While house prices appear to be stabilizing and interest from buyers is returning steadily, many agents continue to report that instructions remain in short supply. In an already highly competitive market, this shortage of stock means agents are vying for every new instruction.
So what are they doing to guarantee the best possible chance of winning? According to figures released by Metropix this month – it appears that more and more of them are using floor plans to improve their success rate. Brian Farrell, from Metropix, suggests that the increase in the number of floor plans generated by their system is likely to be a result of market response to consumer demand.
“Over the past three months, we’ve seen 23% more plans created with Metropix than during the first quarter of this year. And the same period saw an increase of 51% over the fourth quarter of 2008. In fact, July saw the highest number of plans created in the past 12 months. There’s also been a 7% increase in the number of customers using the service in the last three months, compared with the previous two quarters. Clearly these figures are not in keeping with stock levels in the market which strongly suggests that agents are responding to consumer demand by introducing floor plans into their marketing portfolio and/or extending their use of plans to every property”.
The increasing demand for floor plans has been highlighted in recent months by various major players within the industry:
▪ Rightmove reported that properties marketed with a floor plan attract 30% more interest than those without one
▪ 85.5% of respondents in the biggest ever home moving trend survey carried out by The Academy deemed floor plans to be useful/essential (the higher proportion being in the ‘essential’ category)
▪ And The Digital Property Group disclosed that consumers consider floor plans to be even more important than detailed room descriptions.
When you add the work being carried out by many of the top property portals and software providers in order to improve still further floor plan display on the Internet, it seems that the industry is embracing plans as a valuable property marketing tool.