Successful selling depends on making that extra bit of effort at each stage of the process, to give you an edge. Use these five strategies to boost your sales performance and get ahead of the competition.
1. Be your own house stager
Do whatever it takes to get the house looking good. Throw mess into a box, move the sofa, dress the kitchen with a fruit bowl, even if you suspect your clients have never eaten any, and get rid of the prominent display of toilet cleaners in the bathroom. The key thing is to get buyers or renters through the door. You can’t sell a property to someone who’s not there.
2. Use data to shape the client’s expectations
Obviously, a realistic price is key to sales. The growth in internet-only budget agents, where sellers or landlords set their own selling price or rent level, has led to some very unrealistic price aspirations. When these people don’t sell and come to you for help, it can be useful to show them an Infographic with a map view of sold prices in their immediate area. It helps to induce a sense of reality about the real market value of similar properties.
In the UK, we take it for granted that properties are captured by the major portals and you can’t see them elsewhere, but in the US, all property is available everywhere. This has an interesting effect. Portals have to distinguish themselves from the crowd by offering tools and functions to users that they won’t get elsewhere. In other words, portals cannot act simply as aggregators, but must offer the user more value through the ability to analyse what’s going on in the property market in their area and nationally.
In fact, if you look at the way Nethouseprices.com has been developing, you’ll see that with infographics showing map views of sold prices and automatic valuation tools, this is similar to the development path the site has been taking.
3. Beware tldr
The phrase “tldr” is webspeak for “too long didn’t read” and it applies to portal listings as much as anything else. It’s the photos that drive people to the text, so picture quality is the number one priority. After that, make sure every word in the text description is working hard. Leave out stock phrases, never use “deceptively” and go for the selling points.
4. Make sure you show the home on your own
It is much easier to sell or let a home without the owner or landlord following you around listening. For one thing, a key selling point may be that a home for sale will look a hundred times nicer once the buyer has removed the hideous flock wallpaper that the current owner favours. You can’t say this with the owner hanging about. If the owner has a dog, you want to get that out of the way as well, so suggesting they take the dog for a walk while you show the property will serve both purposes.
5. Stick to the buyer like glue
Once you’ve qualified the buyer or tenant and advised your client to accept, stick to the prospect like superglue. Stay in constant touch, to ensure that their circumstances haven’t changed, they haven’t got cold feet, or that their buyer hasn’t dropped out. Lots of people who wouldn’t actually lie also don’t quite bother to tell you what’s going on, so make sure you know!
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