Spending Money To Build An Agent’s Profile, Not To Sell Your Home

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Vendors may choose an agent/agency to list with simply because of the agent’s high profile in the property pictorial section of the local or metropolitan newspaper (or other publications). In this case, the prospective vendor assumes that because an agent/agency has a lot of costly pictorial ads in a newspaper or other publication, they must therefore be the best at selling property.

This isn’t necessarily the case.

It may mean they (the agent) are great at convincing their sellers to spend thousands of dollars more than what is needed. The fact is, that each and every real estate sales training course I’ve ever been to, have taught sales people to get their vendors to spend up big in the major media as well as local papers/magazines. The reason? This accomplishes three things:

(a) To generate a large number of buyer enquiries and consequently create numerous inspections of the property (they know this will satisfy your need to see lots and lots of activity - again regardless of quality - so don’t expect many well qualified leads);

(b) To hopefully sell the property;

It’s interesting to note though that in this day and age, the majority of our best qualified buyer enquiries come directly from the internet.

Think about it. If you’re serious about buying property, are you going to rely solely upon the selective number of properties advertised in print media, with its great limitations on space and therefore information, or the thousands of properties and unlimited amount of information that’s presented on well constructed websites and property portals?

You see, many agents still continue to present properties in the print media with their vendors as a secondary consideration. They know full well that the majority (see below) of buyers now use the internet to discover and research real estate. Their primary consideration however, is getting more listings for their agency. Sad, but true. Now, I’m not saying there is no place today for advertising property using print media. I am saying though that you should be wary of the motivation for your agent suggesting it.

The key here is to determine who your buyer is (i.e. the person/s who will see the greatest value in your property and therefore pay the most) and then you can determine how they will most likely find your property. Are they more likely to use the internet? Or are they more likely to look in the print media? You must answer that question first before committing large sums of money on expensive print media.

The majority of buyers use internet portals such as www.realestate.com.au and www.domain.com.au to find their next home. Provided internet marketing is conducted intelligently the ‘new school’ way with comprehensive descriptions, a half dozen or so images, virtual tours and floor

plans, buyers will tend to focus their attention on this form of media. And besides, it is extremely cost effective for the home seller, has a long shelf life and I’ll say it again will expose your property to about 90% of the buyers in the market right now.

Where a traditional local agent supposedly needs, say, 1% to 2% of the property’s value to advertise it (with the objective of concluding a sale within, say, a 60 to 90 day period); an agent with a more sophisticated approach to marketing (e.g. they determine who the buyer is and how they’ll most likely find the property, are internet savvy and employ a professional copywriter to write high impact ads) achieve similar (and in many cases even better) results with 0.5% to 0.75% investment.

Please keep in mind, your advertising budget will be dependent on the speed in which you need a sale. If you need to sell in 30 days consider an advertising budget equivalent to 0.5%to 1.0% of the sale price. In this case your marketing campaign should use both internet and print media.

The best way to choose an agency these days is by firstly looking at their website; find out first hand from them what they have sold and ask them for proof that the prices they have achieved are market value or above. Before agreeing to spending your money on advertising, understand who your buyer is which will help you to determine how best to reach them.

It is this point that should ultimately determine your promotional budget not an agent’s bias towards costly print media (for whatever reason).

The Key:

Choose an agency that aims to sell property for full market value in the most cost effective way, rather than simply judging them by the size of their advertisements in the print media. After all, you’re not hiring an agency just so that they can use your money to boost their profile to other sellers are you?

*Note: buyers in some locations and for some specific property types may still be using the print media as their primary research tool. For example, home sellers of top end property over $1,500,000 wanting to sell on a 60 to 90 day time line should still consider investing in print media.