As many businesses have found, people looking for property now start their hunt online. According to the two largest property portals Rightmove and The Digital Property Group, two million ‘unique users’ log on to their sites every month. Not all will be serious house-hunters, some will be tyre kickers or nosey neighbours looking for their regular fix of what some call ‘property porn’.
With over 900,000 homes on the market in the UK and 2,000 over £1m in central London, how can you find the needle in the proverbial haystack? More importantly, if you want to be one of the roughly 8% of homes for sale that sell each month, what do you need to do to both catch the eye of a genuine potential purchaser and just how much information should you make available?
Let's start by looking at the different mediums people can use to search. Computers or mobiles with internet access give anonymity and instant gratification for anyone looking. Property portals like Zoopla, Primelocation and Rightmove each provide the supermarket equivalent of browsing for property putting around 95% of available homes in one place. You can look for sales or lettings properties, by area, price and refine on many by ‘freshness’, distance from a station or within a school catchment area.
With millions looking every month, most people are familiar with searching on a computer. Mobiles with their ability to look ‘close to where I am’ gives many people even better data and the latest iPad Apps provide an extraordinarily sophisticated experience. Many people’s first and last search engine now has a property channel with listings gathered from more specialist web sites and almost all these site will allow you to set up email alerts or, better still, provide what’s called an RSS feed - repeating your search and delivering it to your news reader without even having to register your details. Anonymous searching for the ultimate voyeur!
Sifting through all the homes that apparently match your requirements is hard work even with a computer. Some estate agents ‘forget’ to take off homes that have let or sold as this would leave some with almost nothing to advertise. Some homes are advertised by more than one agent (and look desperate as a result), not always at the same price. Estate agents have now had to become new-media experts as they find ways to make their clients' properties stand out from the crowd and get those all important eyeballs.
Google Maps, Street View, Up My Street and the Land Registry already make it much easier for people to look and evaluate a property without even leaving their home. Although some agents try and fight this, there is no point trying to reverse the tide of technological progress. You can’t hide a sub-station from the Google Cameras. Make your advert seem more credible than the rest of the web by offering pictures, floor plans, even video or people will think that the scaffolding which Street View has in front of your neighbour's house when they snapped your road two years ago was current.
We spend a fortune on both our own web site and on the content we add to it to make it more relevant to search engines and to the property portals we use. They in turn are trying to make everyone equal which is fine so long as our clients are slightly more equal than others. Big pictures and clear text without the hyperbole that some agents seem to think adds to their advert.
Knowing where people are when they are looking at an advert means you can make it easier to ask to see your property rather than a competitors. Make sure that the link to the full details works, that it loads quickly and that when they want to arrange to view, it’s easy and obvious how to do this.
Information these days is expected to be free. Don’t try and make people pay by asking them to register, forcing them to undertake a survey or spamming them with offers of mortgages or removal help. At W.A. Ellis we have started to add video tours to some of our listings. Not because we want to substitute a physical inspection (or indeed give burglars a leg up!) but because our job is to sell our clients' properties rather than market them. For-sale-by-owner web sites offer the chance to market your house but they won’t actively put your home in front of buyers, persuade the press to write about it or put on an open day to encourage people to choose your house rather than one of the other hundreds that they could be distracted by.
The internet may have made finding a home easier but for many people it has made selling one much harder. Homes stacked high in an electronic supermarket are treated as a commodity and all too often sold cheap. Like a rare picture, a fine wine or a vintage car, we try to place a property perhaps to someone we know who is looking but who isn’t scouring the internet every day. Add in the interest that can be generated from adverts online and that’s how we can achieve a premium price and a satisfied client. We like technology but letting and selling premium property is a people business, not something we want mechanised.
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