Marketing your Property

Henry Ford once said,

“Only 50% of my advertising is any good.
The problem is, I don’t know which 50%.”

Today a combination of low cost routes to market and better feedback on the results, enables Move to the Future to focus our marketing spend more efficiently and improve its effectiveness.

Where and how we market Move to the Future and your property:

Direct Marketing to active applicants

Our growing list of current active buyers will always be the first people we approach.  When a new property or buyer becomes active the properties that match the requirements of the buyers can be sent to the buyers by email for viewing online or alternatively if preferred the information can be sent by standard mail.

Online advertising of Move to the Future and your Property

Over 73% of buyers now start their property search on the Internet and this has some significant benefits:

• Online searching of the apparent multitude of properties for sale can quickly filter down to the handful that meet the buyers’ requirements in terms of location, price and accommodation.
• Properties can be advertised faster on the Internet – often appearing days earlier than the same property could appear in the property newspapers.
• It is cheaper than newspaper marketing because it lacks the printing and distribution costs and enables us to present the property more fully without major expense. This also makes it more environmentally friendly.
• It is truly global.
• The effectiveness of online marketing can be more readily measured and focused.

With regard to the property market there are two primary ways to find property online, search engine optimisation and property portals:

Search engine optimisation

This is where the user will search the search engines such as Google using a search phrase – e.g. Properties for sale in Cambridge.  This will return the websites that best fit the search term and rank them in order of best fit and popularity.

As with any market there are dominant players and in online search engines Google is currently in a class of its own with Google.co.uk and Google.com together taking over 91% of the UK market  (source: www.Hitwise.com)

Websites representing companies are constantly fighting for position within the search engines because if they are not on the 1^st results page of a particular search then the website will probably not be seen.

In this fight for position on the search engines the dominant property portal Rightmove announced that in Q2 2010 for the first time there were more search engine searches for “Rightmove” than there were for “property…..” (e.g.“Property for sale Cambridge”).  This was achieved by a combination of Rightmove’s own dominance of the property portal market and an intensive TV advertising campaign immediately prior to and around Google’s launch of its own property portal , which may in time become the most significant event since the advent of the property portals.

At a local level it is also practical for individual agents to compete on the search engines and at Move to the Future we will continue to work to improve our own search engine presence in conjunction with working with the dominant portals.

Property Portals

These are websites that in a variety of ways take property details from members and present them together on one site in order to create a market place where all properties can be seen.  No site has 100% of all properties although currently Rightmove has a similar dominance to Google in its market, with the other portals including Zoopla, Propertyfinder, Globrix, Primelocation and Findaproperty hardly registering as search terms on Google.  However, these figures are national and some of the other portals do have significant presence in specific areas.  Searching on the portal name is also not the only way to access these portals but there is also very considerable overlap between Rightmove and the other portals.

source: Google Insights 13^th July 2010

The one new property portal that could provide a threat to Rightmove is Google’s own UK property portal at http://maps.google.co.uk .  This is Google’s own property portal that is recognised as potentially the dominant portal which is why some existing portals such as Zoopla as well as estate agents are now advertising property on it.

All Move to the Future properties are uploaded to the Google maps property portal

In much of the UK www.rightmove.co.uk is currently the dominant property portal with around 85% of estate agents using it to advertise their properties, making it a very powerful market place.  At Move to the Future we are constantly monitoring the benefits of the available marketing routes and at this time Rightmove represents the most effective online place to focus the marketing of both Move to the Future and your property.

Where appropriate we have purchased the local home page advertising – e.g. Cambridge below.  This branded advertising is used to both raise the profile of Move to the future and the specific marketing of new property developments.  Enquiries from interested developers would be welcome.

We are happy to also use of the Rightmove featured property and Premium property listings in order to enable your property to stand out from the crowd.  Please contact us for further details.

Local newspaper advertising of Move to the Future and your Property

Online marketing is becoming increasingly dominant in the marketing of property but the local property newspapers are important and are likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.  However, this can be a relatively expensive method of marketing which is why we give customers options.

Move to the Future will continue to advertise in the property press and as a minimum use this marketing to build the brand and guide potential buyers to our website.

Advertising specific properties in the property newspapers coupled with our online marketing ensures the widest possible exposure and is particularly useful for more unusual properties or to help ensure a quick sale when selling costs are of secondary consideration.

Move to the Future also use property newspaper advertising to promote Open House events to the local market.