Are two agents’ boards good or bad for your property?

Love them or loathe them, For Sale Boards (FSB) are excellent marketing tools to maximise exposure and generate interest.  And without them our job as estate agents gets that much harder, my discussion today is two agents’ boards, how helpful is this?

Whether you approve or not, FSB’s are an integral part of estate agent armoury, bright as tropical birds in some cases and clamouring for your attention as you drive by.  But here’s the thing, when I’m out and about and I see FSB’s outside property, I know that place is on the market, pretty obvious huh?  But then I see a few homes with two boards from different agents strapped back to back and I immediately think, oh dear, trouble selling?  Now this can be for any number of reasons, but usually they conspire to be reasons of negativity which can then transpire to your potential buyer. 

So what can be the reason that drives sellers to the have two boards from different agents outside their property?  Is it because the first agent couldn’t provide a service or gave such poor advice such as a ridiculous asking price and the seller is left without a sale. Usually these are the agents that have lengthy contracts; part of their complacency is they know their vendor isn’t going anywhere.  Or, are sellers, out of desperation, then signing on the doorstep when they are ‘door-knocked’ and bamboozled into a multi-agency by the competition. 

My point is, having one board outside your home for many months is bad enough so to compound that further by adding another agents board is clearly advertising that this house is difficult to sell, whether it be the price, the property or the persuasive door-knocking competition, the impression shouts “help, this house won’t sell”.

My advice, be sure before you sign up, you feel comfortable with your chosen agent.  It’s key to success that you should be able to discuss action points should things not go according to plan. Valuing houses is not an exact science and it’s impossible to predict the future, these are the crucial variables in establishing a marketing strategy.

Your relationship with your agent, could be a long one, so make sure you understand each other and can communicate your expectations. Good luck and should your relationship dissolve under irreconcilable differences and they prove useless then it’s got to be the three D’s, Dump the agent, Ditch the board and Do it again with another!  

Predictions predictions predictions.

Predictions predictions predictions, isn’t it fabulous how so many clever people can predict the future of the housing market in 2012!  It’s been interesting reading when unqualified individuals and weighty estate agents give us their opinion.  Thanks goodness, it is only their opinion.   But here’s the downside, when an experienced agent offers their advice, inexperienced house buyers and sellers end up taking it and this could be misleading but this is precisely what keeps the estate agents draws full of overpriced houses.   You only have to scan through a major internet portal to and see how long some property just sits on the market collecting dust and not offers.  

Now, there are two ways of looking at this; either, the seller is not very bothered about selling and likes to have viewers turning up every so often to disrupt their home life but they like a visitor.  Or, new buyers come to the market every day and when they first look online they can see everything for the first time and so to them, they consider everything is new to the market.  But, helloooo everyone reading, who wants to be on the market for months and months and maybe years? I predict not many of you.

Everybody knows that property is safe as houses for investment and we as a nation are pretty motivated to get on the housing ladder as soon as we have completed our GCSE’s but here’s the thing. Not even mystic Meg can predict the future, so how can your local agent do it?  The way I like to get this point over is this “Put your hand up if you think house prices will rise?” Yes do we all agree house prices will increase? Now “Keep your hand up if you can tell me the date?” See not easy huh!

In the meantime, while clairvoyants, charlatans and the like dish out their predictions, I say we carry on and keep calm, be realistic about property prices and aim not to count the valuation from the estate as money already in the bank!

Next time, I would like to discuss estate agents tactics to gain your instruction; I feel this will provoke some debate.  Please email me your slant to Yvonne@hillcrestprop.co.uk. It would be great to get some feedback on this column.