Even though there is a lot of talk about demand outstripping supply in the property market, vendors operate in a highly competitive market. With most buyers beginning their search online by checking out online property portals, listings only have a limited amount of time to stand out from the crowd and make a prospective buyer pay attention.
Therefore, vendors need to ensure prospective buyers see their homes online, and the importance of impact marketing when selling is crucial. Creating a striking first impression and guaranteeing people see your listing is vital, and we recommend some strategies to ensure your property connects with the right people.
Professional photography is essential in grabbing attention
The impact that images have on prospective buyers is enormous. Descriptions are imperative and provide useful information, but when it comes to stopping people from scrolling and making buyers visualise the home, images are essential.
In the present day, smartphone technology ensures many people have a high-quality camera in their pocket. However, great images rely on more than fantastic technology. The best images that promote a home and grab attention are styled to support key features and ensure a house looks at its best.
Hiring a professional photographer costs money, but the cost is more than often justified by the results. A professional photographer highlights key features, they remove potential problems, they use lighting effectively, and they will spend time on the process to create stronger results.
When you only have a second or two to grab a person’s attention, you need the best quality images, and hiring a professional photographer brings excellent results.
Virtual tours
Of course, improving technology means that many prospective buyers demand more than images of a house. Virtual tours allow people to walk through a house, creating the flow of the property and ensuring buyers get a genuine feel for what a home has to offer.
Images only tell some of the story, and savvy buyers know that staging and manipulation of pictures happens. Therefore, virtual tours allow for a more honest representation of the property.
Also, virtual tours allow people to review another person’s home from the comfort of their own home or office. The use of virtual tours may lead to a reduction in viewings as some buyers who would have been interested now decide against pursuing an initial interest.
However, buyers who have taken a virtual tour of the property, and who are still interested are likely to be genuine about their intentions. This outcome means the vendor can reduce the time they spend with people, but make sure that the time they do spend with others is relevant.
Social media boosting
It is essential to promote your home on social media, and the best estate agents provide this service. Social media advertising is a cost-effective way to promote the property, and it is possible to create highly-targeted campaigns. Therefore, social media boosting is an effective way of ensuring your promotional posts are seen by people who are most likely to have an interest in your property.
Modern technology and communication advances have created the opportunity for impact marketing to be hugely influential in property marketing. If you are looking to sell your house, call on the services of an estate agent who can utilise the very latest in technology and marketing methods. To promote your home effectively, call on Hunters.
Buying a home is a massive moment in a person’s life. It is impossible to remove all risk from buying a home, but buyers can make an informed decision that helps them feel more confident about the process. If you are selling your home, you can play a part in helping a buyer feel more assured about their decision.
As buyers need information, it makes sense for a vendor to provide buyers with as much information as they possibly can. Of course, there is a lot of information to share about a home, so it is essential to provide information that buyers need and which helps them make an informed decision.
Given that Rightmove is the leading online property portal in the United Kingdom, their research findings into what buyers look for should help vendors prepare and present their property. A study undertaken by the property site spoke to 10,000 people and the result was 33% of prospective buyers would be less likely to inquire about a property if there wasn’t a floor plan in the listing. The same survey also found that 20% of buyers ignore a property listing if there is no floor plan.
When you sell your home, you want to attract as many buyers as you possibly can. The thought that one in five prospective buyers will ignore your listing if there isn’t a floor plan will be a warning sign for many vendors. Most vendors are unwilling to allow that many potential buyers ignore their listings, and this means adding a floor plan to your listing should be an integral component of the sales process, not a nicety or additional feature.
A floor plan provides facts for buyers
As has already been stated, buyers need information, and they want evidence that helps them feel confident. It is vital that buyers feel as though a home meets their functional requirements, but the house must meet their emotional requirements too. These needs can often feel like very different things for a buyer, but both of these needs can be sated with facts.
We all know that staged images and well-lit shots enhance some property listings. In a competitive marketplace, it is crucial to grab buyer attention, and therefore, producing images that appeal to buyers is part of the process. However, while buyers are attracted to stylish photos, they know that there is a practical aspect in the process, and a floor plan provides details regarding space, size and flow of the home.
A floor plan allows buyers to picture themselves in the house
One of the most critical aims in presenting property is to help the buyer imagine living in the home. This outcome is why decluttering is an essential component of the sales process. When you declutter a house, you create more space, but you also remove the personal artefacts and memories that mark your house out as your home.
These images and memories may be comforting to you, and a lot of prospective buyers find them cute, but they act as a barrier when selling your home. If a buyer views a house and it features images of the homeowners family sharing great times, the buyer thinks of the house as someone else’s home, not their own home.
Decluttering removes these barriers, and a floor plan allows a prospective buyer to imagine themselves in the property, walking from room to room. A floor plan may seem blank and bare, but this is a suitable platform that allows prospective buyers to dream about the life they could have in the home.
Vendors are advised never to leave a room completely blank because this can overwhelm prospective buyers. However, when it comes to floor plans, the bare facts, dimensions and flow of the house, allied to images and video clips, help a prospective buyer to piece together their version of your home, and this may help them form an interest in your house.
Returning to the Rightmove survey, 80% of respondents indicated they use a floor plan for every house while 12% suggested they only used the floor plan when they had the time to do so. With rental properties, only 28% of rental listings, at the time of the survey, featured a floor plan.
