Beat Your Commercial Real Estate Competition by Refreshing Your Listings

It is a sad fact that many agents do not spend enough time in refreshing and repackaging listings that are being marketed.  That single strategy when implemented can lift your conversion rates greatly.

Some listings stay on the market for a long time; perhaps that is because of the property itself, the location, the market, or the price (or rent).  In many cases the client or owner of the property is totally unrealistic in price and rent expectations, and they take a long time to accept the realities of the property market.  Unless some marketing adjustments occur, not much will happen with the property.  Over time it will become stale and very few enquiries will come in.  The client then gets annoyed with the agent, assuming that the agent is not doing anything.

How many times have you seen a property listed with one agent that does not sell or rent, and then is then withdrawn from the market, only to then later come back in at a lower price with another agency?  It happens so often, and simply because the first agent didn’t spend the time conditioning the client and refreshing the listing in a logical and regular way.

Let’s face it; the people that are in the commercial or investment property market today, and looking to buy or rent, are well aware of prevailing market conditions and price ranges.  It is our job to help our client see what is going on around them, and help their property convert to a successful contract or lease.

Top agents are ‘good conditioners’ when it comes to working with clients and listings.  They repackage and refresh listings to get the best results.

In handling this problem what should you do?  Here are some ideas:

  • Track and measure the enquiries coming in for each exclusive listing.  In that way you can understand the volume and type of enquiry for a property and what tenants or buyers are looking for.
  • Understand just how your marketing campaigns are working and ‘tweak’ them for better levels of enquiry.  Some methods of marketing and promotion will be better than others, so make sure you are using the right channels of advertising.
  • Collect the comments from people that inspect your listings, and feed those comments back to the client in a ‘conditioning’ process.
  • Understand your target market for each property and ensure you have the right ‘vendor paid funds’ to tap into the targeted group of buyers or tenants as the case may be.

So how do you do a ‘refresh’ of listings?  Here are some ideas:

  1. Change the advertising layout and copy so it features the property in different ways.  You can and should have 3 different layouts for any exclusive listings and use those layouts in the different portals online.
  2. Have the client pay for ‘priority placement’ in the industry portals as a ‘prime’ or ‘elite’ listing.
  3. Get professional photographs taken of the property so that its features are well displayed on all marketing material.  Change the photographs on your adverts online and offline every few weeks.
  4. Change the price or rent to align the property to the existing market conditions.  You will need facts and figures to support your requests for price adjustments with the client.
  5. Shift your media choices where inspections and enquiries are low.  You will know the better media choices if you are tracking the incoming calls and inspections from all of your property campaigns.
  6. List the property in a number of different online portals and websites.  In each case use different advertising copy and photographs.
  7. When a price or marketing adjustment has occurred, get flyers or brochures sent to your database and or the local property owners and businesses in the location.  Spread the word about the adjustment; the same process applies with any people that have inspected the property previously when it was priced differently.

So the message here is clear.  A price adjustment and a listing refresh creates more activity around the listing; that’s how you rejuvenate an otherwise ‘stale or difficult’ listing.

When you have a good property to sell or rent, it is the start of the hard work and not the end of the process.  Work on your clients to ensure that their market expectations of price, rent, and promotion align to the incoming enquiry.  Work on your property listings to ensure that the features and improvements are well promoted to the right people in the right way.

We are the best people (the professionals) to bring the parties of a deal together; it takes strategy, information, conditioning, and listing refresh.  That’s how you list, sell, and rent more properties in this market.

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