Tag Archives: marketing

A bed set with comfortable pillows and a lamp beside it.

When it comes to moving home, the stress doesn’t stop after you’ve found the right property for you. Packing and moving your belongings can prove to be chaotic and time consuming, but there are certain things you can do to make the process run smoothly. The experts at ABC Movers & Storers have put together some top tips to help you make the most of your moving day.

1. Make a List

Make a priority list of all the things you need to pack and in the order you should pack them. This will make it much easier when you start piling your possessions away. Tick off the items once you have packed them so you know exactly what has been packed already. You can also create a system including boxes containing items from i

Individual rooms, for particular uses and of a certain category. By grouping your possessions together like this they will be easier to organise when both packing and unpacking.

2. Start Early

It isn’t worth leaving all of your packing to the week before you move because you’re likely to either forget things or run out of time. Start with the things you only use now and then like books, tables, out of season clothes and ornaments. You can box these up in the weeks before your move so that in the last week you can concentrate on packing those things you use daily.

You’d be surprised at the amount of things you can live without for a month or so, and with the promise of making your moving day less stressful, it’s definitely worth planning ahead.

3. Label Boxes

This seems simple enough but people get it wrong so often. Label your boxes by room; if you need to colour code then do so. This will ensure that when you go to unpack you will know exactly what boxes should go in what room, allowing you to access your possessions when you need them.

Don’t just label the room either, write down some of the contents on the box so you don’t have to search all of your belongings to find what you’re looking for. When you’re labelling, make sure you write on the side of the box and not on the top. This will make it easier to see the contents when the boxes are all stacked.

4. Mark your Essentials Boxes

You may need a few boxes filled with items that you will need straight away – things like phone chargers, kitchen utensils and cleaning products. Marking these with a different colour duct tape will make them stand out straight away, making sure you’re not stranded when you get to your new home.

When filling your essentials box, take time to consider what items are going to go in there and what you will need as soon as you get to your new home. Writing down a list before you start to pack will make sure you don’t miss any vital items!

5. Don’t Fill the Boxes to the Top

Filling your boxes up to the top may m

Make it difficult for you to carry them around when transporting them. Whilst making the most of the space that you have is efficient, you will be making it more difficult for yourself to transfer your belonging to and from the removal lorry. If you put the heaviest items in smaller boxes not only will you be less tempted to keep packing extra bits and bobs, but you can take up less space without adding to the weight.

With these easy steps, you can be sure that you are fully prepared for the big day, making the move stress-free and easy. Make sure to plan ahead in order to avoid anything going wrong and try to remain as organised as possible. You will soon reap the rewards of spending time organising and labelling, and unpacking will be made even easier too!

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

A stoned fireplace facing a single sofa with a blanket, pillow and book on it in a cozy living room

The UK housing market is at an all time high since 1998 and research by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) showed that on average, 22.700 homes were sold each month since the start 2014. People up and down the country are taking advantage of this “time to sell” and investing money back into their properties through redecorating and DIY.

It used to be that a lick of paint and a few nice light fittings were enough to generate interest in a house but people are getting savvy with their use of space, especially in the cities where converting an attic into a second or third bedroom could increase the average value of a house by 12.5%.

In order to entice people to buy, sellers are taking it one step further and totally revamping rooms in their houses.

Cellars, for example, if large enough can be converted into a second living room or entertainment room. This type of conversion is the most expensive however it yields the highest return on investment when it comes to adding value to a property.

As the “Help to Buy” Scheme increases in popularity more and more younger people are considering property as an investment so sellers need to provide the right incentive to cater for a younger audience in order to achieve a successful sale.

If there isn’t enough space to totally transform a cellar or loft then remodelling other rooms can also prove profitable in the long run.

This infographic by Evolution Money called “The Real Cost of Home Improvements” gives you an idea of what rooms can be renovated, how much you would expect to pay and what the average percentage of value you could expect to add to the asking price.

An infographic design by Evolution Money called The Real Cost of Home Improvements

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

Corner of the room.; decorated with a table and a bird with lamp on top of it

Martin & Co logoThis guest post is brought to you by Alex Sebuliba on behalf of Martin & Co.

Martin & Co are a UK based national Lettings agency who offer service to tenants, landlords, sellers, buyers and investors. With over 25 years of experience, they specialise in ensuring the specific demands and requirements of every individual are met at all times. 

