Once you’ve decided to sell your property, preparing it for sale and getting it in front of the target audience is crucial.

Great photography and a brilliant description are the basics, but potential buyers still need to know your property is for sale.

The real estate market has returned to more of a balanced market and currently average sales times are around 60-90 days.

Different marketing outlets

Having the ‘For Sale’ sign outside the property does really help to create awareness locally and is useful for when potential buyers are at the research stage and are doing their recce drives round an area.

Traditional media still holds its own in many ways, but in this day and age, you do need to list your property online. While there are some websites offering free listings, the main ‘go-to’ property search websites are domain com.au and realestate.com.au which have paid-for options.

Get to the top of the list

When people are searching online, they will include a suburb in their search criteria; to give your property the edge over similar properties in that suburb, your property needs to be at the top of, or near the top of the list which comes up.

On Realestate and Domain, there are four different levels of advertisements, and you may not realise it when you do your suburb search, but it’s the level 1 and level 2 listing which will take your property to the top, or at least close to the top of the list.

The thing which gives you exposure to a wider, but interested audience, is when your listing comes up in the ‘surrounding suburbs’ option. This is important, as when someone is looking for a property, whilst they have their desirable suburb in mind, they often are open to looking at nearby suburbs.

This is where the level 1 or level 2 listing gives you the edge.

Reaching a wider audience

All the properties in a given suburb, say “Cardiff” for example, will show with the level 1 at the top working down to the level 4 ones. But under these listings, it will show all the surrounding suburb properties with all the level 1 listings at the top then the top and level 2 under that.

When we looked recently, Cardiff had six listings for Level 1, one listing for Level 2, two listings for Level 3 and for Level 4, nine listings.

Now under this, there were a further 233 listings. Naturally, those with the level 1 listings are at the top with the level 2 and so on after that. What is important to remember is the level 1 listing closest to the suburb will be showing first.

In all honesty, you would probably go through the first few properties on this list, but would you go through all 233 of them?

Having the level 1 listing ensures you’re at the top of the list and people will see you before they lose interest in scrolling through the 200 plus more properties.

To give you some idea of what these higher level of listings can achieve, we sold a unit for a colleague experienced in real estate who had been trying to sell a small unit privately for six months was using these sites but at the lower level. We then listed the unit at the higher level with video, professional photos and quality description, to give it maximum exposure, and it sold within a week at nearly 7% more than what she was asking privately.

Want some more tips on how to give your property the edge? Our talented and experienced team can tell you a few more!

Call in and see us in the Cardiff office or give us a call on 02 4954 8833. Or send us an email to: mail@apnewcastle.com.au – we’d love to hear from you.

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