburban three bed semis and so on. If you have a 18^th century oast house, or converted watermill, you may well have less success. These highly individual properties need carefully crafted marketing campaigns to attract the right kind of discerning buyer, and this is usually best done face to face, which virtual agencies don’t offer.

You will have to do the viewings yourself. For many sellers, this is actually preferable, but do be aware that it’s not an easy thing to do, either for you or for your buyers. They can’t be as honest with you as they would be with your estate agent for a start, so you may well never hear any of their objections to the house, and if you don’t know what they are, well, you can’t overcome them. An agent can listen to a buyers protestations that your kitchen is too big or your hallway too dark, and make suggestions as to solutions. If you don’t know what their worries are, you can’t help them to see the options.

Their call centre staff are only really there to book viewings and take offers. They have not visited your home, so they can’t tell a viewer anything about it. There are some companies that have taken steps to overcome this factor, and often the person who originally visited your house to take the description can be available, but with up to 2000 properties on their books, this is often impossible.

Their photography and property brochure are of a minimum standard. This is often not enough to sell a premium or valuable property, which need the quality of the features and fittings represented by a suitable brochure, so sellers of individual properties may find it necessary to commission their own photography and brochure, at their own expense.

None of these factors is insurmountable and actually, in a buoyant market where you are confident of your home selling quickly, you can save a lot of money by using a virtual agent. However, if the market is slow and you are a busy person with no time to spare to take on some of these tasks, it’s often better to leave it to an experienced professional estate agent, and entrust the process to him. In the long term, this may well prove the best investment return.

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.

Standing in my kitchen at home on a Sunday morning, peeling potatoes one-handed, generic smartphone in the other, I’m being subjected to a courteously-phrased but stinging tirade. My crime? I’m “not letting” a buyer view the house she’s just spotted on Rightmove until the day after the Royal Wedding.

If you’ve ever been in or around estate agency you’ll know that, once in a while, one of those houses comes up that would just sell itself in seconds. After stiff competition on a three-way valuation, I am the proud custodian of keys to just such a beast.

According to Mrs Polite-but-Miffed, many agents of her acquaintance will happily sell her a house without marketing the property (one wonders at this point why she hasn’t bought any of them) and this is the “expected and professional” way of doing things. Mrs PbM thinks I’m frustrating her in order to “artificially boost the price”.

I disagree. By delaying viewings, I have had time to organise clearance, cleaning, gardening and wait for blue sky photos. A RICS survey has been commissioned for the benefit of both seller and prospective buyers. Laborious newspaper advert deadlines don’t matter, tortuous Rightmove upload speeds are immaterial and the Easter hols are safely out of the way. Even our Facebook and Twitter clientele have been duly informed. By the time viewings start the house will be pristine, with every corner ready for detailed inspection. Unproceedable buyers will have had time to get themselves into a better position and my vendors should have a truly representative selection of prospective purchasers to choose from.

Is there an advantage to selling core market properties “off market”? If you’re the shy and retiring type, maybe you don’t want the world to know your business (although in my city, they already do!). Swift revenue generation for agents is a major plus and the chosen buyer is likely to think positively when picking the agent to sell their home the next time. However, should we be prioritising their interests over the sellers?

It’s still a buyers’ market out there but every home deserves a shot at maximum exposure. How many times have we heard owners say with glee that their house “sold to the first person through the door” and we’re thinking, yes but did you get the best price from the best buyer?

The answer, as always, is down to time: time for the agent to agree a proper marketing strategy with the owner, time to get details right and advertising prepared; time for buyers to do proper research rather than a quick flip through Zoopla, Mouseprice et al, and time for vendors to concentrate on maximising the saleability of their home.

Sadly, time is an increasingly rare resource in estate agency these days.

STOP PRESS: since writing this post, we re-launched the house, and our approach generated 28 viewings in 1.5hrs last Saturday. Another 9 viewings since, 4 revisits + 5 nosy neighbours – vindication of our technique I think, especially as we have already received asking price offers!

This week’s guest blog is courtesy of the dashing Carey Gilliand. Apart from running my independent estate agent in Bath (Madison Oakley) with two partners, I am a local history buff, amateur photographer, proud father to two beautiful daughters and a keen gardener. For my sins, I have over 15 years experience selling homes across Bath & Somerset for both corporate and independent agencies.

www.madisonoakley.co.uk

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.

Remember Kate and Will’s Royal Wedding? If you’re anything like me, you were eagerly awaiting that first magical glimpse of Kate’s dress. For months, it was the subject of conjecture and rumours, and still managed to end up a complete surprise. No one knew who the designer was, the colour or the style. And don’t we just love it? The surprise for me, and millions around the world, added to the excitement and enchantment of that wonderful day.

Kate’s determination to keep the secret is something that every seller could learn from! When we sell our home, there is a tendency for the estate agent to try to show everything, warts and all, in the brochure and photography. The property of a client of ours, has been listed on Rightmove with 52 photographs! The problem with this, is that a buyer will make a decision about whether or not to view a home based on the photographs, and if there are images of every nook and cranny, they don’t need to come to see it! In this sense, less is definitely more. Or in marketing speak, you need to sell the sizzle, and not the sausage. Here are my top 5 tips for keeping your viewers interested and excited about your house:

1. Make sure there are no more than 6-10 photographs in your online advert. Any more than this, and you risk losing their interest before they have even seen the best features of your home;

2. Look at your description, both in your online advert and also in your brochure. Is the copy wordy and overly descriptive, complete with full measurements and every power point listed? It should be punchy, full of emotive language and enthusiasm. Create atmosphere with the wording, and make sure every word entices a buyer to view.

3. Your brochure should include up to 20 photographs, but at least half of these are better as ‘lifestyle’ shots. These could be a glimpse of the garden through the gate, a window seat with an open book and a cup and saucer, or a posy of flowers on a bedside table. If you have a country property, try a shot of muddy wellies by the back door, or a stack of logs in the sunshine. Urbanites could try a bowl of limes on a shiny kitchen surface, or a bottle of bubbly and two glasses on the coffee table, with just low lamps lit.

4. When your viewer arrives, make sure all your internal doors are closed. Invite them to go first into each room, opening the doors like opening a present. In this way, they ‘take ownership’ of the house.

5. Try to make some little secret corners, in your house and also in the garden. This might be a little reading corner, or a garden bench hidden by shrubs, and secret paths are loved by adults and children alike.

You only get one shot to make a great impression on a viewer. If they are under 40, they are most likely very used to browsing online, and with a click, you’ve lost them. Unless you can pique their interest and hold their attention long enough to create a desire to know more. Do it right, and they’ll reach for the phone, and book that viewing.

As for Kate’s dress, well it was certainly worth the wait.

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.