Get proactive with stubborn vendors

I was surprised by the number of properties that have been for sale for over a year and have not dropped their prices when I was poking around Rightmove the other day. The simple reality is that even if the market has bottomed out now, an overpriced property a year ago will remain an overpriced one today.

We know this, our clients may grudgingly acknowledge it too, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to accept it and lop £30 grand off. If you're having these sorts of arguments with house proud vendors at present, you may wish to consider ways in which you can turn the conversation to more positive ideas rather than price cuts.

Why not be pro-active and offer them a summer marketing makeover? Get the property marketing refreshed and ready for the autumn. New photography? Get rid of those wintery looking originals. A bit of room dressing? It never ceased to amaze me how our photographer could make the most boring looking room seem more attractive using £20 worth of furniture props from TK Maxx!  Maybe get a 3D floorplan done and how about this for the house proud seller; their property's own website?

EstateCreate.com is a new service which lets agents set up a property with it's own website really easily. Using a templated system, you can feed existing property details into an individual site which includes images, floorplans, maps, schools info, local area info or any other content that you wish to include. It makes it really easy to present a property online and is sure to be a hit with vendors. Have a look at this video for a full tour of the features...

The clever bit is that EstateCreate will register a bespoke web address for the property as part of the service. Anyone who manages DNS records for web domains will know what a laborious task this would be for lots of individual property sites, but EstateCreate does it all for you automatically. Because the sites work from data via feeds, they require no manual updating. Vebra, CFP and Core users can actually automate the process of creating sites for every property directly from the software to EstateCreate.

The features that EstateCreate provide are very simple and very cost effective. If you visit the site at present, you can get a free trial for a month. So, why not pick some properties that could do with a marketing makeover and speak to the vendors about trying something new? They will love the idea of their address having it’s own web address and it also gives you a good excuse to do a “Julie Ryan” and leave some business cards with the property’s bespoke web address with the neighbours. Turn a negative, into a positive, into a listing opportunity...