In this article we’ll look at what you can do to keep a property listing fresh and why it’s so important.
The first thing to look at is to rotate the photos. The most important photo is the main image that will be the first thing buyers see when looking online. At AKS we take two different versions of this photo, possibly from a different angle or elevation, and swap them every 2 weeks.
We also re-order the other photos too making sure to especially change the featured ones (which are the first handful of photos that you see on Rightmove). Doing both things in conjunction will completely change the look of a property advert, and cause buyers who may have previously scrolled past to pause & click for more details.
It’s also important to keep the photos themselves up to date. If something has changed in a property such as a new carpet or any decoration than that room should be re-photographed. Equally as the seasons change and photos start to look like they may have been taken some time ago than they need to be re-taken too. It’s not a great look when you see properties on the market in February that still have Christmas decorations in the pictures!
Another way of keeping a property listing fresh is to look at adjusting the price (note that I said adjust rather than reduce!). A good way of doing this is to change from an asking price to an ‘offers over’ approach. We recently sold a property that had previously been marketed at an asking price of £485,000 with the seller looking to achieve something close to £480,000. We adjusted the price to offers over £475,000 and ended up accepting an offer of £480,000.
The reason this adjustment was so effective was that it brought it into a different price banding in buyers online search so brought it to the attention to a different audience of buyers. It’s a particularly effective strategy for us at AKS because we have an enhanced Rightmove package that automatically puts any property where we adjust the price back to the top of the search as a ‘Featured Property’.
The reason it’s so important to make these tweaks and changes is that freshening an advert up makes a significant difference to the number of clicks and viewing requests it gets.
It’s especially important in a slower moving market like we’re currently experiencing, with properties in DE65 taking an average of 87 days to find a buyer. If a property advert is just made live and left, it will very quickly start to look stale and will then receive less interest than it should.
Sellers need to be confident that their estate agent is doing everything in their power to get their property sold which is another reason it’s important to make sure that on-going changes are happening to an advert. You don’t want to be reducing your price if you’re not confident that everything else is being done as it can be all too easy for an agent to just suggest a price reduction!
Your property advert is crucial as it acts as the magnet to bring in potential buyers. I hope this blog has been useful in giving you an idea of what could/should be done to make sure it’s the most effective magnet it can be!
