What should I pay for advertising my property?
An agent’s database should be meticulously maintained when it comes to managing buyers for your property.
Depending on who you’re dealing with, larger companies in Real Estate often have a larger established database of clients over many years of operation.
If they’re collecting and religiously maintaining their data, this should minimise your costs for advertising with an agent.
If you’re dealing with a newer established agent/agency, one who is working on their own, or off their own mobile, they generally request a higher spend on advertising because they don’t have the established database of buyers.
Generally speaking, they will also be aiming to increase their profile through marketing your property because they’re a smaller operation.
With many online real estate portals offering multiple property “upgrades” you have to be careful because a lot of the upgrades are there to benefit the agent – such as adding branding, the agent’s name or the agent’s photo.
If you think about it – our Illawarra suburbs are relatively small and so when a buyer conducts an online search, in a particular suburb, it is rare to see more than a handful of ‘page’ of properties listed for sale.
With additional filters such as ‘property type’ and ‘price’, the suitable property list is reduced every further. And so, reasonably thinking, any serious buyer would look at all available options prior to moving forward with contacting an agent for more information.
Put simply, you don’t want to be spending money that is aimed at a profile-building for the agent, or to promote their brand. You want to question them carefully on how the advertising budget is being spent to advertise YOUR property.
It is also important to ask questions such as “How is each buyer enquiry handled?” If buyer enquiry is being received at all hours of the day directly via an agent’s mobile, it can very easily be lost or oversighted. It is important to know how each enquiry is received, recorded, answered and followed up at a later date. An unanswered or poorly handled enquiry could cost you thousands of dollars through a lost buyer.
Another important aspect to weigh up in the overall cost of advertising is – “What is the risk?” or “What is the obligation if the property does not sell?”
It is best to be clear upfront – if the property does not sell, who is responsible for the marketing costs?
An agent should be able to justify any advertising or promotional cost that they’re asking you to pay, and it should be a cost that you’re happy to wear based on the risk of it not being a successful sale or you not being satisfied with that agent.
If you have any questions on advertising, or marketing, or reasonable cost, please feel free to contact Matt Dignam or a member of the Team at any time for any help or advice.
