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| What have the Romans ever done for us? |
I had an incredibly insightful conversation
with one of our clients at the weekend which started out with a Life of
Brian-esque question of “what has our estate agent ever done for us?” and
finished with her knowing so much more, hopefully, of what we try to do for our
clients in the background.
At the end of the conversation, I realised
that actually, maybe we aren’t telling our clients enough about what we are
trying to achieve on their behalf, probably in fear of sounding like broken
records.
So, my blog today is optional! If you are a
client of ours that is reading this, I do hope that you will read on and will
get to the end and have a moment of clarity. If you choose not to read on, we
totally respect that you might be very busy and might just want us to sell your
house without needing to know our background efforts.
I suppose whether you are still reading might
boil down to whether you are one of the lucky ones just now. You might have put
your house on the market with us and we might have sold it in one weekend with
multiple offers and a stampede of viewings…. but then again, you might be like
so many at the minute, wondering why it is that your house isn’t selling.
We all look round our own homes, most of the
time, and think “this would sell in a flash, I have such a lovely home!” but
this feeling of pride and sense of homeliness is packaged in beautiful memories
of friends laughing, parties, loved ones, Christmasses, children growing up…. etc
and we sometimes don’t appreciate that that feeling is one that comes from
living within a home and that we get used to the little jobs not having been
done that we always meant to do.
So, what is your Spencers Estate Agent doing
for you in the background to try to sell your home? We have been on many
marketing courses, including PR, social media, in house advertising and soul
searching into various methods of sponsorship and charity exposure and still
find it difficult to measure what actually works; or is it all about brand
awareness?
When your property comes onto the market with
Spencers we no doubt explain all about our new website, that we have just
redesigned from scratch, we talk about our incredibly well-placed office in the
heart of Ecclesall Road where we have been for 20 years, we tell you about our
longstanding relationship with Rightmove and all of the extra products that we
sign up for to try to increase our presence on our clients’ behalf, and about
our new relationship with Zoopla who are doing their utmost to rival Rightmove.
No doubt, we also tell you about the Property Guide, which still has a 16,000
distribution and readership in the city, and how we still feel that this method
of advertising carries much weight. We use a professional photographer for all
our photographs on every house and always take internal shots, no matter what
the condition, as well as using professional floor plan artists and an EPC
surveyor. Hopefully by outsourcing to specialists you get the very highest
quality. We undertook extensive research earlier this year when redesigning our
brochures to incorporate less text, bigger photos, floor plans, and easy to
read information.
When we have your property on the market we
then advertise on your behalf through other social media such as Twitter and
Facebook; did you know that there are 845 million people on Facebook? Half of
this number use Facebook every single day. The average person on Facebook has
over 250 “friends” so if you “Like” Spencers for example, and we share your
property with our friends, your property will be seen by thousands of people,
many of whom have an interest in property, are from the area, and have similar
likes and interests to you, because they are your friends too.
On Twitter for us to share a link to your property
and get retweeted, by our Lee Bullen for example, means that within seconds
your house will have been advertised to almost nine thousand people….
I think that it is easy to feel that you
don’t want people to be “nosying” round your house, but actually you really do
want people to be looking round and talking about your home, as it means that
someone who sees it might actually want to buy it!
So, if you are selling your house, don’t just
ask yourself what your estate agent is doing for you, but ask yourself is there
any way that you can help. Have you liked Spencers on Facebook yet? Have you
shared your property through social media? Do you follow us on Twitter? Do you
read the newsletter that we send to over 2500 people including local professionals
and property experts? Do you ever take time out to check our blog? Over 4000
people do, and it has been quoted and commented upon by some excellent national
journalists. We recently have been in two national publications advertising our
properties that they read through our blog and Twitter. We had the most
fabulous mention and photo in Period Homes and Interiors magazine, and had some
excellent articles in both The Property Drum and Negotiator industry magazines
through our blogging skills.
We are always looking into ways to increase
our brand awareness, and have a thousand thoughts and ideas up our sleeves for
your property to be seen by more people by increasing our brand awareness in
the city. If you have any ideas of your own that you want to share please get
in touch; this might be sponsorship of a football team, or a charity event, or
it might be adding some special incentives to your house sale that buyers might
notice. Let’s get creative together.
Please know that at Spencers, we will try all
sorts of things in the background to try to sell your house. We WANT to sell
your house and want desperately for you to get the best price and the best
possible buyer so please know that we will not give up and we really appreciate
your business. Thank you for reading.
