Estate Agency Marketing Reports

The reason why RICHNESS in estate agency marketing content is key

Overdoing the Market Report thing!

Rich content in marketing blogs, social media, newsletters, mailers etc is now a well-established estate agency marketing technique. Yet too many estate agencies simply buy syndicated news stories that are wholly irrelevant to their agency and can even damage their reputation. I genuinely saw a British estate agency “news” blog last week which featured a headline about rising house prices in Montenegro (roughly 1,600 miles away) – insane! Surely the purpose of these initiatives is to demonstrate local expertise, opinion, advice and comment, so that prospective local property sellers are positively influenced in favour of your agency.

In an effort to achieve this, a number of estate agencies subscribe to a monthly market report service. These are generally excellent. However, people are only interested in house price movements in their area up to a point. “Hey, prices rose by 0.27% in Loughborough last month” is hardly engaging, especially when it follows on from a similar report the previous month, and the one before that.

Reporting is one thing, but influencing is quite another. Yes, we need to be seen as having a good knowledge of house prices. But as the professionally attractive EXPERT, you should not just report, but also comment and advise, demonstrating real mastery of your subject. Only then will people notice you.

Such comment, opinion and advice should be meaningful and ideally cover the type of subject matter that is of interest to your target audience, ie property sellers. So think about the questions that you might address if you were at their property with them. What issues are they considering:

• “Should I withdraw my house for the summer holidays?”
• “Should I tell the children we’re thinking of moving?”
• “is it worth redecorating before putting the property on the market?”
• “do I really need an estate agent?”
• “should I accept an offer from someone who has a property to sell?”
• “why do agency fees differ so widely?”
• “should I price high and expect offers?”, etc.

There are hundreds of topics that do the job beautifully – you just need to make sure that you plant these issues, along with your solutions, in front of the right people, using blogs, social media, newsletters, flyers, advertorials, email marketing, etc.

In these days of faceless online agency, it is more important than ever to be out there – even if not in person - with an opinion, and those agents who are habitually generous with their knowledge and advice tend to be those who reap the rewards in terms of reputation, and consequent instructions.

Key point: “It’s not about what you know: it’s what you DO, with what you know, that counts.”