While many home owners have decided to sit tight while the financial crisis rumbles on despite a desire to move, those who do decide to go ahead and try to sell their property have a decision to make – sell privately, or go through an estate agent?

For many people, it’s a question they’ve not even pondered, handing over the power – and plenty of money – to their local estate agent in a bid to help them sell. But the reality is quite different, and in the last few years a growing number of people have chosen to sell their own property. So which is best?

Estate agents

Using an estate agent remains by far the most common way to sell a property. When I sold my home, I visited a plethora of estate agents in Newark, who all vowed to do their best by me, to take the stress off me and to achieve the goal of selling my home for the best possible price.

But their services came at a cost. All wanted a minimum of 1.5%, plus VAT, as a fee. The average UK house price is now £238,000, meaning estate agent fees total almost £4,000 before VAT is added.

However, if you choose to sell through an agent, you know they want to sell your property – and so they will do their best to get viewers and to make a sale. This is, surely, exactly what you want from them, after all it is their job.

Exchange situation between seller and buyer

Selling privately

With the rise of the internet and a change in the rules on buying and selling property online, it’s now easier than ever to sell your house yourself, and the fees that come with it could be a lot less – sometimes as little as £175 to list your property for sale.

However, this cost will likely rise if your house doesn’t sell quickly depending on the type of independent selling process you use; some websites allow a one-off fee to

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

A modern living room with two sofas, a two glass of wine and a chessboard above a table

Welcome to Wednesday and the third in my series themed on Wimbledon.

In his book, Adapt – Why Success Always Starts With Failure – Tim Harford explains we must adapt—improvise rather than plan, work from the bottom up rather than the top down, and take baby steps rather than great leaps forward, in order to achieve success. Thus our great tennis players are constantly adapting in order to improve their games, often one tiny step at a time. Only by losing a point or a game can they re-evaluate, review, adapt and apply a new technique. In other words, without failure, there can be no success.

If your house is languishing on the market, with no viewers in sight, it is very easy to become disheartened and disillusioned with the entire selling process. It certainly isn’t often easy, especially when you are selling a unique home. Maureen O’Hara once said, “To cope, people need to be certain enough to act and uncertain enough to learn”, in other words, to have the courage of your convictions whilst still being humble enough to accept you may need advice and help.  Not an easy conflict to deal with.

If you don’t have any viewings, review your marketing, and make some small changes to effect overall large improvements; if you have plenty of viewings but no offers, critique your home; maybe commission a professional home stager. If you are getting offers but they are below your target sale price, read up on negotiation skills, or even engage a professional homebuyer to negotiate on your behalf. In short – raise your game, and adapt, adapt, adapt.

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

A rock interior design with an antique wooden table, furniture hanging on a wall, a lampshade, and a pot of flowers

Day 2 of my series celebrating Andy Murray’s fantastic win and hopefully, the sale of your home!

Andy Murray and the rest of the world’s elite tennis players really are creative in their game. They innovate continually, coming up with new moves, slices, serves and techniques in a constant effort to improve their game.

When you are selling your home, creativity is key. Your marketing needs to stand out from those of your competitors, and at HomeTruths we are constantly looking at ways in which our clients’ marketing can be more innovative. Your brochure, online advert and property photography all need to be exceptional, so look at it with an extremely critical eye, and ask yourself “what could we do better?” Our photographers strive to create new angles and exciting lighting; the brochures we advocate are very special, with unusual formats, lots of pages, and creative layouts. Only by innovating on a continuous basis, questioning and reviewing your marketing, can you ensure that your home really sells itself.

Once a buyer takes the plunge and books a viewing on your home, you need to be absolutely certain that it really delivers the wow factor in every way possible. No matter how ordinary your home, or how modest its proportions, every room needs to really shine to a buyer. In order to be innovative and creative, visit show homes, stately homes and interior design showrooms; gather ideas and tips voraciously and apply the best and most appropriate ones in your home. It may be a splash of colour, a stylish piece of artwork or a sumptuous rug; whatever it takes to really grab your buyer and reassure them that this is their dream home.

Tomorrow we’re going to look at how to adapt to sell your property faster, and for more.

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

A hanging heart-shaped on the furniture with pillows inside the bedroom

Julie Stevens of Younique Designs Ltd is a professional Home Stager. 

