Recently I was asked to carry out an appraisal on an immaculate family home in my area. As is often the case, the home owners also called in some other agents for comparative appraisals. Now, when it comes to listings, simple math says I don’t get to list them all and this one was one of those homes I didn’t get to list.
As always though, I do my best to find out how I can improve myself and the services I offer and so I inquired of the owner’s why they’d listed with another agent and not with myself. Their answer was straight forward enough but was in reality, something of a moot point.
The owners said that they felt my agency didn’t have as much presence in the area as did the agency they had listed with. Well, the owners had signed up and I wasn’t going to do anything to make them feel bad about having done that, so I wished them all the best and said goodbye for now. They’ve signed with a capable agency and I’m sure they’re in good hands.
Personally, I am of the opinion that area presence plays a quite insignificant part in marketing your home. Most buyers attracted to your home these days will be directed to your home via the Internet. That’s where home buyers shop. Statistically, that’s the long and short of it. The pulling power of newspaper ads and shop windows is dwindling pretty fast.
If you browse to lets say www.reiwa.com.au which is just one of many sites I list on, you will see that it’s geared to help prospective buyers find a property in a particular area and not to buy from a particular agency. Makes sense right? So it’s down to features and price and it’s a pretty level playing field. I haven’t met a purchaser yet who had a preference for buying a property from one agency as opposed to another.
So, while it may be entirely true that my agency doesn’t have numerous shop fronts in your area, I really don’t feel that it impacts to any great degree on your properties exposure to the market. The internet today exposes your property far more efficiently than any newspaper or shop windows can.
The other point of presence I’d like to make is this. While buyers statistically shop on the internet, sellers find their agents in the newspapers. Agents know this and this is why agents are keen to have you give them a nice juicy budget for press advertising. Sometimes open ended I must say. When they have this, they can advertise your property of course to the smaller section of the market using the newspapers but they also attach their photos and the agency banners to these ads knowing that this creates the perception of area presence to prospective property sellers.
Sellers need to be aware that they don’t inadvertently fund the presence they rate so highly.
Posted by Marianne Robinson 
