10-Step Marketing Plan

Agree on a ‘guide price’ (NOTE: guide price, not asking price or valuation figure).

This should be based on factual market evidence and not simply be the price you’d prefer.

It’s important to remember that the purpose of a guide price is only to attract maximum interest. It has no relevance to the true value of a property. In fact, the wrong marketing price can seriously affect your chances of achieving a premium price.

Too high and your house may not attract enough interest and stagnate on the market, too low and you will attract people who are unable to pay the premium price even if they wanted to.

It could be that you and your agent feel your property should be worth £530,000, but it’s agreed that the best marketing approach to adopt in this particular instance is to market the property at a 'guide price' of £520,000, in order to gain the most exposure and achieve the highest price for your property.

It’s best to market at a round figure i.e., £400,000 as opposed to a psychological pricing £399,950. This will mean you appear in searches up to £400,000 ‘and also’ from £400,000. At £399,950, you would only appear in searches up to £400,000.

Arrange for perfect pictures.

Remember that you don’t get a second chance to make a first impression, so quality is crucial, especially when you consider that virtually ALL buyers now search online for properties in the initial stages.

Ideally, you as the property owner will choose an estate agent who understands the benefit of professional style photography and so includes it in their service for free.

A professional will ensure that the lighting is correct, and the camera is placed in the correct position in the room to achieve the greatest angle and present your home at it’s very best.

We have our very own robotic camera to make sure the imagery & property virtual walk through are worthy of your property & they are all professionally edited.

Arrange for perfect pictures.

Make sure the property brief or description is benefits-focused and does not simply list its features.

So many estate agents rely on the time-honoured feature-based phraseology, such as: “XYZ estate agency are delighted to present to the market this delightful three-bedroom semi-detached house…”.

Buyers want to hear about the lifestyle that comes with the property. They just want to know whether or not it could be their next potential home. Therefore, the description should sell a potential lifestyle. Something along the lines of: ‘We love to entertain, which is why we created the large open plan, kitchen dining room’ would be more attractive to potential buyers.

All 'active' buyers will be regularly searching for a property online so it's very important that you have significant online presence.

But what about the 'aspirational buyer'? Ask any estate agent and they will tell you that they have, at some point, sold a property to a buyer who wasn't actively looking.

They are more of an aspirational buyer. You know the type, the one who saw the board on the school run, the ones who would 'love to buy that house if it ever came on the market'. You also need to market to these buyers.

A For Sale board is a great way to do this locally, but what about the opportunist buyers who aren’t local or who may not see the board?

A great way to attract these potential buyers is to place an advert on Facebook, we do lots of digital advertising across social media, YouTube & Google; targeting your demographic of likely buyers. As well as email, and call outs to our extensive database before fully launching your property 'to market' on Rightmove.

The aim here is to reach as many potential buyers as possible, including those who hadn't truly thought of selling until your property was served to them.

Make sure your agent erects a FOR SALE board to attract any local aspirational buyers.

After our extensive pre-launch marketing to get viewings booked and drive as much exposure to your property as possible we then take your property and launch it onto the 'portal' market, the details will be uploaded to the major property portal, Rightmove. At any one time, there will be a pool of buyers looking to buy a property just like yours. For example, there were ...... property searches for a property in PR4 (where our HQ office is based) at the time of writing and there were ...... buyers registered with rightmove.co.uk at the time of writing all signed up to receive alerts about new property for sale in Preston.

These are the ones who are most likely to pay a premium price for your home and the goal is to entice two or more buyers to compete for your property. Make sure your agent is also capable of texting and emailing relevant property details to all registered buyers.

Regarding Viewings: If you’re hoping to hold an open viewing, then set a day and time when this can take place. (WARNING: As you would imagine, there is a very particular way that an open viewing should be managed and executed. If it’s unsuccessful, it can actually be very damaging to the ongoing marketing of the property).

We find that holding an open day works well for viewings to increase excitement & exposure.

We also advocate to pre agree two days and time slots per week with your agent, when 90% of viewings can take place.

The aim here is to keep viewings blocked together to create a sense of urgency and competition between buyers. This is the best way to achieve the highest price.

It’s CRUCIAL that your estate agent accompanies every viewing that takes place.

The demand is there. You just have to make sure that your property is marketed in such a way so as to ATTRACT your potential buyers.

One week into the marketing of your home, you should ensure that your agent is monitoring the effectiveness of the marketing and analysing the detail views on Rightmove; making improvements or changes where necessary.

The detail views should be above similar properties and ideally outperforming the branch average.

Usually, there will be around 8–12 images of your property featured online. USE THEM ALL. Ensure that your estate agent is rotating the lead image weekly, to keep your property imagery fresh.

It may just be the kitchen shot that creates that ‘click through’ which prompts an enquiry, which leads to a viewing, which helps to develop a potential buyer’s emotional attachment which can lead to an offer being made at a premium price.

With all the above marketing, your agent cannot afford to miss an enquiry.

Do they make sure ALL enquiries are captured 24/7 and an enquiry is NEVER missed.

It is important to ensure that your estate agent never misses a telephone call and therefore potentially an enquiry/opportunity/viewing.

That missed call could mean you have just missed the buyer who would be willing to pay a premium price.

Research carried out by a leading telephone answering company suggests that:

• 86% of callers will not call back if their call is unanswered
• 86% of callers will not call back after hearing an engaged tone
• 75% of callers hang up after six rings

This all makes perfect sense to us. We rarely leave people a voicemail, preferring instead to hang up and text them.

