10 Step Plan: Selling For a Premium Price

Introduction

By the very fact that you are reading this, the chances are that you’re probably thinking about selling your property soon or maybe even  have a property currently for sale You don’t just want to sell it though… you want to sell it for a ‘Premium Price’.

If you follow this 10 Point Plan, you will almost certainly achieve a premium price for your property in a short amount of time. It really does work! When our team implement this step by step plan on your behalf, you should see better results than the national average.

Maximising exposure is crucial to ensuring you can achieve the most when marketing your property.

If you just want to sell your home quickly to any buyer, then this plan won’t interest you.  However, if you want the best buyer to offer a premium price, you should read it very carefully. Achieving a premium price Requires a great strategy and an even greater plan. It’s important that you have a clear, concise, strategic approach to your marketing, tailored to your target buyer. This plan gives you just that.

Many Estate Agencies, often the ones who purposely over value or undercut on fees, have no real plan in place to sell your property after they’ve signed you up.  Often, they will do the bare minimum without any real expertise – just taking pictures, attaching a price, posting details online, and hoping for the best. This demonstrates how finding a buyer can be easy but finding THE BEST buyer can and does require more work.

50% of property owners end up having to change estate agents before eventually selling their PROPERTY. *

This costs them unnecessary time and money because once a property has lingered on the market for some time, the chances of achieving a premium price are hugely reduced.

Step One – the price

Agree on a ‘marketing price’ (NOTE: marketing price, not asking price or valuation figure). This should be based on factual market evidence and not simply be the price you would prefer.

It’s important to remember that the purpose of a marketing price is solely 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 £630,000, but it’s agreed that the best marketing approach to adopt in this instance is to ask for “offers in excess of £600,000”, for example.

It’s best to market at a round figure i.e.  £300,000 as opposed to £299,950. This will mean you appear in those all important digital searches up to £300,000 and from £300,000.  At £299,950, you would only appear in searches up to £300,000. Also agree on a pricing strategy – i.e. guide price, asking price, offers in excess of, offers invited etc.

Price is there to entice.

STEP TWO – The marketing material

YOU DON’T GET A SECOND CHANCE TO MAKE A GREAT FIRST IMPRESSION, SO QUALITY IS CRUCIAL, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU CONSIDER THAT VIRTUALLY ALL BUYERS NOW SEARCH ONLINE FOR PROPERTIES IN THE INITIAL STAGES.

We always use a professional photographer to ensure we get the best quality photos, making the advert all the more appealing to potential buyers. This service is included in our sales fee.

Make sure the property’s brief/description is focused on the benefits as buyers want to hear about the lifestyle that comes with the property as well as the property features.

Step Three – The Launch

The property should be launched onto the market WITH THE details uploaded to all the major property portals along with your agent’s database.

At any one time, there will be a pool of buyers looking to buy a property just like yours. You just have to make sure that your property is marketed in such a way to ATTRACT your desired potential buyers. 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.

It is important for your agent to call the applicants on their database. Sometimes your property might not tick the boxes at first glance, but that does not mean to say the property could not be adapted to work for them. A good Estate Agent should know their applicants and what they are looking for.

An open house is a great way to   create a sense of urgency and competition between buyers. The idea is to come out with multiple offers. It is very important to ensure that if you are carrying out an open house, it is executed in the correct way (WARNING: if it is unsuccessful, it can be very damaging to the ongoing marketing of the property).

STEP Four – passive buyer marketing

Social media is a great way to target the ‘passive buyer’ who is not continually checking the major online portals.

All ‘active’ buyers will be regularly searching for a property online (we’ve already seen in step two the amount of demand there could be for your property) so it’s very important that your property has a significant online presence. But what about the ‘passive 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’ or would ‘buy a property in that block if one ever came up for sale’. You also need to market to these buyers!

having a FOR SALE board is a great way to attract any local passive buyers.

Step five – Monitor & improve

The CTR needs to be between 6 & 10%. Why? Because buyer interest drops by 50% after two weeks and your property will begin to stagnate on the market.

One week into the marketing of your home, you should ensure that your agent is monitoring the effectiveness of the marketing and analysing the Click Through Rate (CTR); making improvements or changes where necessary.

Your agent should be showing you the CTR graph weekly so you can get a true understanding of the impact your property advert is having.

Ensure that your estate agent is rotating the lead image weekly, to keep your property imagery fresh online.

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. Different aspects appeal to different buyers so your activity needs to reflect this,

Step six – The enquiries & VIEWING STRATEGY

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.

With all the above statistical evidence, it’s clear to see that your agent cannot afford to miss an enquiry.

It is important to ensure that your estate agent will NEVER miss 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.

Make sure your agent has 24/7 access to all online enquiries and that the monitor social media messages in the same manner to ensure any enquiry on your property is not missed.

STEP SEVEN- the viewing

It’s clearly CRUCIAL that viewings are carried out correctly otherwise steps 1 to 6 are 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, get some feedback 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 (if possible).
• 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 can be helpful if the owner can be in the property during a 2nd viewing to answer any questions the agent cannot which will speed up the decision-making process.

MISCONCEPTION:  Some people (and online agents) think it’s best that the property owner shows buyers around because no-one knows the property like them. It isn’t!

Here’s the thing – ‘IT ISN’T ABOUT THE PROPERTY, IT’S ABOUT THE BUYER’. Owners tend to talk (a lot) about all the things THEY love about the house and on a first viewing you might be surprised that actuallyit’s totally irrelevant.

Obviously, there is A LOT more to carrying out “The Perfect Viewing” but this will get you started.

step EIGHT – the feedback

Honest, unfiltered feedback from every single viewing is crucial to your sale success as it will help with Step 9.

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.

As much as you may not want to hear what people dislike about your property, it is a great opportunity to see if there is something that can be changed to appeal to anyone else that is viewing over the coming week. This gives you a better opportunity to sell for a Premium Price

Step NINE – The review

Control the process.

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 examine the marketing, interest to date and the relevant data. During the meeting, you need to discuss how you plan to move forward.

Step TEN – the offers & negotiation

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.

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.

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.

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 principle reasons being that the correct due diligence wasn’t carried out by the estate agent at the right point of negotiation.

TRUST YOUR AGENT TO NEGOTIATE FOR YOU.

the SUMMaRY

It’s in your interest to create demand as quickly as possible. A drop in interest usually means a drop in price, too.

It’s important that one expert estate agent, who you are on what we would call “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 its marketing history.

The cheapest agent is the ultimately the one who extracts the best price from the marketplace, not the one who charges the lowest fee… and that takes effort.

Step 3 will likely generate some early viewings. It’s crucial for you to try and persuade potential buyers to attend the 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 is 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 from the outset.

 

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.