All agents are the same right?

Looking from outside in, that is potentially nearly true; after all, don’t agents just stick an ad on the two biggest real estate portals in Australia, realestate.com.au and domain.com.au, then sit back and wait for the enquiries to flood in?

Well, sort of, but there’s a bit more to being an agent than that. Ultimately, our aim is to get your property in front of as many genuinely interested people as possible. In doing so, there is more competition for your property, your property becomes very desirable and the chances are, we’ll get you a better price.

So, let’s take a closer look at how real estate marketing works.

How it worked 20 years ago

Pre-internet days, it was much easier for a consumer to judge how agents marketed their property; all they had to do was simply pick up the local paper, flick to the property pages, see which agents used it, how big their ads were, and from this, find out how regularly properties were advertised until sold.

Buyers in the meantime would browse the paper and be drawn to the ads that stood out (obviously the bigger and better designed ads do this). An important point to note is, whilst they were flicking through the pages, they would also see properties in suburbs they may not have thought of looking in.

The process today

Today buyers usually go to their preferred portal, either realestate.com.au or domain.com.au; between them, these portals have over 90% of all the real estate traffic on the web, but only a little over 50% of buyers use both.

Generally, they only search in the suburbs they are interested in purchasing a property and then they click for more details about the properties they like. But just like Google searches, buyers do not usually go past page one of the search results and most buyers believe that the newest property to the market will be at the top of the search results.

The rule of four

What most buyers and vendors don’t realise is that both these portals have four different levels agents can use when listing their properties to these portals. Realestate has the following choices: Standard, Feature, Highlight and Premier whilst Domain has: Basic, Silver, Gold and Platinum.

What else you should know

What buyers and sellers don’t realise is that both Platinum and Premier will always be at the top of the sales results; even new Gold and Feature properties list below these. And this travels throughout the listings; new listings that only have a basic or standard package will still be at the bottom of all results.

Only a little under half of properties are actually listed at these premium levels.

Furthermore, when viewing the preferred suburb results, and you click to see surrounding suburbs results, only properties which have a Platinum or Premier Listing will show. Those with a basic listing will not come up in the nearby suburbs.

Why is this important?

When selling a home or investment property, we strongly believe you need to have as many genuinely interested people as possible view your property, as this activity helps the seller get the best result possible. And this only happens with strategic marketing.

Why don’t all agents use Premier and Platinum listings?

Quite simply, it comes down to cost; it’s no different to the days when some agents took out full page ads on a Saturday and others only a quarter of a page.

Return of investment

Quite simply, the more people who see the property online the more people will inspect it. Most sellers spend between 0.2 and 1% of the value of their property on marketing it (either directly or indirectly). The person who spends at the lower end of this figure usually does not get as good a result even though we are usually only talking spending a couple of thousand dollars between an average result and a great result.

For instance, an average sale price of a property with a standard listing on realestate.com.au is $523,271, whilst those that had a Premier had an average sale price of $656,520 – a difference of 25%. No wonder property developers will spend anywhere between 2- 5% of the cost of their projects as they know they get it more than five times back.

Other marketing strategies

Of course, there is still much more in the marketing mix; there is also our database and strategic social media adverts.

But it’s not just about getting eyes on the property – the more you can engage a buyer with the property the more likely they are to inspect it; a quality video and virtual tours also grab a buyer’s attention.

How do we fair against other agents?

In the Newcastle area, there are 157 Agencies that use REA with 427 sales people. Our family-run independent agency, with three experienced sales people had 3.95% share of all the listing in the first quarter of this year and over 7% of all the views; this leads to a higher average sale price for our clients.

Of course, there is still a lot more to all of this but when considering an agent, vendors really do need to look at how their property will be marketed and rather than try to get the cheapest agent, as this generally will actually cost them up to a $100,000 or more in their end result.

We obviously can’t give away all of our secrets, so if you want to know more, contact us now for a free, no obligation quote. Call us on 02 4954 8833, email us at: mail@apnewcastle.com.au or call in at the office where we can answer questions, talk you through the process and give you options.

And don’t forget to check out our Facebook page for handy tips on selling your property or what to look for when buying a property.