Brightsale

It’s very difficult to call the market right now, some analysts are predicting doom, doom and more doom, yet others are proclaiming this is the ideal time to buy!  Who should you believe?  It seems like there is a never ending stream of contradictory information populating the media.  So what should you do?

As self-serving as this might appear, my honest opinion is that this is a good time to buy.  There are plenty of properties on the market right now which are sensibly priced, and even taking into account the fair pricing there are vendors who are still willing to listen to offers and are open to negotiation.  

The point is, countless properties on BrightSale’s books are priced to sell, even considering this difficult market.  Even in these negative times this particular still property strikes me as great value for money.

So, don’t wait for the media to report an upturn in the fortunes of the housing market before you decide to buy!  At that point it’s likely the best deals (like the one above) will have gone.

Now is the best time to buy - but then I would say that - I am an estate agent with a vested interest in selling property !

But think about it, many of the signs are pointing towards now being the best time for you to negotiate the lowest price on the property you want to buy.

If you don’t buy now you might look back at this point in time in a few months and say I wish I’d agreed to buy sooner?  Why?  Well:

1. Vendors have spent all year reducing their asking prices.
2. The media have hammered the housing market and vendors expectations are at their lowest level for years.
3. There is increasing choice in the market place.
4. There is a backlog of people who want to buy, especially in the first time buyers market, but they are wondering when make their move - when they do vendors expectations will harden.
5. Savers cannot get a decent return on their money in the bank or building society
6. If property auctions are anything to go by the property market is a good choice and investors are returning in their droves.
7. Stocks and shares continue to be high risk because of their volatility, buy to let investors feel that prices have stabilised and risk has reduced to acceptable levels.
8. Interest rates are at their lowest level since the 1950’s.
9. New build housing construction has come to a standstill so there will be a shortage of supply when the buyers return.
10. Vendors are accepting offers below what are already very realistic asking prices because they can pass their loss on to the property they buy.
11. The cost of renting has become more expensive than servicing a mortgage on a comparable property
12. Buyers are in short supply at this time of year, increasing your chances of being able to buy at the right price now.

Wow, what a few weeks it’s been here at BrightSale Towers!  Releasing groundbreaking new features, adding a huge amount of new property for sale,  tying up partnership deals and above all else to our loyal readers… moving the blog!

After many weeks of deliberation, we finally decided to switch platforms and integrate the blog closer with the site.  We hope this will make it easier for people to find and encourage comments and interaction with our customers and fellow property bloggers.  You might also notice we’ve moved our press section to this part of the site too, so those wanting to stay up to date with the latest BrightSale company news can now subscribe by RSS to receive the latest news as it happens.

We hope you like the new blog appearance and we look forward to hearing from you all soon!

As unusual as it might seem for us to link to a traditional estate agent twice in a week, I couldn’t help but comment on the latest blog post from the London estate agency Chard.

It seems that Chard really don’t like “for sale signs”, which in all honesty I find quite unusual, especially for a traditional estate agent. Here at BrightSale, despite our expertise of this new fangled internet thing we really value some of the traditional marketing methods, especially for sale signs.   We also think they have some evolution left in them, after-all they have remained pretty unchanged for decades. To let you into a little secret we even have some ideas in development on how to bring them into the 21st century.  On the whole though,  we don’t think the world is ready to say goodbye to boards just yet.

In the meantime though, what is your opinion on agency boards? Do you love them or loath them? Have your say in our poll to the right.

Here at Brightsale we thought it about time we blew our own trumpet rather than commenting on others failings for once…

Based on the fact that 80% of prospective purchasers now search for property online, wouldn’t it be great if you knew that your agent was doing everything possible to make sure your property appeared as one of the top searches on the worlds biggest and most popular search engine, Google? Of course it would. Brightsale are fortunate to not just have experienced estate agents on board, but also experienced web and programming experts, enabling us to maximise the exposure your property receives on the web. The proof is in the pudding however, so lets try an example:

Take any development of flats where Brightsale currently have an apartment for sale, for example the ‘Quay Five’ development in Manchester. If I were a member of the public looking for a property here, I would type into Google ‘Flats for sale in Quay Five’ and look whose link comes up first. Brightsale. There are lots of flats available in this development but through our unrivalled experience in this field we can virtually guarantee a top five placing. This power is immense and provides us with the majority of our sales, pro-active ready to move purchasers know where and what they want to purchase and are by-passing the traditional property websites and searching directly and clicking the link shown by Google. Flats and apartments are not the only ones to benefit, take any of our houses and enter its’ street name, for example ‘houses for sale in Elmslie Close’. There we are, top of the tree. Surely there must be more than one house for sale in a road called Elmslie Close in the whole world? But there we are top, above all the other agents and even the property portals themselves.

Now where’s my trumpet….?

In these challenging times for all estate agents we read with amazement that our already struggling high street competitors are raising their fees.

KFH recently said: “Our fees have gone up because of the nature of the property market as it is – we are having to do more to find buyers for our customers … In that situation, it is inevitable that fees will have to go up – we have 50 branches across London and have had to raise our fee across the board.” Mmmmm.

Perhaps if they focused more carefully on their cost base they would not have to raise prices for the hard-pressed consumer.

A senior negotiator at Bonnetts in Brighton is quoted as saying: “a lot of people are getting desperate to sell and so they put their property on with a load of agents. The chances of us selling it when we are competing with five other agents are slim and in a difficult market, you don’t want to spend the time on these sorts of properties if you are not going to get a good fee. If people walk away because the fee is too big then that is fine with us if it is something that we do not want to deal with”.

