Disclaimer: These comments are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect the current opinions and policies of the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia.
With the local property market showing signs of recovery, the promotion and marketing of your property is critical in maximising the selling outcome. The marketing of property has always played an important role in achieving the highest possible price but when the number of properties available for sale extends beyond the fifteen year average of 12,000 homes metropolitan wide, (currently at around 15,000) sellers and their agents need to polish their marketing skills to ensure buyers compete.
The potency of promoting property over the internet on sites like http://www.reiwa.com remain important, however, with higher stock levels, properties can be easily “lost” amongst the thousands of on-line listings. It really is no longer good enough to limit your property to a single property web site, nor can agents simply take some pics with the office camera, write some descriptors, load it and forget it. Some schools of marketing thought suggest the main picture on all sites ought to be changed weekly along with the property script. Social media postings, video, property staging and re-marketing are increasingly popular ways to differentiate your property listing from others and could, in fact, become normalised and overtake portal listing as the preferred methods of property promotion.
Property floor plans are almost mandatory nowadays as is listing property as a “feature” so that it appears within the first few pages of a classified portal.
Rapidly changing market conditions and the internet has prompted changes in seller expectations of their agents. Ten years ago, sellers ordinarily did not expect an agent to open a property for inspection each and every weekend until sold, nor did they expect a sale within the first week. A mixture of a remarkably strong market in the early 2000’s and during the mining boom, competition between agents and extraordinarily low transaction levels has raised the bar in seller services from agents.
The market is cooler nowadays, and there can be marketing benefits derived from “resting” a property for a short time before “re-listing” it with renewed marketing and enthusiasm. Refreshing a property listing is important if on the market for more than thirty days, with new ways of promotion discussed and tried; try an auction, change the listing price, rewrite the copy, run an advert in the Herald, hold a twilight open, etc.
In market environments with cagey buyers and reasonable supply, an agent can no longer rely on the buyers simply coming to them. With sales volumes less than half compared to a decade ago, agents and owners need to think of new and exciting ways to promote their properties to affect an expedient sale.
by Hayden Groves
REIWA President
REIA Deputy President
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