Real estate agents generally pay a flat rate subscription to the property web sites and can list as many homes as they like within that fee. And the more listings they have up, the more enquiry they get. But unfortunately none of the real estate portals yet have a system in place to “expire” the listings at any point.
When a new listing comes onto the market there’s a buzz around the place. Buyers eagerly await their e-alerts from the web portals and the enquiry often comes thick and fast in those first few days. (It’s one of the reasons setting your asking price is so important, capitalising on that early response. But we digress…) After a couple of weeks it can take tailored promotion, price reductions and a good dose of tenacity to capture buyer interest. And after 6 or 8 weeks many sellers, and their agents, lose interest in the process and give it up as too hard.
So buyers often get frustrated that the online info is out of date. Open houses details from weeks ago. Tenancy info on leases that have long expired. There’s two ads live right now on one of the portals that recommend you buy before August 1st to avoid stamp duty changes. Another says the property must be sold before Christmas…but they’re not talking about 2011. Many times the property has been sold or withdrawn from the market months ago, but there’s no requirement on the agent to remove the listing.
Buyers are tired of dredging through this rubbish. They deserve better too – considering the hundreds of thousands of dollars we’re asking them to spend. In Brisbane CBD this week there were 531 properties for sale on realestate.com.au. Have a look at your suburb. Toowong (114) and New Farm (176) have a heap of listings on the web too. But how many are current and relevant?
If you’re selling make sure your agents keeps your ad fresh. You need to stand out of the crowd. Change the hero shot and headline around so the home has a better chance of standing out in those tiny search result lists. (Professional pics and an ad that’s relevant and targeted are always essential). Use a “last updated” date at the bottom of each ad to let buyers know it’s current. If your property’s not attracting any enquiry a “spruce up” of the web ad is a quick and free option.
Half of Australia’s home buyers say prices are on the rise, with most believing this is due to a shortage of places for sale.
In one of the largest research projects in recent months realestate.com.au had 4,082 visitors to their portal complete a survey.
And encouragingly for those of you thinking of selling, half of buyers say prices are going up, 39% think they’re just stable and only 12% say they’re moving downwards. The same survey one year earlier had only 18% believing prices were rising. That’s a big turnaround.
When asked why prices might be rising 54% said there wasn’t enough for sale. The improving economy (40%) and the return of property investors to the market (35%) were also chosen as reasons for current price growth.
You can read too much into these surveys. But with such a big survey sample it should be fairly representative of buyers’ views.
Professional photographers can transform a building
If you believe the marketing gurus, more and more advertising messages are being consumed through images and video. No wonder, with the deluge of sales pitches we all endure almost every hour of the day no-one has the attention span left to read. So the importance of photos in real estate marketing is becoming more critical than ever.
When realestate.com.au surveyed 1000 people on their site the number 2 gripe about agents’ ads was the photos (number 1 was “no price”). Buyers are trolling through dozens of possible search results and if you don’t stand out with a high quality hero pic you won’t get that all important click-through. And almost three quarters of those survey respondents want more than 5 photos once they view the ad. So your sales agent is not doing their job if
they haven’t asked you to fund a professional photo shoot, and have at least 10 sharp, well executed images on your web ad. The choice of shot for your classified and newspaper display ads is similarly critical.
Not every home is straight from the pages of Vogue Magazine. Dark rooms, overcrowded or dated furniture and limited street appeal can all make a photo shoot challenging. But a professional with the right camera gear can make a huge difference to the result. Even without full staging or de-clutteringthey can move the odd item around to really improve the visual appeal (like taking the magnets off fridges!)
And if you think limiting the pics to a smaller number will get the curious buyer to come along to the open home anyway, in our experience you’re likely to be disappointed. They have choices, they have limited time on a Saturday and they want to be pretty sure the home’s close to fitting the bill before they’ll leave the comfort of their lounge room.
Have another browse through the portals and see how many badly photographed homes are on there. Blurry, crooked, badly framed, unwitting self-portraits in mirrors, pools full of leaves, toilet seats up and breakfast plates on kitchen benches…. It’s time some agents and their seller clients got serious about marketing real estate.
If you’re considering selling your property and are weighing up an auction or private treaty (a priced listing) consider this: Price may be your best feature. That’s not to say your property might not have many appealing qualities… but when we write up that ad it’s going to look and sound like a million dollars. Which can be a problem if you’re chasing $500,000!
A survey conducted by realestate.com.au found 92% of buyers would be unlikely to enquire about a property with no price indication. So if your place sits in a busy part of the market a private treaty with a good agent can get you a great price quicker than an auction. We’re not anti-auction, we do several each year, but in our view they’re over-used by many agents who jam their clients into a one-size-fits-all method.
