Do portals drown unique homes?

If you’ve ever tried searching for a unique home on a property portal, you’ll know just how difficult it can be.

The search parameters are minimal – ultimately house, flat, bedrooms, location, price – and are geared to the mainstream marketplace and conventional homes that make up most of the nation’s property stock.

But if you’re looking for something different, why should you have to search through so many homes that are ultimately the same? Scrolling through hundreds or thousands of listings is an overwhelming and time-consuming experience for buyers, and many homes simply disappear into the background as the next one comes into view.

Let’s switch that round to selling a unique home: how can that possibly be the way to get the best exposure? With no way of searching for what you have, it’s left purely down to chance whether a buyer happens to notice your home among the accompanying ocean of listings.

If you’re anything like many – if not most – of our clients, you could well have found your unique home by accident. Perhaps you were passing through on your way to somewhere else when you saw a for sale board. Maybe you were heading back to the station after dinner out when you noticed something in an estate agents’ window. Or a friend might have told you about something they’d seen right around the corner from them.

Many of the stories we hear about how our clients came to own their home are tales of the unexpected. The individual circumstances are wide and varied, but if there is a common thread, it’s that most of them weren’t specifically looking to live – or actively searching – in the neighbourhood where they ended up.

They didn’t find their home on a property portal, and they didn’t find it from a local estate agent calling them and saying: “I’ve just seen something that might be the perfect fit”. Something else had to happen for them to discover the home of their dreams, and, ultimately, it came down to pure chance.

Now, call us unconventional, but leaving it up to chance to sell your unique home seems less than ideal. Leaving it up to chance gives it less of a go than the most stereotypical of conventional property – at least with an ocean of 1930s semis, two-up-two-downs or 1980s purpose-built flats, they fit the template of what buyers are looking for in a particular location.

So how can you put your oast house in Kent in front of a buyer looking in Berkshire? Or your converted water tower in Winchmore Hill in the sights of someone looking in South London?

What will give your home the reach to push beyond the confines of your local high street, beyond the local vernacular, and beyond the local demand.

With almost 20,000 followers on social media, 4,000+ subscribed to our newsletter, and up to 4 times more enquires from our website than we get from portals like Rightmove and Zoopla, we can confidently claim to expose you to an audience unlike that of any high street or local agent, and without thousands of competing homes covering up the existence of yours.

With a series of touchpoints where people seeking unique homes can find us, we attract a wider and yet more concentrated audience of active buyers looking for that special something; people who are far more concerned with the type of property they find than its precise street or postcode.

Wherever you are selling a unique home – the Sussex coast, the Kent countryside; anywhere in London; East Anglia and any of the home counties – there is another audience you can reach that is mainly invisible to your local high street.

If you’d like to talk about selling your unique home, we’d love to talk to you about finding you the perfect buyer. Call us on 020 7917 9995 or email us at [email protected] – everything starts with a conversation!