Are There Any Alternatives To Rightmove?

As I am wandering around the garden centre with the music tinkling away in the background, I spot in the far corner a lonely garden gnome sat on the edge of a feature pond, with a single-line fishing rod in hand. Evidently he is thinking that by sitting around for long enough, a large fish will come this way at some point and take the bait.

What should agents be doing

This got me thinking that this is like some estate agents (and vendors) who think that just by simply flinging a property onto Rightmove, that’s it and job done. Like our gnome, the agent and vendor think that with one line of enquiry dipping into the Rightmove pond, that’s good enough to sell the property. But it isn’t. The biggest issue is that nobody knows who is looking at your home on Rightmove. Therefore how can the estate agent proactively chase up and engage with these potentially interested parties?

Multiple contacts

Estate agency is much like being a fisherman and I often use this analogy with new clients. An estate agent needs to have the capability to cast their fisherman’s marketing net as far and as wide as possible across the property market. Otherwise how do you know you have got the best price the market will stand and could you get buyers into competition with each other? The quality agents know that they need to dredge up every corner of the market and they need to use a multitude of routes to do this. Yes of course being on the key property portals is useful, but they are just one line of investigation to find that elusive buyer.

As a current example, last week a client’s property secured some editorial in one of the national newspapers. This was picked up and featured on an international website, which was then seen by a UK ex-pat living in the US. They liked the look of the property so much, that they caught a flight a few days later to come and view. You may think that this is just for the likes of properties in the top tier price brackets, however this example wasn’t.

Possible routes to consider

So what other routes to market should be considered by an agent – after all as I have just demonstrated, fishing in one pond with just one hook can be unreliable. Ask your estate agent about their database, how good is their black book of buyers in the market and importantly do they have the time to be able to call these connections? What about off-market options? Does the agent have the time and sales ability to cross-sell and up-sell your home to others on their books and if so, who is accompanying the viewings? Social media and pay per click advertising or perhaps some feature advert in the newspaper(s) or magazine. Does the agent have a private section on their website to lure people away from Rightmove and how does one gain access? Perhaps going further afield to London or the international markets (if applicable) and aim at those relocating. These aren’t exhaustive, but hopefully demonstrates that there is more to estate agency than just good old Rightmove.

So if your estate agent is a garden gnome, you may wish to suggest that they ditch the single-line fishing rod for a trawler net, that is going to catch everything in its path. From my perspective, garden gnomes have never been my thing anyway.