The Solution:
When a property doesn’t sell it’s always for one of these three reasons: Price, Presentation or Promotion. The first thing we always do is look at these three aspects:
Price
We evaluated the current asking price by comparing it to other properties that had recently sold in the area and based on our local knowledge. The asking price was competitive but not so cheap that buyers would wonder why it was so low.
Presentation
Quite often properties don’t sell due to the way they’re presented. This could be anything from too much clutter to a total lack of personality; that’s why we offer a free home staging service. However, poor presentation wasn’t the case here. In fact it was in my opinion perfectly staged for sale.
Promotion
So that only leaves the promotion or in other words, the way the property has been marketed. This is where we found the issues that needed resolving. I’ll explain exactly what we did differently and why it worked.
Photography
With nearly all buyers now turning to the internet to find their next home, your Rightmove/Zoopla listing has got to be the best it can possibly be. Most buyers will go straight for the photos of a property first as these will be the deciders as to whether they even bother to book a viewing. In this particular case, the photography was not up to scratch. Don’t get me wrong the photos certainly weren’t terrible but they didn’t show the property in its best light and definitely were not appealing to potential buyers.
Solution:
Our professional photographer spent several hours (it is a big house!) taking beautiful photos of the inside and outside of the property. The photos he took were light, crisp and made the most of every single room. He also took some ‘lifestyle shots’ which are photos that ‘capture an image to reveal a story’. In other words they get buyers imagining themselves living in the space e.g. a shot of the nearby river. The best photo was an ‘elevated shot’ taken up high and showing off the grounds of the property – a much more flattering main photo.
Description:
Not only do your photos need to be top class when selling but so does the written description of your property. In this case the description lacked interest and wasn’t particularly engaging. It was more of a list room by room which certainly wasn’t inspiring any potential buyers to pick up the phone.
Solution:
We rewrote the entire description from scratch as the original really didn’t cut it. Our new description included interesting adjectives, key selling points and really ‘sold the lifestyle’ and benefits of the property.
Asking Price:
The original asking price (with the other agent) was £1,295,000. We changed this to £1,300,000 immediately. Why would we do that, surely the first price is better? Well it’s not and here’s why! I’ll explain how it works:
- Buyer 1 – searches on Rightmove for a property ‘up to £1,300,000’ in price – no problem they’ll see the property listing online.
- Buyer 2 – is searching for a property priced ‘between £1,300,000 and £1,500,000’ – well they won’t even see the listing in their search…AT ALL! Despite the property being within their price range, it simply won’t show up.
Solution:
Instead, by rounding it up to £1,300,000, the property appears in BOTH searches, potentially doubling the amount of viewings. That’s why the old fashioned ‘99p technique’ simply doesn’t work in the modern day property market.
When selling your home you need an agent that really understands and implements modern marketing methods. Times have changed over the last few years and so our approach to selling property has too. We take as much care over selling each and every property as if they were our own and so put in the effort to produce quality marketing which as you can see, gets results!