If you have been trying to sell your home for some months and possibly even had a sale fall through you could find yourself broken hearted, demotivated and lost of all inspiration of what to do next. You may have lost sight of why you wanted to sell in the first place.

homestaging

My advice to my clients who find themselves in this situation is the following:

  1. Firstly, Reflect back to your decision to sell – was it a half-hearted thought? Maybe you saw the perfect next home for you. Did you think, ‘lets just put it on the market and see what happens’? Was it pressure from family members who think its time you moved into something smaller and more manageable?  Whatever the reasons for your decision were, were you really committed to it?
  2. Reassess where you are now.  What has happened? How has the marketing strategy of your agent been implemented? How many viewings have you had? Have your photographs been refreshed on line? Do you have a brochure that represents your property well? How many price drops have you been through?
  3. Ask yourself afresh why you want to sell. If you have a clear answer on this then you can move forward. Understand what your desires are, how you want to feel when you sell and move into your new home.
  4. Understand that you have to be motivated to action in order to achieve those desired feelings.
  5. Start afresh with new eyes to see the home you have for sale.
  6. Realise that your home is a product to be sold – as such it has to be packaged and marketed in the right way to appeal to the right buyers. It has to stand out from the crowd; it has to have the right features and benefits to meet the aspirations of your potential buyers.
  7. Take the advice of a professional Home Stager to see if your home is presented and packaged in the right way for your target buyers. A Home Stager will understand the aspirations of buyers and know what they want to see when looking for their new home.
  8. Put yourself in your buyer’s shoes – what do you see?
  9. As a buyer yourself for your new home – what do you want to see? How does this differ from what you have to sell?
  10. Write down what you did

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

Books, a glass and a bottled wine above a table with a wooden fireplace in a background

If, like me, you spend many happy hours browsing Rightmove, you can’t have failed to notice the fact that some properties are featured at the top of each page of search results, and others are are given added emphasis, with a grey box, clickable photos, and a red badge. The former is what Rightmove calls a “Featured Property”, and the latter a “Premium Listing”.

Rightmove ‘Featured’ listing

‘Featured’ listing

Rightmove ‘Premium’ listing

‘Premium’ listing

There are three types of listings on Rightmove: Regular, Premium and Featured. The Regular version sees your property marketed on the portal. The Featured Listing sits at the top of the search results and is highlighted with a blue banner top and bottom, so it stands out, whereas the Premium Listing appears in search in price order, but is a larger box with a big green banner.  The cost for a Premium listing is £50 per property, whereas the Featured property spot is a bigger investment, at £180 per month. If you’re using a full-service agency to market your home, this cost will usually be covered by your agent, if they use these features. If you use a DIY agency, like PurpleBricks or Yopa, for example, both Featured and Premium listings are available at extra cost.

Is there any benefit to you or your agent paying the extra for Rightmove added features?

We’ve tested these features in our own agency, AshdownJones, and whilst we found the views and clicks on our enhanced property listings did increase, the number of actual viewings did not. It seems unlikely to me that using one of these upgraded listings would refresh interest in a house that had been on the market for a prolonged amount of time, and when a home first goes to market, it often has a flurry of interest anyway, so an enhanced listing would be a waste of money.

I’m sure there will be other estate agents – and Rightmove themselves of course – who will argue it’s a worthwhile investment, but it hasn’t proved to be for us. Instead, we focus on creating the best possible showcase of a home on a Rightmove standard listing.

Lifestyle photography, professionally-written copy and a beautiful brochure will all motivate quality enquiries and encourage serious viewings, much more so than paying for an enhanced listing. In fact, I’ve seen some pretty awful listings on Rightmove in the Featured or Premium spots, which is just lazy marketing, in my opinion. After all, there’s little point in paying for your shoddy listing to appear in a Featured or Premium spot if it’s not going to appeal to the right kind of buyers in the first place.

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

A study room with a sofa, and a table with a clock and other things on top of it surrounded with different decorations

In these days where most anything we want to buy is but a click of the mouse away, do we really need an agent to sell our home? There are plenty of virtual estate agents out there ready to take our money and promise a sale at a fraction of the cost of an estate agent, but what are the potential pitfalls we need to be aware of?

