As an estate agent, have you ever considered how much it costs to list each individual property? With overheads such as search portals like Rightmove costing in excess of £1,000 + VAT a month for a single branch, photography, floorplans, initial market appraisal time and admin time spent taking and filtering leads, the numbers can soon stack up. This means it is critical to ensure every property you list achieves its best price as fast as possible to keep the cash flow flowing.
Getting the marketing right is hard. It’s all very well to pay for professional photography, videography and the creation of beautiful brochures, but even the best photographer can only take photos of what’s in front of them. How, as an agent, can you consistently achieve these great offers, quickly?
Every room in a property needs to have a purpose and be well laid out, clutter free, well decorated and clean. Of course, we’re not proposing that as an agent you need to carry the burden of sorting this out yourself. You may be able to give advice which the client is carries out themselves or you may need to recruit the services of a home staging professional.
How do you choose the right professional? Firstly, you need one who understands the need to be reactive to instructions and is as motivated as you to get ‘For Sale’ boards converted to ‘Sold STC’ in the least amount of time, for the maximum amount of money. The professional you choose must be able to evidence success in your market niche with the types of homes you sell. Evidence is crucial these days, staging can be expensive at the front end. The statistics that a professional home stager can show of the return on investment of their own projects, not a generalised version is hugely important. This may be done through case studies or statistical reports – make sure you ask.
The ramifications of overlooking presentation before listing can be very costly for an agent. Generally, in the UK, when a property goes onto the market, the asking price is treated as an invitation to make an offer in that ballpark. The longer a house takes to sell or if price reductions are evident, the more any potential buyer thinks there’s ‘wriggle room’. Negotiating an offer becomes more challenging. Selling fast is always the way to achieve the highest price.
A home staging professional can help with many things depending on the situation. It may be as simple as giving advice over a video call, for which there may be no charge at all. Some businesses, such as us, offer free on-site consultations for agents with whom we work regularly. At the other end of the spectrum we can get an occupied home decluttered, fully decorated and restyled in a couple of weeks or an empty property fully furnished with a few days. In every single case we can guarantee that the cost of the staging work is significantly less than a price drop, or not selling at all.
Get in touch today. Call our team on 01332 987740 or email [email protected]
