Don't rely on the portals..

Don't rely on the portals..

The portal became the agent's way of property matching and creating viewings and an entire skill set was lost in a generation. But if you sit back and wait to receive an alert from them, you may be too late.

This won't be the last time I refer to the “good old days” of Estate Agency when a negotiator used their finely honed skills to match new property listings to their Hot Box of eager purchasers and created viewings before their colleagues did in an attempt to get the sale.

Not forgetting that every Thursday the Cambridge Evening News Property Supplement was delivered to Cambridge Curtain Twitchers and Forever Home Dreamers and it would be all hands on deck in the office as calls would fly in quicker than a Jenny in our office says "yes please" when someone says sushi.

In the late 90s, estate agents started to create their own websites, simultaneously property portal after property portal appeared, each jostling for position until those that need no mention rose to the top.

Where I am going with this is as property portals became the dominant way a purchaser looked for a new home the less effective many Estate Agents and negotiators became. The portal became the agent's way of property matching and creating viewings and an entire skill set was lost in a generation.

That was until recently, well, for us anyway. We now have one of the cleverest applicant registration and property matching systems, which allows the user to self-register and be as detailed or as vague as they want. If you would like to live within a mile of a train station or in a particular school catchment area, we can send you properties that either perfectly match (100%) or closely match (91%).

We now know who our purchasers are, where they are looking and how quickly they want to move. Importantly we even match and send new properties to our buyers before we place them on the portals and in some cases sell them before they have gone fully on the market.

If you are looking for your next home and would like to hear about it before it hits the portals click on the link below.



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We are all feeling the pinch right now but there are some of us feeling it a little more and we would like to see if there is a way we can help in some small way.

We have created a broadsheet to inform you about our updated website. So this is a digital message about our physical informative paper, which in turn informs you about our updated digital platform. Ironically, ironic? I'm not sure; my brain hurts.

National Statistics tell us it takes over six months from placing your property on the market to the day you complete. So if you leave your preparation until the spring, when most clients start surfacing from hibernation, you won’t be moving until October 2024 at the earliest!

To have sold (stc) 50 properties in a short month and in February is no mean feat. It is important to know that this is considerably more than any other estate agent in Cambridge. Humility is overrated ;-)