Time to set your marketing price (get it right first time)

If you are looking to sale your property in 2020 then you may well have already had several agents out to value your home. Let’s say that they have all suggested marketing in the region of £500,000. What price should you set as your asking price? When I first started valuing and marketing properties (many years ago!) the advice would probably have been to set the price at £499,995, as it’s psychologically a lot less than £500k.

The problem with this strategy is that internet search engines (Rightmove, Zoopla etc) do not care a hoot that you’ve priced your home at this visually tempting price and you could be missing out on many hundreds of online views, that could have led to you finding a buyer.

Let’s imagine you took my 1990 advice and put your home on the market at £499,999. This means that your property will fall within the Rightmove price banding that ends at £500,000. But this means that if a buyer starts their search at £500,000, perhaps £500,000 to £600,000 or beyond, is not going to see your property at all. It’s going to be completely invisible to them. Rightmove don’t have an intelligent search feature where they include all properties just under this banding. They will only show the properties in the exact search band they’ve been asked for.

Let me give you a real-time example – I’ve just visited Rightmove and searched for property in ‘Bristol’ and chose a price band of between £500,000 and £600,000. One hundred and fifty four properties were available.

I then searched the same area between £475,000 to £500,000. Seventy five homes were available, of which 26 were priced at £495,000 or over. These 26 homes that are just a couple of percent under £500,000 are never seen by anyone who regularly searches the internet from £500,000 up!

But if you now take my 2020 advise and set the price at exactly £500,000 something very interesting happens. Your home not only shows up for buyers searching between £500,000 and £600,000, but also shows up for those people searching £400,000 and £500,000.

This simple pricing strategy could result in many more buyers viewing your home online, which will undoubtedly result in more people through your door.

If your home is currently on the market, maybe a simple review of your marketing price is exactly the thing you should be looking at. Is it at exactly one of the Rightmove bandings, or just below? If you’re unsure, or you’d just like a chat about your asking price and whether it’s optimised for Rightmove and the other portals, please give me a call on 07976 707793 or email robpain@nexabristol.com