I want to share how changing the number of days that a home is marketed for, before allowing any viewings can DOUBLE the chance of sale within 30 days.

I also want to share how you can asking the wrong questions of your data leads to the wrong answers.

Culture vs Data

One of the downsides of spending time working with other peoples Estate Agency business’s is that I don’t spend much time working on my own. Instead James Baker, my cousin, friend and long time business partner is doing the heavy lifting.

James is what I would call a ‘culture first’ guy, and as Peter Drucker the management guru said, “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast”

It’s probably why we built a really successful team as we complement each other with a different approach and also why the business has it’s best month for a year under his renewed leadership.

But if there’s something that I hope I bring it’s a relentless drive to try and turn art into science. In general, Estate Agents are poor, at backing up their opinions with most going with gut rather than fact. For most agencies this works brilliantly, as most estate agencies are driven by highly instinctive founders operating on a relatively small scale. The challenge occurs when you want to grow, that’s when the alchemy of scalable process with amazing people delivers exceptional results.

Have an individual marketing plan – every time

I’ve been running a system called Property Launch since 2014, so as a quick recap for those who don’t know what this is, it’s effectively an open house with a strict marketing campaign that runs for 4-16 days before an event, where the interest is turned into one event. It works brilliantly for sales and lettings, it’s time efficient and gets great results. I have written about it before, so if you want the deep dive into it the article is here.

Running a Launch leads to a higher price (currently running a £5k more), but something that changes with the market is how long should you market a home for before you have the Launch.

So what is the best number of marketing days to choose if you want to maximise the price. Less than 5? So that would mean launching a property on a Tuesday for a Saturday Launch in the same week.

Maybe. But are we asking the right question.

That only tells us the price that was achieved, not the chance of selling. When you look at that question you get a very different answer.

So the chart above shows

1. The number of marketing days before the Launch on the right hand side
2. The percentage of homes with that strategy that agreed a sale in the first 30 days of being marketed (the deeper blue bars)

You can see that the best chance of selling (between 70-80%) is in the marketing period before 6-15 days. The current sweet spot seems to be around 11-15 days.

People won’t pay you a higher fee unless they can see you are different

Anyone who has been on one of my listing course or worked with me, will know that my central belief is that in order to present a higher fee, you need to show amazing value for money and be different from the competition.

Imagine the conversations you can have with a seller with those two bar charts live on your mobile phone.

Show them the impact of each strategy in terms of outcomes for customers and then they can pick which marketing period is the best strategy for them and their needs. Your recommendations are no longer just based on experience they are now based on evidence. No other agent will do this.

My point isn’t that this is the ‘best’ way to present your service. Whatever your secret sauce is, get a system / CRM that can be flexible to allow you to record what you do and the impact. You can work out what difference it makes and if it makes a real difference to your customer.