You’ve chosen your estate agent. The measuring and photos are done so I’d hope the next step is for your agent to send you the brochures to approve. Given the information below, they certainly should;
Code of Practice for Residential Estate Agents Section 7 clause J – “Prior to commencement of marketing, the written details of a property (sales particulars) must be agreed with the seller to confirm that the details are accurate.”
However, whilst accuracy is of course essential for both you and your agent, you also need to take some time to make sure the content of your brochure is also specifically designed to attract maximum interest. From our experience, the quality of content in some marketing material can be questionable so 10 minutes of your time analysing their efforts should really pay off in increased activity on your property.
Did you know, once your property is launched, whatever is first published is what the websites use to auto-send to all the buyers registered for updates? That information doesn’t get resent unless you drop the price by 4%+ or change estate agents so you’d do well to get it right first time or risk losing a lot of viewers.
Before we go into detail, its worth saying that, these days, the content of the physical brochure and the website content are usually pretty much the same so we use the term “brochure” to mean both.
Pricing
The single most important point on your details is the price. Getting the price right is a separate topic in its own right but, assuming you’ve already decided on a figure, take time to work out how best to express it on your brochures. There are plenty of choices, each with their own merits or disadvantages, including;
- Straight asking price
- Offers in excess of
- Offers in region of
- Guide Price
Some agents also seem to be advising advertising either a price range or even POA (Price On Application). Whatever you choose, just bear in mind the more unusual the technique, the less some buyers may understand what you’re trying to say.
Where are your brochures going to appear?
In one format or another, material from the brochures will be on the following;
- Physical copy or PDF – sent to buyers and downloadable from websites
- Property portals – Rightmove, Zoopla etc
- Window displays
- Social media – Facebook, Twitter
Here are a few of our thoughts on what you might want to check for;
As well as checking the full brochures, you’ll need to look closely at what will appear in the initial Rightmove search information – the idea here is to maximise the number of buyers “clicking through” to your full brochure;
You only get one chance to make a first impression amongst a sea of other properties and the average buyer spends less than 4 seconds browsing on each property. Make yours stand out from the rest and get them to make the crucial step of clicking on your home;
· Photo/s – unless it’s a “premium listing”, your property will have one or two photos in the initial search result (two on a desktop and one on some mobile devices) so make sure they are the best of your choices and the front of the property HAS to be included. If not, you risk buyers thinking you’re hiding something ugly and moving on.
· Type of property and address – both auto generated from the agents database but I’ve seen mistakes made here before and the address needs to be as comprehensive as possible (road, suburb, town)
· Initial text – 300 characters is about your limit which is tough to fit in everything about your property in so few words. Make sure your top selling points are packed in to make buyers want to know more but you don’t need location, type or number of bedrooms stated as that’s already above. Anything text wise that isn’t directly about your property and its benefits could be a waste of the viewers time so be ruthless and cut it out.
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