How often do you update your property listings? Earlier this year I wrote a post with some ideas for how to refresh the marketing of properties that have been on your books for a while (see previous post here).
Having attended a seminar with Rightmove recently, it appears that I made things overly complicated. Feedback from one of their surveys showed that the majority of customers thought that property photos should be updated every fortnight! This is in stark contrast to the agents' response who for the most part ticked the 6 months to never category.
Of course, actions speak louder than words and to put this to the test, we looked at properties with low click through rates (the number of times someone clicks on the property in search results to see the full tour). Changing the lead picture to another image from the existing photos caused, in some cases, an 8,000% improvement in the click through rate! By the law of attrition, more click throughs should equal more enquiries and to see what a profound effect such a simple change can have on the attention a property receives was a real revelation.
When you think about achieving stand out from other properties, it makes perfect sense. People trawl the portals regularly and will see the same properties over and over again. Using a different photo will provoke the reaction, "ooh, haven't seen that one before". Even if they have seen the full tour, will they remember? Have their circumstances changed? Have they softened that uncompromising stance on having a south facing garden?
I think this idea is just as applicable to other media too. I've often advised agents to vary their property photos in newspaper ads. You get wallpaper syndrome if your ads are filled with 30 images of similar looking 3 bed terraces. Be brave, use internals, show off what will make someone fall in love with a property and most importantly, use a different shot next week.
With some agents apparently using the old PR stunt of claiming to have sold out of properties, vendors who have been on the market for a while are likely to feel pretty miffed that their door is not being beaten down by hordes of applicants. Just rotating your lead image seems to be a simple way of generating a better response and getting some new leads to prevent having to put a "SOLD OUT" sign out of the window.
There's been some big traffic numbers from many of the portals recently, but how many of these visitors are active in the market and actually selling a home? This time last year 95% of active home movers had never heard of Globrix and 25% were using Google all the time to search for property.
This is a constantly evolving space and those stats are from a whole year ago. We need your help to find out what's really going on now...
For the 3rd consecutive year, the Home Moving Trends Survey will provide estate agents with actionable insight into the behaviours of the customers you value the most; your vendors. The survey is only open to those who are currently selling or have recently sold a property.
We are asking agents to encourage as many of their vendors as possible to take part to ensure we have a broad and diverse sample of results. Questions include:
How long did you look at properties before putting yours on the market? What is your primary reason for moving? What was important to you in selecting agents to value your property? What influenced your final decision on appointing an agent to sell your property?
The results in previous years have confirmed or denied many commonly held beliefs. Nearly ten times as many people said fees were not an issue in selecting an agent as said they were last year.
Every agent who generates more than 20 responses to the survey will receive a free summary of the results and findings once the survey has concluded.
You will find a template e-mail to send to vendors here.
Rightmove has started to introduce digital magazines for agents. These automatically created documents list all the properties an agent has on the big daddy of the portals in branded layouts which follow a template for property listings. The listing pages are also interspersed with promotional pages for the agent and for Rightmove.
Just like the good old local newspaper, these digital magazines are unlikely to be of much use in selling properties, but should serve as a handy marketing tool to attract vendors by showing off an agent's market share and aspects of their services. Because the magazines work on their own dedicated URL, there is plenty of potential to link to them on your own website and elsewhere online.
If you've been brave and stopped or reduced your local newspaper advertising, it's not necessarily a good idea to have the paper bin by the front door any more. But to go so far as putting together a proper magazine can be expensive and time consuming. This is probably why plenty of agents do a truly awful job of putting together in house magazines using basic applications like Word. With inbuilt print functions, Rightmove's new feature offers agents an easy way of replacing their own in house efforts and printing off a few copies of the digital brochure to stick by the front door would probably be a distinct improvement on current practice for some.
Coming at it from the other perspective, if you're an agent who already puts together your own magazine, then the Rightmove template may seem a bit basic by comparison. Getting your printed magazine online is very easy too though. There are lots of tools that turn PDF's into interactive e-brochures, but one of the best that I've seen (and the cheapest) is Issuu.
Simply upload a PDF to Issuu and it will create a fabulously feature rich digital magazine. There are a range of tools to help improve the user experience and give you, as the publisher, data and analytics too. One of the best features is the embedding tools which let you and others place your magazine virtually anywhere on the web, just like I've done here with this copy of e-Smart Property Magazine:
Beyond your own magazine, Issuu can be used for any document that you may have previously uploaded to your website as a simple PDF. Marrying web pages with printed pages is something that, when done properly, can dramatically improve the user experience and these freely available tools are worthy of further investigation.
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.
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...
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...
Rightmove's news on Monday that average asking prices actually rose in July spurred me to do a bit of desk research into property prices in my own neck of the woods. Following an hour or so of nosing around, I am pleased to report that I found 3 houses similar to mine for which the asking price has been increased in the last few weeks. A small anecdotal endorsement of Rightmove's figures. I also found price reductions, increases, then reductions again, carefully crafted modifications to property descriptions,
and various other changes which equate to a big sign saying "DESPERATE
TO SELL" on many properties. And I also found a number
of properties that have not reduced in price at all, despite having been listed
for well over a year.
At this point, I must point out that I am not an agent and do not have access to Rightmove Plus or the various other tools that agents can use to monitor these things. Yes, I do have a healthy interest and involvement in the industry, but for the purposes of this exercise, I was quite simply a homeowner with internet access...
