As estate agents in Bishop’s Stortford, we know how important viewings are in order to sell your home. Not just how many, but the quality of those viewings to and the way in which they are conducted. This week, we wanted to tell you a little bit about one of the properties we sold recently. You can see on the picture above that it was a beautifully presented property, the owner and her tenant had taken very good care of it and worked tirelessly to prepare it for sale (they’d clearly been reading our blog!)
When we met the owners of this lovely property they were fed up as they needed to get the property sold. The property had been on the market with another estate agent for around 4 months but had received only 3 viewings – hardly a recipe for success and unsurprisingly this had not resulted in a sale. The average number of viewings it takes before an offer is agreed is 10 – so quite simply, they hadn’t got the numbers through the door.
The Personal Property Shop team were on the case – we went in and identified the sticking points for this lovely property and formulated a whole new marketing strategy to get it the exposure it needed.
So what did we do?
Like for most of our other properties, we started by looking at the 3 P’s: price, presentation and promotion. Firstly, we knew that the presentation of the property was spot on thanks to the owner’s keen eye for interiors, so that wasn’t the issue.
So then we looked at price. Now rarely do I find that price is the reason properties don’t sell – it normally comes down to either the presentation of the property or the promotion (the marketing). Price really wasn’t the issue here but what we did was ‘re-frame’ the way we displayed the price. It was originally listed for £329,995 (clearly missing our price-rounding strategy!) so what we did instead was list the property at “offers over £300,000” with a guide price of £310,000 to £330,000 so buyers knew the range we were looking for. Read more about this in our zero-pricing article.
The next issue we identified was in the third P – Promotion. The original estate agent’s photos were of average quality and really not getting people through the door, nor was the description and the way the property was presented on Rightmove. With brand new professional quality photographs, some staging of the property and a new engaging, interesting description, we were sure the house would sell. We booked an open day, launched the property on Rightmove, Zoopla etc. and within minutes the phone was ringing…
The result?
After just 10 days we had booked 33 people for the open day – this is 10x what the original estate agent had managed to achieve! On the Monday morning we received 5 offers and the ‘winning offer’ was a whopping £330,000…100% of their original asking price!
The moral of this story?
A picture speaks a thousand words. Excellent property photos = more viewings = more offers = the best possible selling price for your home.
This is why we’re achieving such great results and selling properties that have been on the market for weeks, months or even years with other estate agents. So if you know someone who’s going to be moving home then get them to give us a call on 01279 719193 to ensure they too sell their home for the BEST price in the SHORTEST time frame.
What to read next? ‘Do I need to sell my home before I buy the next one?’