Well, firstly whoever let this member of staff speak for the company must be mad. Everything about it reads badly. The phrase ‘the chances of us selling it when we are competing with five others are slim’ exudes not just a lack of confidence in the market but also in the ability of the company to perform the task that the public are now paying them more for!

This is followed by ‘if people walk away because the fee is too big, then that’s fine with us’ just amazes me. Every instruction is a possible fee for an agent, letting people walk away is just madness. If I was still in traditional agency and one of my staff let someone ‘walk away’ because of a fee I would go crazy. They are negotiators, negotiate! Would you want an agent like that to let a potential buyer ‘walk away’ from your property because their negotiation skills failed them?

All estate agents, traditional and online, need to get real. The market is tougher, sure, but the way to deal with it is to roll up your sleeves, cut out unnecessary costs, and work harder. Simply raising fees and turning away business is the path to ruin, not salvation.

“I got home last night and my wife demanded that we go somewhere expensive…so I took her to the petrol station.”

With national press and TV coverage bemoaning the state of the economy and specifically the housing market, it’s no wonder that the typical British trait of poking fun at ourselves in times of need begins to surface once more. All we are hearing is ‘house prices are falling’, ‘cost of living increasing’, ‘fuel bills to soar by 15%’. My point is that we know life does go on. We make these jokes to soften the blow because in reality people still need to buy houses and people still need to sell houses.

The trick is making the most of both what your property offers, and every opportunity that your agent provides you with be it an open house day, professional photography, floorplans, a specific advert for your property or just a For Sale board. Grasp them with both hands. Make sure your agent’s description focuses on the very things that made you buy the property, because you can be sure that if they attracted you to it, they will attract someone else to it.

In return though, and I think I speak for most of my competitors here, a simple request : Please, please prepare your house for viewings! With buyer activity limited, the buyers out there are not only thin on the ground but also very knowledgeable. Your home needs to stand out from its competitors and if you cannot do that by being cheaper than them, then you need to be better. Below are some general pointers that will make all the difference.

Kerb Appeal

The viewers pull up to the front of the property, open the car door and look around. If the neighbours have five foot high grass and old bathtubs/fridge-freezers/washing machines/car parts (delete as appropriate) in the front garden it really doesn’t help. Whilst I understand that you don’t have any control over what your neighbours do, a polite request or even a helping hand to clear any unwanted ‘rubbish’ wouldn’t go a miss. Now, your own front garden will of course not be in this state, but we need to go a couple of steps further. Firstly cut your lawn (stripes are nice, but not essential!), remove the bins from the front of the house. If you have a driveway nearly finished, finish it. If you have a driveway finished, clean it. No oil spills and a quick weed will go down a storm. The percentage of purchasers whose first request when registering with agents is ‘off street parking a must’ is phenomenal, it saves money on car insurance and is hugely convenient, so as they say, if you’ve got it, flaunt it.

Tidy up

Rooms look larger and more inviting when they are neat and uncluttered. Put clothes away and close cupboard and wardrobe doors, make the beds, do the washing up, clean the sink and remove any limescale from taps. Kitchen work surfaces should be clear, make sure bathrooms are clean and toilet seats are down. Remember that the presentation of your kitchen and bathroom are very often key to leaving that good impression. If you have an extractor fan with a light, use it! Light up the glistening hob beneath, if you have under cupboard lighting use it also, sometimes in preference to your main kitchen lighting. Your home should look warm and cosy both inside and out. Replace any dead bulbs, open the windows, (even for a few minutes – to get rid of any cooking or pet odours). If it’s winter, make sure your home feels warm. Empty the kitchen bin, make sure the windows are clean inside and out, turn off the TV and put the radio on softly and tidy away any children’s toys you have. Control pets as much as possible, for instance people who don’t like dogs can be really put off a house by an aggressive loud barking dog.

During the Viewing

While people are viewing your property, you have an opportunity to find out what’s important to them. Listen for clues and, where possible, tell them about the features of your home and the neighbourhood that you think would appeal to them or are relevant. There is no point in bringing to their attention the excellent pub 100 yds down the road that has live music every night if that is not what they are looking for. Once you have told them everything you think is useful, let them look round the property again on their own so that they can gather their own thoughts and impressions. Ask them what your agent was like setting up the viewing. Was he or she helpful and informative? Did he/she really ‘sell’ your property. This will give you an excellent insight in to how your property is being marketed.

Conclusion

Contrary to popular belief, the market isn’t Dead. There will still be more than 600,000 homes sold this year even under the very worst case scenarios; and there is no reason why yours shouldn’t be one of them.
As the Scouts say ‘Be prepared’, and as Henry Ward Beecher said, ‘The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is: that one comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won’t.’
You will sell your property if the price is right and you have prepared properly.

Commenting on the publication of a major BrightSale research report (Is There a Future for High Street Estate Agency?) BrightSale Managing Director Andy Etches said:

“A combination falling house prices and completion rates is going to cause major upheaval in the next couple of years. Many traditional agents are already struggling. We demonstrate in this report that the high costs associated with an increasingly redundant branch network are going to be the anchor that sinks the traditional agency ship.
Online estate agency, by contrast, is growing rapidly. Online listings are up 58% in just the last nine months (to 3,200), making the online sector now the 10th largest ‘estate agent’ in the country.
Vendors are feeling the pinch, and they are keen to secure the best deal possible when selling their properties. This is causing them to migrate to online agents in record numbers.”

Read the full report here.