An auction can be the perfect solution for properties that are out of the ordinary, likely to draw more emotional interest (eg Queenslanders) and those that are in scarce supply. But for many properties a listed price is the first drawcard for buyers.
With a price or without, one key to getting a great result is showing buyers you are a committed seller. Why? Well with access to so much info today they are cynical and won’t get off their couch on a Saturday unless they think you are a genuine seller. They’ve seen the rubbish that fills the online portals and know that some agents will list properties on the web for sellers that are still very much undecided as to whether they will sell.
Some agents leave expired listings on the web to continue drawing enquiry. Some agents will delete the address or leave the apartment number off. One we know used to completely fabricate ads. Shocked? Buyers aren’t because they’ve wasted their time on these before only to be met with some lame excuse about “admin problems”.
And this is one big reason why newspaper ads continue to draw strong buyer enquiry in this very digital age. Every one of those sellers has put their hand in their pocket for advertising costs and in doing so proven their commitment to selling.
Buyers are buying and where they sense competition many are paying good prices. But if you’re to create that high level of interest you need to first show the market you are doing more than testing the waters – regardless of your sale method.
More future-gazing this week and here’s another innovation that may soon change the way we sell and lease Brisbane real estate.
Geo-fencing is not new technology. Using GPS systems you create a virtual boundary fence in a real world geographic area, and are sent an alert when a device crosses the ‘fence’. It’s used to track Kenyan elephants – when they pass a certain checkpoint the park rangers get an SMS. Stolen cars can be remotely turned off using these systems and Americans use it to keep an eye on their kids (sounds perfect for teenage daughters!) And it may soon be on a real estate portal near you.
Imagine you’ve registered all your criteria for your desired home (bedroom numbers, price etc) and walking through your preferred neighbourhood one morning you get an SMS to tell you you’re about to pass a new listing that matches. The next open home time is included or you can reply to have the agent to call and organise your inspection. Finding Brisbane real estate on your phone is no longer new, but this is an electronic tap on the shoulder – you no longer need to do the searching. A basic GPS matched system, it’s not a complicated process and we understand several US portals are close to implementation.
Recent innovations in property marketing have been all about increased availability of info – better real estate mapping, virtual reality video overlays and broader search criteria. All are designed to help a buyer or tenant cut through the clutter and see only the listings they want. Geo-fencing is immediate, local and specific to your personal needs so we’d expect it to be a real hit.
Meantime local portal behemoth realestate.com.au launched its new ‘face’ this month and the industry collectively stifled a yawn. There are some good ‘about-time’ improvements, such as finally allowing buyers to search from the first page, rather than 2-clicking. For the most part though it’s only a tweak on the old version.
Good to see the addition of dynamic mapping (Google’s big innovation that they’ve now matched) which means you’ll be offered results outside your search area. We’re guessing this will see increased interest in some suburbs where a neighbouring address has a dearer price point. Suddenly suburb boundaries won’t be as relevant and it’s likely more and more buyers will use mapping as their search tool of choice.
What do you think of the ‘new’ realestate.com.au? We’d love to hear your comments.
We try to stay on top of emerging trends in property marketing but the pace of new technology has our industry looking more and more like a sci-fi movie!
Two years ago we noted the emerging use of GPS enabled mobile phones in the USA and how we might soon be using them to find homes for sale in Brisbane. Today the hottest real estate marketing trends are all about using your phone (especially, but not just, I Phones) to search property for sale or rent while you’re out in the area where you want to live. The big portals like domain.com and realestate.com launched mobile phone versions of their sites this year so shopping for Brisbane real estate is becoming a far more mobile sport.
The recent launch of Google real estate mapping was another hint of what’s to come. The future is all about access to info, when and where you want it.
And that’s why the launch of Layar’s Augmented Reality browser is so exciting. Turn your phone toward a building you like the look of and if there’s an apartment for sale the video image on your screen will show a real-time pop-up with the details, internal pics, price and a button to click to ring the agent. Simple but mind-blowing stuff using your phone’s GPS and compass.
Watch the video below to see how amazing this tool will be. No doubt we’ll have it here in Brisbane before long.
We shouldn’t be surprised, given Google are turning out to be the most innovative company to grace the planet this millenium. They’ve now launched their new Google real estate mapping portal for Australia. And it’s guaranteed to draw home hunters in their gigabytes – buyers and tenants included.
Watch out, realestate.com.au and domain.com.au. The big boys are here.
Google Maps is something we’re all getting used to seeing and using and they now display homes for sale and for rent. Choose an area, choose a property type, choose a budget – like you’re used to doing on the other portals. But then the fun starts. Drag the map around or zoom in and out andthe results automatically update.
