In a time long, long ago properties were predominantly advertised in Newspapers or on flyers, which over time decomposed on our sidewalks or faded into obscurity on our dining room tables. These marketing tools had one clear advantage over today’s methods: They left no trace of our existing.
In our now digital world, owners can’t just dip their toes in to the property market to test the waters, not without them running the risk of acquiring a permanent digital footprint, courtesy of online advertising!
Once upon a time, if we didn’t like the result we could simply take the property off the market or reduce the price and our buyer would be none the wiser. Now we’re faced with what long term harm having a property that doesn’t sell at the original price advertised could potentially have on the eventual sale.
A property listed in Australia will appear in several real estate marketing websites, such as realestate.com.au and domain.com.au, two of the largest. And these companies make it their job to never let us forget! They do so by regularly sharing all their advertising data with CoreLogic who are the largest supplier of property information in Australia, here information is stored permanently and made easily accessible.
These digital footprints of today’s real estate market intensify the danger posed by an extended marketing period. If a property doesn’t sell at the inflated price that is has been advertised for, then the digital record of this can cause a great deal of damage to the property history and furthermore the selling price.
The whole market is now partially controlled by our fear of the digital footprint. Previously it was possible to “snag” a buyer at a high price, but in the digital age this is a high risk approach that can easily backfire.
With many websites providing easy access to property information buyers are able to research formerly hidden information. On the realesate.com.au website buyers can view the number of page visits with little to no effort, giving them a clear indication of the properties time on the market and desirability.
This is just one example of the information available to buyers, who now have a wealth of knowledge at their fingertips! With knowledge comes power… If a buyer can research and answer questions about a property like:
- Has it sold in the past?
- For how much?
- Did it get passed in at auction?
- Why hasn’t it sold?
- Why have so many people looked but not purchased?
- Why was it withdrawn?
Then they have more negotiating power than we’d like, let’s be honest, we don’t want them having any, but it’s getting ridiculous!
The motto of this story is that testing the market at a higher price must be done carefully and poor market pricing can damage the reputation of your property permanently. So when you make the decision to sell, tread gently across real estate’s digital landscape and speak to an agent who knows what they’re doing.
