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4) Advertise!
Expose your unit to the right crowd and as much as you can!
There are various ways such as property web portals, newspaper ads, SMSing to the 30,000 industry agents, reaching out to overseas customers, social media like Instagram or Facebook and many more!
Which method is most effective?
There are so many web portals such as PropertyGuru, 99.co, SRX, EdgeProp, Carousell, Nestia, iProperty etc. It's literally impossible for a homeowner to subscribe to all portals (and only licensed property agents are allowed to subscribe to most of these portals anyway) as it is very costly to do so as well.
Hence, one of the key factors in choosing an effective property agent is to check whether he or she has access to all these portals. Just imagine the results you will have if you or if you get someone to market for you who have limited or zero access to these portals and can only rely on newspaper ads and word of mouth! Disastrous isn’t it?
Newspaper ads are no longer as effective as before in this tech-savvy generation. However, for marketing landed properties, we still do get some enquiries from buyers for this category of properties though.
More than half the buyers have their own agents! The key question is, how do you reach out to all these agents all at one time?
Unless you have a SMS sending machine at home plus a database of the entire industry of real estate agents, SMSing to just a few hundreds or even thousands of agents is not going to be effective. If your salesperson has a database of the whole industry, it will surely be an additional boost for your marketing!
Social media marketing does not simply mean posting on your own Facebook wall and expecting tons of enquires to be flooding in!
Factors for a successful Facebook campaign include but not limited to:
a) The reach and the targeted crowd. You have to be specific on who you want to target! For example, if you are selling a $5,000,000 landed property in east coast area, targeting buyers who are married, above 35 years old, and staying in the east area is better than targeting the whole Singapore! Because based on your budget, if your reach is too wide, Facebook would not be able to optimise your ad as effective as compared to if you are targeting a niche market.
b) Your ad content! Have a catchy headline to entice viewers to take a second look!
"Why is this homeowner selling his $2,000,000 bungalow?
would be better than
"Renovated bungalow for sale!"
c) Use nice pictures. Video works best! If you are using a video, ensure that the video is less than 60 second. This is because viewers tend to get bored if the video is too long and draggy.
5) Negotiating For The Best Price!
Always understand that every interested buyer has a NEED to buy and has ONE or MANY things that he likes about your unit.
Ask yourself:
a) Does the buyer have a compelling reason to buy your unit? For example, his or her parents stay in the same block, kids’ school is nearby etc.
b) Are there many housing options in this area for the buyer? Is your unit the only unit on sale?
c) What does your buyer like about your unit? For example, the renovation or the facing or the view of the when you look out of the unit window?
d) Does the buyer have a dateline to meet? Perhaps he had sold his property and will be homeless soon?
By knowing the answers to the above questions, you would be able to know how to approach your buyers when negotiating.
Some buyers do not know that they can stretch their budget further as they are not familiar with the housing grants available to them if they are buying a HDB, or they do not know that they can take up more mortgage loan through revision of their own financial situations, or do not know the exact usage amount of their CPF monies, or are not familiar with the stamp duty regulations and hence they have to fork out more monies due to this ignorance etc.
Imagine a buyer, who initially thought that he can only buy a property that's worth a maximum of $500,000, is made known that he can actually purchase a property worth up to $600,000 due to higher loan amount and availability of the various grants. Do you think this will help the seller get a higher price for his unit? Chances that if the buyer likes his unit, he may increase his offer!
If you have a property agent, work closely with him to sell your home! As much as the commission that you will be paying to your agent may seem to be a lot at times, why not work out something with him or her that if he is able to deliver at a higher price (and of course still within realistic range), you shall pay him more commission for his efforts? Rather than focusing on how much you are going to pay to the agent in absolute value, you are definitely better off focussing on how much you are going to get after nett of expenses if you are going to sell at a higher price!
There's so much art and science behind the scenes of marketing and negotiation process. Sometimes by selling a property on your own in order to save brokerage fees can be proven to be very costly for you! An efficient and knowledgeable agent may have more resources to reach out to the right buyers and may have the experience to convince the buyer to offer the highest possible price for your unit.
To get in touch with our guest writer, you may like to PM us at +65 85565271.
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