  • You can’t get your property advertised on Rightmove and the other property portals without an agent of some kind. An agent is defined as someone who crucially will visit the property to take measurements and a written description that they will stand by legally, and can be held to account for if necessary. The property portals will not take responsibility for this, so an agent is needed. Private seller sites are not the same, and these will not put you on the property portals, so beware.
  • They are much better at selling lower priced properties. These tend to be the more usual terraced homes, city centre flats, suburban three bed semis and so on. If you have a 18th century oast house, or converted watermill, you may well have less success. These highly individual properties need carefully crafted marketing campaigns to attract the right kind of discerning buyer, and this is usually best done face to face, which virtual agencies don’t offer.
  • You will have to do the viewings yourself. For many sellers, this is actually preferable, but do be aware that it’s not an easy thing to do, either for you or for your buyers. They can’t be as honest with you as they would be with your estate agent for a start, so you may well never hear any of their objections to the house, and if you don’t know what they are, well, you can’t overcome them. An agent can listen to a buyers protestations that your kitchen is too big or your hallway too dark, and make suggestions as to solutions. If you don’t know what their worries are, you can’t help them to see the options.
  • Their call centre staff are only really there to book viewings and take offers. They have not visited your home, so they can’t tell a viewer anything about it. There are some companies that have taken steps to overcome this factor, and often the person who originally visited your house to take the description can be available, but with up to 2000 properties on their books, this is often impossible.
  • Their photography and property brochure are of a minimum standard. This is often not enough to sell a premium or valuable property, which need the quality of the features and fittings represented by a suitable brochure, so sellers of individual properties may find it necessary to commission their own photography and brochure, at their own expense.

None of these factors is insurmountable and actually, in a buoyant market where you are confident of your home selling quickly, you can save a lot of money by using a virtual agent. However, if the market is slow and you are a busy person with no time to spare to take on some of these tasks, it’s often better to leave it to an experienced professional estate agent, and entrust the process to him. In the long term, this may well prove the best investment return.

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

A bedroom which is focused on the side table with a lamp on top of it overlooking the window view with a vase of flowers

A bedroom which is focused on the side table with a lamp on top of it overlooking the window view with a vase of flowers

People watching – what a terrific pastime it is! I’m a very visual person, with a background as a professional photographer, so I really enjoyed all the outfits, hairstyles, personalities and characters that Henley Regatta had to offer. Boaters, blazers and wedding-type hats were the order of the day, and some attendees were more creative than others!

What’s today’s lesson then? I suppose it is to be observant! When your viewers arrive, notice what they are wearing, how they carry themselves, and their gestures and try to deduce from their appearance what kind of buyer they are. Are they down-to-earth, jeans and trainers types? Focus on the garden, the garage and the practical elements of your home. If the lady turns up wearing high heels and perfectly groomed, then she will appreciate any touches of luxury and sophistication your home has to offer. Make sure you give her the best chair, and offer her a cup of tea made in a teapot and served in a cup and saucer. These are all little touches, but little touches all add up to become a buying motivation.  Make the effort and see what happens!

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.

An oak bedroom with a wide space reflecting the outside's veiw through a glass window

An oak bedroom with a wide space reflecting the outside's veiw through a glass window

“Didn’t we have a loverly time at the Henley Regatta……”

It was fantastic! I went along with my husband Michael and my baby sister Kathy (the very talented photographer Katherine Ashdown), courtesy of a client of my husband’s. We dressed appropriately, as I hope you’ll agree, and Kathy and I were particularly pleased with our nautical styling! It was amazing to see everyone so beautifully dressed up, and as a lady, much of the enjoyment of my day was in watching all the other ladies, and admiring their gorgeous outfits. My husband was very content to cheer on the rowers as Kathy and I engaged in some serious people-watching. More of that in tomorrow’s blog.

The highlights of our day were:

  1. The delicious catering, absolutely in line with the quality and creativity you would expect from such a prestigious event.
  2. The outfits: some outlandish, some beautifully elegant, but almost all worth looking at!
  3. The shopping: all the best of British shops selling lovely pretty things.
  4. The atmosphere: and the rowing, of course!  Seeing all those young university men competing against each other was a real treat. Just think, they could be competing against each other in the House of Commons in a decade!
  5. The company: I thoroughly enjoyed spending the day with two of my loved ones, but also the other people we met really made the day fun and it was over before we knew it!

So what’s today’s lesson from Henley Regatta? Well, I suggest you look at your home and ask yourself “What are my highlights?” Looking at my five highlights above, can you arrange some visual and sensory treats to wow your potential buyers?  How about homemade cookies, served by you wearing a special outfit, having staged your home with some pretty things, and to create atmosphere, some well-chosen music playing? Then all you have to make sure you do, is to be the best host or hostess, and make your viewers feel like the very special guests they are.

If you’d like my help to sell your home more effectively, please answer a few short questions here and if I think I can help you, I’ll be in touch.