Are featured/highlighted listings worth it?

Thanks for the reply Big Will.

Being active on a property forum and thoroughly running through listings on RE.com in my opinion are 2 very different things and I don't feel they are necessarily linked. My wife knew every listing in her criteria (God help me if I intervened) inside out and never once visited a forum - nor did I expect her to. She was intent on finding the house she wanted and could care less about any property forum. Although I do not consider our circumstances typical - we did see over 40 properties when looking for our PPOR & 100's for our investment properties.

I don't know if it's the company I keep, but anyone (whom uses RE/Domain) I've spoken to has taken months to find a property and is all too familiar with the listings on RE/Domain within their criteria.

The agents I've spoken to always have the same response - that the premium listings get more clicks. I've just never seen the evidence that the extra clicks are from genuine buyers and the scenarios I provide above don't give me confidence.

It would be interesting to see a study (with a large enough data set) of conversion ratios of sales per view of premium vs standard listings.

It's quite strange being on vendor end of a deal - very different to what I'm use to.

thanks
D

 

I think the premium listings help bump your ad into the forefront of viewers who have "and surrounding suburbs" on and are using that function. I think it helps if you are adjoining a very popular suburb that's perhaps very desirable but hard to buy into. Other than that, simply appropriate pricing also attracts buyers to your home, if something has no price or priced too high you will lose buyers.

 

The premium listings are built with the agency in mind. It's all about agency branding.

Standard listings have no agency branding and small images. They look cheap.

Premium listings have the agency colour and branding plastered all over it with nice large "hero" images.

It's all about selling the brand... but not the product.

 

96.4% of statistics are wrong. lol

Of course not many people continue past the first or second page because they switch to price or age listed filter. You've been sold a dodgy stat.

Some here say it's only experienced investors who search using a filter. That's crap. Anyone who can interact with the most basic website knows how to search with a filter. One may look at the default when first looking at the area but once they've established a desire to buy in the area they move to price or age filter.

 

Do what you want I really don't care.

@dodobird You will never get any results from it as you can never compare we are not selling the same product in the same condition in the same market ever.

Property is unique and you will never get to know how many people put in offers as the websites do not track this metric (as how can they).

For me I would rather spend a couple hundred more on a premium listing than paper (provided I am not targeting elderly). However I have to be comfortable in the fact that someone sitting in a doctors surgery waiting flicking through the newspaper in the property section might not see my property and decide I want to move into it.

Your money, your call... I have given you the information you asked and my opinion, not going to lose sleep by you not agreeing with my thoughts .

 

All,

Thank you for your thoughts on the subject.

Will mull over it for the weekend and make a decision then.

Thanks,
D

 

I don't get the point of these videos. It's just someone talking over some photos. Unless your target buyer is illiterate... does anyone actually watch them?

 

This is an excellent marketing tool, visual is very important.

proof in the pudding.. these sold within 4 weeks in a market that started to turn and higher than similar product.

 

There's no guarantee that there's a correlation between the two

 

More views does not = more buyers from my experience.

 

OK, that is fine, its your choice what you do with the information.

I am here to share what has worked for me and to help others.

 

HI D
I don't know whether premium listings work, I guess it cant hurt.

However, what I do know is you need to go hard at it when selling, by this I mean the first 6 weeks are critical when selling.

I find tools such as price point very important and I like agents to go in aggressive, basically lower the price slightly to attract more buyers and then create competition, this can work very well.

MTR

 

Like @MTR says end of the day you will never know if that extra couple of hundred of dollars found you a buyer or got you an extra 10k due to competition.

As we have both allueded to (I worked as a REA, not sure about MTR's work history), the best price is achieved with multiple buyers, regardless of how good a negetior the REA as the more people one has to work with the better position you are in (thus better results).

The reason why you will never know is two houses on the same street with the same build with everything the same as a house is not the same. One house might be closer to shops, public transport, flatter block, less or more garden (different markets), wear and tear can be different, one might be closer to power lines, one might be sold earlier.

Take TV show 'The Block' and you had 20 purchasers who just wanted to buy a slice of the action for their egos... As in they don't care about the unit just want to say the live in the unit that was featured on the block. All units in the same complex being sold at the same time (different builds) but the order of the auction can play a part in the sale price as buyers have a choice of 4 units at the start however if there are 20 buyers it is a 4:20 chance a buyer will win. As the units are sold off and one is left it is now 1:17 chance the buyer will end up with a unit.

So you can see you can't compare results, you either believe or you don't (I guess like religion).

 

not a re agent, but I think you pretty much nailed hit, create competition, hence multiple buyers.
In boom times that is an easy one because you have more buyers than stock, when markets soften that is when you need to strategise and employ the right re agent.

 

Re.com have a very cunning marketing strategy whereby the "exclusive" listing are continually superseded by a more "exclusive" type of listing Of course each new rebranded "exclusive" advertisement is more expensive than the last.. this accounts for the massive jump in advertising costs in the past few years..

It's all a bit of a farce if you ask me. If you have a listing that can't show up on the first/second page after filtering the suburb and price, then that's a problem.. probably an oversupplied unit?

An agent told me that most buyers are incredibly lazy and don't use the filter function except for maybe house vs unit, so upgrading the listing is essential.. I'm not convinced.

 

As a buyer, it's not that I'm lazy, it's that I know not every listing contains the data I'm filtering on. Say I only want to see properties with a block size of >600sqm, if your listing doesn't mention the block size it simply won't show up. If I don't filter, I still have to flick through hundreds of listings.

 

Depends on what you are buying but for me I would rather trawl through 50 properties of 400sq to get one that is 600sq (not listed). As there is less competition You can always look at photos of the backyard and get a good understanding along with google maps with satellite view, if you really know your market you will know roughly the size of the blocks are in that area.

If an agent is just selling land and doesn't have land size included then I would think they will have difficulties selling it.

 

It's a bit suckworthy when you filter by lowest price and you have to scroll past all the properties with no price or auction.