“More Information Please”

GlobalEdge has some very sage advice about how to choose a property portal to advertise your properties on. You can see their article HERE.

Go through their points and you will see that FranceHouseHunt does extremely well.

GlobalEdge suggest the 4 main criteria for choosing a property portal as:

• Consumer Marketing & Traffic
• Content
• Design & Navigation
• Business Model

In our opinion, the best way to evaluate whether a property portal will generate leads is to ask yourself what your potential buyers might search for on Google, search for the phrase and see which portals show up in the search results. Natural search results provide a better indicator than paid search in our opinion, as the results are generally clicked on more and do not disappear when budgets change or competitors outbid you.

Content is important. Without it, buyers have little to look at and will soon leave a website, perhaps never to return. Property listings are in our opinion more important than editorial content. Buyers want to search for property, compare houses, prices, locations and facilities. Check if portals have a good breadth of property content to give consumers choice.  

On the internet, buyers are only one click away from the competition. If they get lost or frustrated, they will leave. Try to search for property in the areas where you are selling property. How difficult is it? If you find it difficult to find what you want, then your customers will too and this should raise a question mark about the portal’s ability to deliver leads for you.

Price and payment terms are factors in any business decision. If a portal offers cost per lead or commission share, you should consider them more favourably. However, portals that charge monthly can have much more effective marketing so, in our opinion, the business model should always be a secondary factor in your analysis. If the product and the marketing are right for your customer profile, then you should definitely consider paying monthly.  On the best sites you may also want to look at enhanced or high-traffic listings that put your properties and brand above your competitors, as this can be a very effective lead generation tactic.

This is our favourite subject…as we are TOTALLY FREE your cost per lead is going to be very low.

Some other important factors we think should be considered when choosing a property portal that GlobalEdge hasn’t mentioned are:

Does your property portal advertise YOU as well as your properties - does each listing have a link to YOUR website?

Quality of leads - I have spoken already of this in a previous post, but it is worth mentioning again. Where do the leads generated come from? Are they quality leads? How are people finding the property portal, are they typing in search terms to do with property or are they searching for French recipes or metric calculators?

In conclusion then, taking the criteria specified FranceHouseHunt is one of the best French property portals on which to list your French properties for sale (after all some of the biggest immobiliers in France are advertising on FranceHouseHunt).

If you want to list YOUR properties for sale on FranceHouseHunt please click HERE.

Nobody (buyers, owners or agents) wants to waste their time by viewing unsuitable properties.

When asking for more information from any agent, try to be as specific as you can. More information covers a multitude of information from the surrounding area, the house, room sizes, schooling, transport links etc. There is no point in us telling you all about local schooling if you do not have children for example. Also give the agent as much information as you can about you and or your family’s requirements. Is the house a holiday/permanent home? Budget is helpful for us to know too, and does your budget include renovation work for instance?

I have had instances where people have arrived for visits with a back seat full of children I knew nothing about to view properties which did not have enough bedrooms. I have also had an instance where a client with mobility difficulties arrived to view properties which, although they had chosen them were totally unsuitable and had I known about accessibility issues I could have steered them away from these properties.

However, at the same time try to keep the information required applicable to the property, renovation, locality etc. Remember estate agents are not the Citizens Advice Bureau, the Job Centre (yes, I have been asked to get jobs for clients!) or the DHSS (yes, I have been asked about what benefits people can claim for!). Asking us about job prospects and benefits are not in our field of expertise and you should be doing lots of your own background research to add to any information we provide. This is particularly true if you are planning a permanent move, and if that is the case I would encourage you to learn to speak French as well as you can, because the most ordinary, everyday things become very difficult when all you know how to do is order a coffee. It can be scary trying to speak French, but what’s the worst that can happen if you come out with the wrong words. My partner once asked a French couple showing us their house if the neighbour’s were gay instead of if they were friendly (his French has improved slightly since then)! No bolt’s of lightening, just quizzical expressions between the couple until he cottoned on and corrected himself.

The cost of making a visit to view properties is getting more and more expensive. Whilst, there is NO substitute for actually viewing a property, you can spend many years and a lot of money doing so, on top of the hours and hours spent trawling the internet. You can cut those visits down by doing proper research, asking the right questions, providing agents with a detailed profile and sometimes being prepared to compromise (unless you have an very big budget). Take time to get to know the area, moving there because of friends and family can be a costly mistake. If you decide you do not like it be aware that it can be a year or two before the property sells.

I will just add, that it is possible to find the house you want on your first visit, how will you know if its the right house for you?…..you’ll just know!