Don’t be left behind in the market
If you are looking to sell your house, a floor plan should be a necessity, and if you don’t use one, you are hampering your chances. If the majority of listings offer a floor plan, you also need to provide a floor plan. There are arguments for being different in the property market, but you should look to be different in ways that add more value, not less value.
If you are in the rental market, the incentive to use floor plans is to get ahead of your peers and rivals, not stand pace with them. If you have an opportunity to offer more value than rival landlords or listings, do so, because it helps you to stand out from the crowd.
Be the property listing people remember
Don’t forget that buyers and tenants review a lot of properties, and it can be hard for them to differentiate between the homes they see. By offering a floor plan, you add another element that helps to differentiate your home, and this will hopefully help to place your home in the memory of prospective buyers or tenants.
If you are looking to sell your house, you need to be proactive, you need to help buyers, and you need to provide information. One of the most effective ways of engaging your audience and offering invaluable information is by providing a floor plan in your listing.
At Hunters, we appreciate selling your home is hard, but we know how to engage buyers and persuade them to purchase a property. If you are keen to sell your house effectively, contact us, and we will do everything we can to place you in front of willing buyers.
In a competitive marketplace, vendors need to help buyers make a decision, and they must give buyers what they want. This is as relevant for vendors selling a house as it is for a dealer selling a car or a convenience store selling soft drinks and snacks.
While you may think your home is attractive and that people will fall in love with it as soon as they see it, you must remember that your home isn’t the only house on the market, far from it. Buyers have a lot of options, and even in an era where industry experts state a lack of supply has affected the market, buyers have a lot of properties to search from.
You need to make sure your house stands out from the crowd in property listings. Buyers tend to scroll through lists, only pausing when something catches their eye and practically begs them to stop. If you want to sell your home, your listing needs to pop off the page and be the option that buyers want to see.
Many components help create a fantastic property listing, but video tours and virtual tours are an excellent feature to grab attention. Improving technology provides many options in promoting property but video tours meet a need, and they solve a solution. These outcomes are why video tours are becoming an essential feature when listing your property as opposed to being a feature that is nice to have.
Video tours generate interest
Buyers are curious, and people by their nature want to see what other people do and have. Therefore, if you have a video tour of your home on a property listing, more people are going to click on your link than if you only offered images of your house.
Photographs are essential in promoting your house on property listings, and video clips take this interest a stage further. Improvements in broadband connectivity and the increasing use of smartphones to access the internet to ensure video content is in high demand. People want to see video footage, and if you’re going to engage buyers, offer them a virtual tour of your house.
Video tours save time and money
Selling your home can be a time-consuming task; it can feel draining and it can be expensive. Therefore, you want to sell your home in a cost-effective and timely manner. Creating a virtual tour of your home adds a cost, but the returns from this expenditure form benefits and help you promote and sell your home effectively.
With a virtual tour, some buyers will decide they don’t like your home and don’t wish to pursue an interest in the property. If a buyer isn’t going to make an offer on the house, it is best to remove from the process as early as possible. Removing uninterested parties helps you to focus on people who genuinely hold an interest in your house.
If someone has watched a video tour of your home and then arranges an actual viewing of your home, they hold an interest. Therefore, you have an opportunity to engage with this prospective buyer, and if you conduct a successful viewing, you enhance your chances of selling your home.
Video tours assure vendors that their agent is working hard on their behalf
If you are looking to choose an estate agent, you have a lot to choose from. Not all estate agents are the same, and you should look for a professional who is equipped to help you sell your house. An agent that offers video tours of their listed properties knows what buyers want to see, and are in a position to help you connect with your audience.
You should look to enlist the services of a proactive agent who understands the market and who engages buyers. Video content is vital in the modern property market, and listings that don’t offer video tours have to work harder to gain attention.
Therefore, when you select an agent that creates video tours of your home, you can be confident they promote your home effectively. Also, buyers develop an awareness that your agent provides video tours, and they will instinctively check out their offerings, which in turn brings further buyers to your listing.
Do video tours the right way
Smartphone technology has driven the demand for video footage, and you can capture excellent quality video on your smartphone. However, if you want to have the most significant impact, it is best to call on professionals to shoot your video footage.
A professional videographer has reliable equipment, but it is their expertise in staging video footage that helps you sell your home. Someone who has experience in this line of work creates the best shots, they utilise lighting effectively, and they create a flow between rooms that makes it easy for prospective buyers to feel as though they are in the house.
It is easy to shoot video footage, but it isn’t easy to shoot effective and appealing video footage, which is why it is best to call on an expert for help in this area.
Video footage has greater reach
A huge factor in the popularity of video tours is that they have a massive impact wherever they are placed, not just in a property listing. Some of the locations where vendors should share video tours include:
- Their website
- YouTube and other video platforms
- Social media sites like Facebook and Twitter
- Community pages and websites
If you want to sell your home, you need to present it effectively and reach out to buyers. Video tours help you connect and engage with buyers at all times of day and night, no matter where the buyer is in relation to your home.
Adding the virtual tour stage to your sales process saves time and allows you to engage with prospective buyers who have shown an interest. If you want to ensure your home grabs attention from buyers, contact Hunters, and we will be delighted to help you sell your house.
