Coronavirus: The property market boomed, did you sell?

The property market officially kickstarted again on May 13th after lockdown all but ground it to a halt from the middle of March. Initially there were concerns that the market would trickle back with people being particularly cautious given the position that we are still in & faced with the ongoing uncertainty around returning to work and the furlough scheme, but thankfully that doesn’t seem to have been the case!

Rightmove, the popular property portal recorded its busiest day ever on the 27th May which recorded a huge 6 million visits in the 24-hour period. Saturday 23rd was also a big day for them, with the most minutes spent on the site as a collective ever, with over 47 million minutes.

So, did you manage to get a few viewings or even sell? With such a busy time over the last week we hope that your property has generated a bit of interest with some enquiries and hopefully upcoming viewings. If you haven’t however there could be a few reasons for this and there might be a few things you can do.

Here is what you should try in order to jump on this initial property boom before it settles back down:

Talk to your estate agent

• Discuss with your estate agent to see if there is anything you can do in order to try and attract more visits to your listing.

• They might have an internal emailing list or know a way of giving your property a bit of a boost that you may not have considered.

Improve your property listing

• Have you squeezed every bit of juice out of your property listing that you can?

• Read your property description and ensure it encapsulates every little feature about your home that may be considered appealing to a buyer.

• Detail, if you’ve got a new boiler, smart heating system, carpets, redecorated, whatever you can think of that might interest people, put it in!

Upgrade to a premium listing

• This might be one you have to negotiate with your estate agent, but they may be able to get you a featured listing on Rightmove for a price.

• This means that if anyone searches your local area your listing will come up amongst the top few in a highlighted box, which means you are more likely to attract more visits & hopefully enquiries.

Add new photos

• You can never have enough photos of your home.

• Take every photo you can and make sure your property is clean of course and that they all look high quality, covering every room and angle so people get the full picture before viewing.

• If a comparable property in the area has better quality photos than yourself, who do you think will be getting more enquiries?

Reduce your asking price

• Your estate agent will almost always push this. Reducing your property asking price can work, people often have alerts set up on sites like Rightmove to email them when a property drops into a certain price range.

• You can use this to your advantage as dropping into a popular price bracket will generate a spike in listing views.

• That being said there are obvious downsides to reducing your property price, the obvious being that you are likely to get a reduced offer & the other being that you look more desperate to sell which may mean potential buyers offer significantly below the reduced value.

• Before reducing your asking price, you should see what we can offer you.

If you reduce your asking price, we will often reduce what we are able to offer you in line with the new price. We can provide you with an initial cash offer in as little as 24 hours, just fill in our online form.

Done the above & still struggling?

As we just touched on, you could have a few alternative options if you’re still struggling to sell on the open market, despite the booming visits to large property portals.

We can buy your property in as little as 7 days with our quick cash property buying service. We offer a great alternative option to the open market, we’ll cover all your fees including solicitors and handle everything for you, meaning you can get on with more important things.

Our process is simple, all you have to do to get started is fill in our online offer form. We’ll then be in touch to discuss our initial offer, after which if you are happy with the ballpark figure then we can look into providing a finalised offer ready for agreement.