Sold, subject to things beyond our control

Foxtons made headlines for all the wrong reasons again this week over the allegation that a negotiator refused to show a property without the applicant taking mortgage advice from Alexander Hall; Foxtons' mortgage advisors first.

Farcical as the whole episode is, it is indicative of the fragility of the 'green shoots' of recovery. Activity levels are up, there is no doubt about that, but how much of this activity will actually result in completions?

Rightmove's latest survey has shown that consumer confidence has increased dramatically since the beginning of the year, but it seems likely that the basis of this confidence is driven much more by desire and hope than by understanding.

It remains highly debatable whether the banks will value properties at anywhere near the price that buyers agree to. It also remains horrendously difficult for the vast majority to obtain a mortgage at a decent rate, if at all. An article in The Times today suggests that lending criteria has the potential to get even tighter because of European directives introduced last year.

Consequently, there may be some busy negotiators inclined to feel the same way as the Foxtons chap, dismissing those who they're not sure are good for the money or the mortgage.

If your resources are stretched and stock is still limited, it is of course vital to ensure your team are qualifying applicants diligently and professionally. But remind them that you only ever sell to a small percentage of applicants and that percentage has more to do with market share than market conditions.

There is a will again, we just need to help find a way.

Who has helped you this year?

The response to this year's Estate Agency of The Year Awards has been amazing. Over 4,000 offices will be represented at this year's awards on 20th November, but we were asked by numerous suppliers if they could enter as well.

Although the main awards is only open to agents, it is important to recognise the contribution of these suppliers too. It's been a tough year for everyone and you may not have fared so well without the help and support of your suppliers and partners.

That's why we're asking agents to nominate their Supplier of the Year. This is your chance to tell the industry who you feel has really helped you to survive and thrive over the last 12 months. Is there a particular portal that has punched above it's weight? Has your software provider pulled out all the stops?

Nominating whoever you feel is deserving is simple, just tell us in 200 words or less how your supplier has helped you in the last year.

The nominations will be judged by the same expert panel who review the main award entries and the winner will receive industry wide recognition at the Awards in November.

Click here to nominate your supplier.

Everyday Calculations for Estate Agents

Remember those scientific calculators from school with all the extra buttons like TAN, SIN and COS? They did amazing things when learning trigonometry, but you'd be hard pushed to find a reason to use them beyond those lessons.

Wolfram Alpha is an amazing website that suffers from a similar problem. Unless you're uber geeky, you may struggle to find reasons to use it every day. For those who haven't seen this website yet, it is a sort of hybrid between Google and that scientific calculator. You enter calculations or queries on a vast array of subjects and Wolfy gives you the answer and lots of other stats, graphs and data. It tells you such wonderfully trivial things as what the weather was like on the day you were born and how many calories are in 10 peanut M&Ms!

For an estate agent though, there are all sorts of sensible day to day things that you can use Wolfy to help you out with. Here are some some examples...

Calculating square footage:

You can use it to calculate monthly mortgage payments:

One of the most useful is calculating future dates. Like working out what the completion date will be if it's 10 days after exchange:

 

There's probably lots more, so let me know your suggestions if you can find other things Wolfram Alpha can do better than the calculator and the old grey matter.

The power of 3rd party endorsement

You know what makes you better than your competitors, but quantifying it to potential customers isn't always easy. Many times have I heard agents complain that customers think we're all the same, but this doesn't stop them trying to show otherwise in their marketing efforts.

Unfortunately, many agents attempt to do this by making spurious claims about being the "best local agent" in their marketing materials, often by using ghastly pre-templated mailers touted by print shops who purport to be marketing experts. As Seth Godin observed in his recent blog post about a Realtor in the US, those who make vague unsubstantiated claims in their marketing are treated with at best apathy and at worst mistrust. Even if you believe you are the best, you can't say that you are with credibility. But who could? Well, there are two things that can help to influence potential customers on your behalf.

