Is too much information doing damage to your property listing?
Over the past couple of decades, there has been a real attitude shift amongst real estate professionals regarding the amount of property information that is displayed to the public when advertising. This happened circa 2005-2007 and almost directly correlates with the rapid rise of realestate.com.au and realcommercial.com.au (REA group), commercialrealestate.com.au (Domain) and propertylook.com.au (commercial portal which was acquired by Domain).
These portals made it convenient for lookers to access listings comfortably in front of their computers rather than visiting each agency in town and being driven around by the agent – saving an absolute ton of hours for all parties involved. Those of us who have been in the game long enough will remember a time when the agent didn’t want you to get out of the car until you had committed to a property! Real cowboy stuff.
Some of these tactics still exist today, where agents want enquires to contact them directly so they can “sell” their product – although one must question if this is their tactic or more a case of a lazy agent. Sometimes it works but more likely it’s wasting both the agents and the enquiry’s time. This strategy has more benefit to the agent as they are gathering more ‘data’ with more enquiries.
As agents, our role has changed and we are not ‘salespeople’ anymore. We are marketers who exclusively specialise in promoting commercial property with the objective of achieving our client’s goal, whatever that may be. This could be maximising sales price through competition with an auction campaign or finding a quality tenant prepared to stay on a long lease (which is not always about price).
So back to our original question: “Is it worth sacrificing mass enquiry in an attempt to ‘pin-point’ the best tenant or buyer?”
I say YES, absolutely, without any doubt.
Having worked on both sides of the fence there is so much overwhelming evidence to support the strategy that more information produces quality results and this doesn’t just apply to the real estate industry either.
When we put a property online and all the information is available for lookers only one of two things will happen – we will either get an enquiry or we won’t. Both scenarios provide feedback so we can give our recommendations to the owner and they can make a decision about what to do with their property. If we have an enquiry then happy days, we’ve priced and presented the property correctly so it will simply be a matter of time before we see a transaction. If there is no enquiry, then we need to start looking into why there is no enquiry: Price? Presentation? Positioning?
Either option provides us with value and gives us the opportunity to serve our clients better.
Fun Fact: Propertylook was originally collectively owned by Colliers, JLL, CBRE, and Knight Frank
