Can you sell more homes in a tough market?

There are reports everywhere at the moment of house sales plummeting, prices falling, profits tumbling and a general doom and gloom about the property market.

Anyone who has been an estate agent before will recognise those stories because they are rolled out about every five years in pretty much the same shape or form. And indeed, the market is not the easy peasy place it was not so long ago.

Still, people do still need to move home. I don’t suppose everyone will stop having children, or that their existing children will stop growing up, or never leave home. People will still get married and still split up. they’ll get jobs in other parts of the country, or indeed the world, and perhaps they’ll be laid off. They might decide to go travelling for a long time, or relocate for adventure. And they’ll still retire, or downsize for other reasons.

And of course there will be still be people who get sick of paying rent and decide to buy what may very well be their first home. And there are plenty of people still doing well at work, getting promoted and looking for places to invest their money – buy to let might have taken a hit but it’s not totally dead. So I’d say that still leaves a reasonable amount of opportunities to get some property sold – because there will be lots of people who NEED to sell, even if they don’t want to, and even if they don’t like the price they’ll get.

The question now, is how do you make the most of it?

Like always, it is quality instructions that win the day. I would call a quality instruction one that has a motivated seller and is priced to sell. The rest doesn’t matter. Where it is, what it is, how old it is, how it’s decorated – none of this matters. You want properties that are going to sell, no matter what.

It’s very easy to get disheartened when the market takes a turn for the worst, and I can well imagine that homeowners won’t be hearing much good news on the telly, in the press, on social media or even from estate agents. It’ll all be gloomy, miserable, hopeless and depressing.

It is very unlikely that people looking to sell their property will be having a bunch of highly positive estate agents coming round, explaining exactly what they need to get their property sold and being told that the estate agent will make it happen.

So I’m pretty certain that if you turned up, were full of possibility and positivity, were really clear about exactly what sort of price would make things happen and your estate agency’s marketing would ensure their property sold, you would pick up a whole load of business. And you could probably increase your commission rate into the bargain.