The development of the internet and smartphones has meant that information is now available at our fingertips and that we as a society have become very demanding.

If someone is interested in your home and wants to view it immediately but can’t reach your agent, they’re more than likely to view the house around the corner from you, instead, possibly fall in love with it and then don’t even consider your property.

You may well have lost that potential buyer.

At MovingWorks we communicate outside of the normal 9-5pm. Our Property Partners often communicate with their clients via WhatsApp to make sure they're up to date, they are very flexible with communication. We also have a 24/7 phone service, so a call never goes unanswered.

It’s clearly CRUCIAL that viewings are carried out correctly otherwise steps 1 to 7 would have been pointless if you fall at the viewings hurdle.

Here are a few golden rules:

• ALWAYS have your agent show buyers around. Buyers feel more comfortable and will be more honest. If it’s not for them, you want to know quickly and move on. Not have them spend 30 mins of wasted time just to not upset you.
• ALWAYS block the bulk of the viewings together twice a week.
• The aim of a viewing is to ‘show’ the buyer the house not ‘sell’ the buyer the house.
• First viewings are emotional; second viewings are logical.

It’s good if the owner can be in the property during a 2nd viewing to answer any questions the agent which cannot speed up the decision-making process.

Owners tend to talk (a lot) about all the things THEY love about the house and on a first viewing, it’s totally irrelevant. They don't always have the same requirements you do from your home for example the size of the drive or garage may well be irrelevant if they don't own a car.

Honest, unfiltered feedback from every single viewing is crucial to your sale success as it will help with step 10.

On average, it will take about 10 viewings to secure a buyer and as a property can only have one buyer, feedback from the other nine people can help you to secure that offer.

STOP LISTEN you're getting FEEDBACK

After three to four weeks, if your property is still for sale, then you and your agent need to have a face-to-face meeting to review the marketing and interest to date. Look at marketing reports and Click Through Rate reports, feedback reports and market comparable reports (which show any similar properties that have been sold whilst yours has been on the market).

During the meeting, you need to discuss how you plan to move forward.

Don’t just leave your property sitting there on the market, hoping someone will come along and make a sensible offer at some point.

Control the process.

10 Offers and Negotiation

Prepare

• Assess objectives - yours and theirs
• Decide on areas of possible flexibility
• Plan approach and sequence of events

Discuss

• Exchange positions and issues
• Create a positive working climate
• Create a positive working climate

Propose

• Specify what you want
• Seek compromise - get a win/win if possible
• Remember optimum and fallback positions

Bargain

• Ask for what you want - modify if you need
• Don’t concede without exchanging
• Reiterate the value of your solution

THE MOST crucial part. In fact, Steps 1–9 will all have been followed in vain if you and your agent get this part wrong. By this stage, you would have hopefully received a number of offers from competing buyers, so it’s important that this part of the plan is handled with care.

1. Remember that most buyers will have made an offer on the basis of at least some degree of emotional attachment to your property and although you don’t want to manipulate that, you do want to use it to your advantage so don’t be afraid to negotiate hard.
2. Don’t be offended by really low offers. Any offer is a good offer. It means someone wants to buy your property. It’s down to your agent to negotiate correctly and achieve the highest price possible.
3. If you receive one or more offers early on in the marketing process, be very cautious in trying to beat the market and holding out for more. Research shows that the best offers usually come in during the first four weeks of marketing a property.
4. Make sure EVERY offer is correctly qualified, identifying both the potential buyers’ chain and financial position before entering into negotiations with them. Between 30-40%** of property sales fall through before exchange of contracts, one of the principal reasons being that the correct due diligence wasn’t carried out by the estate agent at the point of negotiation.

The aim when marketing a property for sale is to quickly attract as many potential buyers as possible, which will likely create multiple offers from multiple buyers, securing the best price for your property.

By implementing a systemised plan to achieve a premium price, you are likely to achieve c.4.5% more for your property. It’s in your interest to create demand as quickly as possible, as a drop in interest usually means a drop in price, too.

Things to bear in mind:

• It’s important that one expert estate agent, who you are on mobile number terms with, is handling your sale from start to finish. They will be the one who is most knowledgeable about you, your property and it's marketing history.
• The cheapest agent is the one who extracts the best price from the marketplace, not the one who charges the lowest fee… and that takes effort.
• Early viewings are crucial for potential buyers to attend an open viewing or block viewing. If there’s a valid reason as to why they can’t attend, make sure you squeeze them in on the understanding that you are unlikely to accept an offer until you have at least held the first open house viewings.
• This plan will work in any market, whether rising or falling. The plan is the consistent factor, the marketing price is the variable.
• Many property owners think it prudent to market their property with multiple estate agents - it isn’t. What you really need is the best estate agent with a strong marketing plan.

Signing up with multiple estate agents can actually affect the price that the buyer will offer, as you appear to be flooding the market and will look desperate, which in turn will likely attract lower offers.

When a house is on the market with 2 or more agents, it gives out the impression that the owner is ‘desperate to sell’ (and so you lose your position of strength when negotiating) and also gives out the impression that it’s a hard sell… not a good look.

Although it has been described as one of the most stressful activities, moving house should actually be an exciting time. With this plan, you’ll find that each stage of the process becomes more structured and organised, rather than chaotic, meaning you can relax, safe in the knowledge that the process, the plan and your personal agent are doing all the hard work.

We hope that having read all 10 steps, you can now understand the importance of a well planned and executed marketing plan.

If you would like to talk to a member of our team about implementing our tried and tested plan for your property, simply contact our office using the details below.

We’d love to help.