The value of property marketing in a changing market

It’s the oddest thing. Surely, the most fundamental requirement of an estate agent having won an instruction, is to get it noticed by the best buyers for all the right reasons. And yet, a cursory look through the portals at the poor quality of some (not all!) of the images and sub-optimal written copy and you might wonder whether that simple notion has sunk into the collective consciousness of our UK property industry.

In other industries, imagery and copywriting would fall to marketing departments. Cars that are worth a tenth of the UK’s average property value are shown-off by beautiful brochures and websites, using photographs that are gorgeous with written facts about what really matters – how many cup holders there are.

Some bright sparks at Kellogg worked out that cornflakes (just two quid) sell better when they’re in brightly coloured boxes, not brown paper bags. And yet the power of property marketing has almost completely passed by our UK property industry where homes have an average value (as I write) of £283,000!

I say ‘almost’ because there are notable exceptions. The largest new homes developers, many of which we work for (so we know), are always meticulous about every aspect of how they present their properties to the market. So too, the large country house agents – their vendors pay the best photographers many hundreds or more to capture their essence. The agents’ brands benefit!

Then there are the agents, like our customers, who have already woken up to the power there is in making their homes stand out in the beauty parade we call the portals. We enhance their average photos to look amazing.

Professional copywriters like Neil Whitfield do the same for property descriptions – there’s no ‘boasting 3 bedrooms’ when these creatives write. Instead, they talk about the young family that will love living in a home because of the playground 200 yards away and collecting their child from the OFSTED highly-rated local school. Great imagery and copy together speak positively to the emotions of prospective buyers. What makes agents who use these resources special? They care.

• They care for their vendors.

• They care about getting optimal prices for their properties.

• They care for their brands.

And they should care, because while for the past 13 years selling houses has felt like shooting fish in a barrel, agents that care understand that the way they market their properties helps set them out from the crowd of agents all vying to win the best instructions.

There are only two tangible pieces of evidence that show prospective vendors that you are as good as you say you are: those are your sold boards and your property marketing.

Everything else is down to your winning personality. Problem is, you’re up against other agents whose personalities might be more ‘winning’ than yours. At least, if your property marketing is better than theirs, that’s incontrovertible proof of your brilliance. It either is better or it isn’t. If it isn’t better, then your opportunity now is to move it up several notches.

Today, there is an even more urgent reason to double down on making your property marketing better. Going forward, agents will need to attract the best buyers as well. There could easily come a time where there will be 30 properties for sale for every buyer instead of 30 buyers per property.

Given the past 13 years, it’s hard to think that possible, but it happened 50 years ago, it could easily happen again. Economic conditions then, including a war in the Middle East, an energy crisis and rampant inflation (sound familiar) made the challenges of 1992 and the early 80’s seem like a cakewalk.

Our founder, John Durrant, teaches property photography to agents for Property,ark and DCTR. He’s lost count of the number of agents who have practiced for 40+ years who have never been shown how to use a camera. Yet, in the USA, there are stats abounding that show the perception of a property’s value can be improved by 12% where the photos are taken to a professional standard.

Put another way, if the homes you’re selling look 12% better than those above and below yours in the beauty parades we call the portals, it’s a no-brainer that your homes will attract more interest than theirs. They also say that houses sell 30% faster with great photography.

Sadly, in the UK, property marketing isn’t really recognised as a thing. There are awards for marketing but those include corporate marketing. There are no awards for the best property marketing – and yet this is the most fundamental reason for employing an estate agent. Fail to get a home noticed by the best buyers and as an agent you could be a fantastic negotiator, but you’ll have fewer to negotiate with.

This is your opportunity to correct the one thing about your business that you always knew wasn’t quite up to par, but you lacked the motivation to do anything about it – because you were selling houses anyway so there was nothing to fix.

This is the time to take a close look at HOW you sell your properties, to be better, to become superstars at property marketing in much the same way that our antipodean cousins are.

The Aussies have been ten years ahead of the UK in terms of their property marketing for the past 50 years. Time to catch up and overtake!

DCTR would be delighted to complete a free, no obligation review of your property marketing and help you to move it up. It’s your call. Just get in touch with tom@dctr.co.uk and share your challenges, objectives, your website, and a set of your best sales particulars. We’ll come up with constructive ideas and an in-confidence report to help you move forward. Also, look at DCTR.co.uk - 50+ service ideas to help with your resale and new homes marketing. We’re here to help.

*Tom Durrant is managing director of DCTR