Firstly, there is the judgement of your peers. The Estate Agency of The Year Awards was set up to recognise the best in the industry in quantifiable terms. The award winners over the past 7 years have found this endorsement to be of great benefit to their marketing efforts because it is independent and authoritative.

Secondly, there is the opinion of your customers. In the social media age, consumers are used to talking about their experiences with companies and sharing opinions online. You can easily find reviews and ratings online for virtually any product or service and social networking helps to amplify the influence that these reviews can have.

Consensus is a powerful factor of influence and although very few companies can hope for a 100% positive record, you do need the vast majority to rate you positively. eBay is a great example of this; it's pretty rare to see anybody below a 90% positive rating, so by comparison that means that if you are around the 90% mark, you represent the worst of the eBaying community.

Consumers are searching online for objective 3rd party opinion and just a couple more negative reviews than good could make you the 'maybe' agent rather than the 'definitely' agent. Too many bad and you're the 'definitely not' agent.

I've been persuaded to stop typing and start talking about this particular topic in more detail and will be presenting a series of lessons on The Academy on how to use social media to win instructions in the next few weeks, but for now, I would like you to consider how your services could be a "Blank" and how customers may exhibit behaviours similar to Dave...

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...

FSB0%

0% commission. It's a tried and tested tactic that has been used to establish a presence in new markets. Many reassuringly expensive agents saw their market share severely dented when an audacious out of towner started doing the job for free in recent years.

Now a fresh assault on the reassuringly expensive agent seems to be afoot as Channel 4 Presenter, Sarah Beeny has launched a new self sale portal called Tepilo.com. She hasn't laid out on branded Mini's or cappucino machines, but Tepilo has adopted the 0% model in an attempt to tempt sellers away from the services of Estate Agents. It is completely free to list a property on Tepilo.com and the site offers the facilities to pretty much handle the whole selling process. Presumably, Tepilo's business plan is to earn commissions on all the services that you would expect an agent to refer usually. For example, the site will, very diligently, not allow you to list a property without a HIP and if you don't have one already they direct you to myhiphome.co.uk; a site which bears a striking resemblance (bar a few quid) to hipilo.co.uk.

This is by no means the first FSBO (For Sale By Owner) service to launch in the UK, (remember Tescopropertymarket.com?) but is there any reason why this one should succeed where others have failed? To succeed, they need traffic, but portal traffic is built on one singularly important factor; choice. Forget presentation, forget features or technologies, the buyer wants choice and for that reason you have to have everything that's on the market. Tepilo may attract a lot of listings, but a lot just doesn't cut it. Tescopropertymarket understood this and tried to cheat it's way to glory. They failed. Although Tepilo's property price info is supplied by Zoopla, I can't imagine any of the portals would dare bite the hand that feeds them by listing properties from Tepilo or vice versa.

Even in a recession though, fortune favours the brave and somebody even bigger than Tesco could upset the applecart and give Tepilo a big helping hand. If Google rock up with their real estate search in the UK in the next few months, Tepilo will have it's chance to shine. Google won't make it's property listings as fully featured as Rightmove's or Primelocation's, it doesn't need to. Globrix and Nestoria have laid the foundations for property to be found through a search engine and then presented through an agents own website already. Tepilo can feed a search engine in the same way an agent's website would. This interdependency is critical; If you want to see the 10 or 15% of the market which is FSBO properties, you have to go to Tepilo, if you want to see the other 85 or 90% of the market, you go to Rightmove et al. But if you want to see everything, you go to Google. Not instead of, but beforehand.

It is an interesting irony that someone who has built a career on chronicling the misadventures of the 'average' homeseller, should now decide to facilitate what will no doubt be a comedy of errors for some. A few of the sellers that have already listed on the site have made a real hash of presenting their properties (here's my favourite thus far). Perhaps Tepilo will provide Channel 4 with an almost limitless supply of property selling horror stories, perhaps it will be another short-lived FSBO folly or perhaps (only with help from the aforementioned) it will finally provide the UK with a viable self sale solution. Interesting times...