My accomplice for this exercise was a utility called Property Bee. This innovative little utility for the Firefox web browser tracks changes made to the database of properties on Rightmove and a few other portals and automatically displays the information as part of the listing on Rightmove. The facility of having all the info appearing right there in the
listings of the big daddy of the portals is a useful tool which puts a lot of data in the hands of the web-savvy house hunter. Property Bee came into being in January 2008 which means that it's database is an almost perfectly complete record of the crash. The chequered history of many a property for sale throughout the last 18 months is laid bare in Property Bee.
I have written about ways in which online utilities can empower the buyer with information they would not have previously had before, but I am surprised this one has not caused more of a stir to date. You may be concerned about this information being publicly available for your listings, I'm sure some of your sellers would definitely not like it, but this level of transparency actually helps to dispel myths, allay fears and help those wishing to move (of which there are undoubtedly many) to make really informed decisions on what is happening in their local market. No spin, no national statistics. Whatever happens to prices, I think we'd all be behind anything that helps get more people active in the market again.
Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing activity is a fundamentally important job for every business, but there has always been a danger that anecdotal evidence and long held opinions can undermine proper data and analytics. Even companies that religiously track the source of every enquiry can have their figures cast into doubt by the simple fact that some staff and customers will always just tick the first option on the list of enquiry sources.
The internet and, more specifically, Google has helped to dispel a lot of myths in this area by providing proper analytics on visitors to your website, but in doing so, it has also created a myth of it's own; "the website is where we get all our customers, other marketing doesn't really deliver much."
Consider your own actions as a consumer: If you see or hear an advert for something of interest, do you immediately phone the company or do you go the website to find out more. Do you use the special URL on the advert or do you just Google the company name. If you decide to call having looked on the website, do you go back to the advert to get the number or do you use the one on the website. We often oversimplify the customer journey assuming that direct action has resulted from a single marketing medium.
It may have, it may not, but our ability to gain insight in this area is about to change with the arrival of the location aware web browser. In the recesses of Google Analytics is the ability to map the location of visitors, a great idea that has thus far been poorly executed because of the difficulty in establishing the exact location of a computer. The latest versions of Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome browsers include a Geolocation API which allows websites to know your location. Geolocation is part of the latest specification for HTML (the language of the web) which means it will become a standard feature that can be used on any website.
We have already seen plenty of innovation in location aware applications on mobile phones (see our previous posts on Zillow's iPhone App and Layar's Augmented Reality) and Geolocation will help to deliver a better web experience on your desktop or laptop too by automatically delivering content that is relevant to your location.
In improving the user experience, Geolocation will also improve the analysis. The browser effectively tells your website where you are when you access a page, and by collating this data and examining it, you will be able to determine what is driving traffic to your site in the real world as well as the online one.
You will be able to overlay leaflet distribution data with the location of website visits. You will be able to see if For Sale boards cause interest from the neighbours. You will be able to track where interest in a particular property or development is coming from and then adjust your marketing activity accordingly. You may even be able to pinpoint specifc properties that have read your web pages on 'selling your home'.
With better understanding of where your customers are, you will make better decisions on how to market yourself more effectively. There will no doubt be privacy issues to contend with as this technology gains interest, but the benefits of providing relevant content based on location will surely appeal to the majority.
Last week, whilst raiding their venture capital piggy bank to buy Propertyfinder, Zoopla launched a new feature on their site called AskMe Q&A.
This new feature is basically a forum to ask or answer any given question on property. Zoopla's intention is obviously to add value to the site and make it sticky for consumers not yet fully in the market, ultimately building towards the all important request for a valuation.
Forums with a singular purpose are not always a success because their focus is too narrow, but there are 2,800 questions posted on the site, so there is an audience willing to ask, although I would like to understand how a service launched last week has questions posted in 2007.
The vast majority of the questions remain unanswered at present. Some of them are daft and should simply be answered; Google it and you'll find out, but there are plenty of less daft ones which any agent worth his salt should be able to offer insight on.
The fact that the questions are indexed geographically and by topic; renting, selling etc, means that it
would be really easy for an agent to answer questions posed in their
area of operation and establish their authority with buyers and sellers from Zoopla's growing audience. What's more Zoopla provides a rating system so that those who answer lots of questions wisely will be highlighted.
I am a little sceptical about the way the AskMe service has been populated to date, but the idea of creating a forum for consumers to get advice from agents leading up to an opportunity to sell the property is a sound one on face value. For those who recognise the value of giving a little bit of free advice, this could go a long way to getting some lucrative listing opportunities...
If you've ever struggled to get the PrintScreen button to do what you wanted, here's a great little utility for printing web pages...
If you add aviary.com to the front of any URL in your web browser (e.g: aviary.com/www.estateagencyacademy.com) you will be able to save a perfectly rendered version of the web page as an image to your desktop.
What's more, once Aviary has rendered your web page, it gives you a range of simple yet powerful editing tools. This is perfect for capturing portions of a web page like a map or set of images. Fancy an alternative to a Rightmove comparables report, why not try using Aviary to capture a list of properties and the great looking maps from Nestoria to put in your vendor pack?
I'm sure you can think of your own reasons to capture web pages, but Aviary makes it really easy and really flexible.
