How to Pick the Best Estate Agent and Maximise Your Chances of Selling the Project Off-the-Plan?
The most important aspect of the entire venture is picking the right agent rather than just relying on choosing an estate agency to market your project.
Quite often, I have seen property owners pick a big-name agency and expect that because of the reputation of the agency, their property will sell automatically. It is not enough just to leave your property in their hands without personal attention to the campaign.
It is much more important to know who will be handling your property marketing – who will be there opening the property for the open inspections, who’s going to be selling the property to owners or investors.
Key points:
- Pick the agent not the agency
- Interview at least 3 agents to see different approaches & which agent you can relate to the most
- Agent must be able to paint the dream
- Buyers have very little imagination, hence the typical difficulty in selling projects from architectural plans
- Ask key questions of the agent to establish if they are right for the job!
- Is the agent a generalist or a specialist in selling projects?
- What is the agent’s own marketing expertise?
- Is the agency dynamic and progressive to handle marketing a project?
- What is the network of the agent like? If the agency is a franchise, can other franchisees sell your project to their clients?
- Are they going to be creating specialised online campaigns to market your project or do they expect to put together a display suite to sell it?
The 5 Steps to Choosing the Best Estate Agent for Your Development
Step 1 – Research local area and current developments in the area
An important part of the process of choosing the agent, will be finding an appropriate development that is currently being marketed locally that can be used as a comparison. Not only will this help you with feeling out the appropriate pricing structure for your development, but also what competition is out there and how it is being marketed.
Step 2 – Interview at least 3 agents from developments that stand out in their marketing approach
They have to able to explain to the buyers where the walls are going to be and what the colours of the finishes are going to be like. Basically, they’re selling the dream, because there’s nothing in reality, they have to take them to a piece of empty land and almost visualise for the buyer where the house is going to be located.
Step 3 – Ask key questions of the estate agent who is going to be primarily responsible for marketing your project
There is a separate report that we have put together of a list of key questions that you can use to ask an agent to establish how well suited they are for the job.
Some of the questions are: How will you market my development site? What will you do to sell my site if the advertising you suggest doesn’t work? How do you distinguish yourself from your competitors?
Step 4 – Negotiate the commission agreements & marketing budgets
As an experienced property developer, you will recognise that everything is negotiable and it’s about creating the best scenario whilst keeping within your feasibility study of the project.
Step 5 – Schedule a regular frequency of meetings with the agent
This way you can see the progress of your project and there is an accountability system in place, so that if you can see that if the agent is not performing to your expectation or there are other circumstances that are preventing the agent from selling your project – you can be on top of it earlier than later.
Case Study
An acquaintance of mine had dealt with a marketing agency who was handling a 16 apartment development in a suburb of Glen Iris in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne. This particular property marketing group was very experienced in marketing developments to the degree that the entire development was sold out within three weekends in the middle of 2011.
At this same time, according to the most media and newspaper articles, the property market has been flat and falling. Yet these apartments were sold at the developer’s asking prices and the developer was really pleasantly surprised at the speed of the result.
This marketing group has a particular methodology of registering interest from potential buyers and then they are able to explain the development in terms of both the investment to those looking for one or to the owner occupiers looking to live in the area.
Metaphor
Picking the right agent is like travelling with a GPS – less chance of getting lost on the journey and you are likely to get to your destination quicker with less frustration.