So for example I’m moving to Brisbane, want to stay as close to the CBD as possible, and I want to know where I can buy a 3 bed house for under $700,000. I start in the city with that criteria and zoom out until I find a little red flag that tells me I’ve got a hit.
The results simply update as I move my map and this fully dynamic results list does exactly what home hunters want it to do – cuts out the rubbish that they don’t want. And agents who leave addresses out of their ads to encourage buyers to call (annoying the #%^$#@ out of most people!) won’t have their ad displayed.
Ironically realestate.com.au has a map tab that few people know exists and they even run a full beta website, property.com.au, with a very similar mapping option to Google’s. Maybe they’ve just never given it the attention it needed?
The property portal game is a fickle one and big players have come unstuck before. But with simple linking through to Street View, mapping of neighbouring businesses and amenities, and the raw muscle of Google behind it, we’d expect to see this new site quickly become a favourite way for Australian buyers and tenants to search real estate.
Freely available sales information is a double-edged sword for sellers today. It makes it easier to do the homework in setting a listing price, but your buyers are also well informed, and if that price is too high they will simply choose the next result on their search list. The web really is transforming the way buyers research and choose their property. And Australia’s dominant real estate portal has now released a tool that makes every home buyer an expert in their chosen neighbourhood.
Realestate.com.au has always had a click through to old web ads showing properties marked as sold. But agents being agents, very few of these listings showed accurate sales data. Hoping to generate phone enquiry, dimwit agents would put massive ranges on their sales record – “$500,000-600,000″ or similar.
REA’s alliance with RP Data will now give buyers exactly what they want.
RP Data collate titles office records and the links at the bottom of every property ad will now show fully accurate sales prices and dates. Where possible it will include a link to the old web ad as well. This list of the 6 most recent sales in the suburb will match the search – apartments or houses. It’s a simple tool and while it’s not a complete match of data to the chosen home it does brings enormous power to a buyer’s negotiating position.
Very few homes are identical so a good agent, presenting your property with well-targeted promotion, can still achieve a price that exceeds recent sales. History is history and buyers know that markets can move.
But agents that rely on their ‘insider knowledge’ to bluff a buyer will find the going even tougher. More than ever the marketing of property needs to be about finding points of difference, key features that benefit that particular buyer, and establishing value in their minds.
This is no longer a game to be played by amateurs.
Did you know that by featuring your property on realestate.com.au you will attract 4 times the views by prospective tenants. Imagine your business now and imagine 4 times the customers! A “feature” property listing is a simple upgrade by your property manager so the listing appears at the top of tenants’ searches. It costs a tax deductible $95.
So the Reserve Bank dropped official rates yesterday and we now have a cash rate of 3%, the lowest since 1960. What’s next from the government for property? We all know confidence remains low but (while not wanting to talk things up) the worst may be over for real estate. In March the major property web portals had another big jump in traffic. Almost 5 million visitors went to realestate.com.au, up 11% on the same time last year.
Some markets (but not all) are witnessing more sales. In making the rate cut announcement the Reserve Bank’s Governor confirmed there’s been more activity. “Demand for credit is weak overall, though credit for owner‑occupied housing is picking up”, he said. The chatter about the market right now is getting more positive. The big surge of course has been from first home buyers, keen to take up the $7000 boost to the usual grants. In the last quarter of 2008 the govt handed out 7,659 FHOG giftbags, up a whopping 39% on the previous 3 months. And we can’t help wondering if Swan and Rudd will feel that when the boost offer expires on June 30th it’ll be time to shift their support to another market.
Reserve Bank deputy Ric Battellino might agree. He last week told a Brisbane seminar the grant’s benefits could quickly be eroded. “By all accounts the bottom end of the housing market has picked up a lot in recent times and it doesn’t take long for the average house price to increase by $20,000 and leave the homebuyers no better off than they were before.” Market analyst Michael Matusik is opposed to the grant. “The FHOG is inflationary, distorts the normal cycle and creates few new homes over the longer term.” He argues in a time of undersupply we should have incentives to build new housing.
Some commentators worry that removing the first home boost will punish the lower end of the market. But our view is there’s a whole bunch of forgotten buyers on the sidelines getting closer to acting. Investors might just be the next busy audience as they recognise the opportunities on offer.
How should the government support the housing market? We’d love to hear your comments…
Real estate agents generally pay a flat rate subscription to the property web sites and can list as many homes as they like within that fee. And the more listings they have up, the more enquiry they get. But unfortunately none of the real estate portals yet have a system in place to “expire” the listings at any point.
