The Power of a Well Run Mailing List

Mon 14 March 2016

I am often asked, when I am undertaking Marketing Appraisals, whether we have people waiting to view properties such as the one I am inspecting.

The short answer, given current marketing conditions, is normally yes! The internet is not the “be all and end all” of selling a property and I was taught in my very early days as an Estate Agent, back in the early 1980’s in London, that the in-house mailing list was the key to the success of the Agency. Without it we could not contact potential purchasers in an era before e-mail and the proliferation of mobile phones!

In those days we were able to take a photograph of the property, measure the property and produce a set of details after making a “lithoplate” and still get the property out to the mailing list on that same day!

Oh to have had the benefits of the computer and the ability to run a mailing list that is instantaneously accessible and via which we can e-mail detailed particulars, text message notifications of new instructions and price reductions, and easily contact proceedable parties.

Proceedable parties are currently the key note of the mailing list. Our own mailing list as at the 7th March 2016 has a total of 826 actively managed applicants, of which, 76% are potentially proceedable applicants, being recorded as cash buyers, first time buyers, parties leaving rented accommodation, and those parties who have sold and are waiting to find a property to purchase. Only this morning, we re-marketed a property and have had four appointments to view the same confirmed within the first 24 hours of re-marketing!

Parties recorded all have an equal opportunity therefore of being contacted when we make a property available.

So, every week at our staff meeting in Kidderminster, we discuss the mailing list. It is our window into what is happening within a market place and enabling us to give, normally, correct interpretation of market strength and, more importantly, the trend that we predict with reference to property and prices i.e. whether demand is such that prices will remain static, decline or increase. We are all aware that over the last 12 – 18 month period, the market has seen a price gain. If we reflect upon the mailing list with reference to proceedable applicants at the back end of 2014 into 2015, we saw a mailing list rise from 65% proceedable in the November of 2014 to 69% by the February/March 2015. This underlying growth in the proportion of proceedable parties drove the market further forward last year to what, in many instances, is reflecting prices that are now getting near to or in some instances back to the heady heights of 2007.

So, if you are thinking of instructing an Estate Agent then, in my opinion, the mailing list is still one of the most key essential ingredients the Agent can offer to you that gives control of marketing to the agent and not just a blind reliance upon the internet.

After 40 years of being associated directly or indirectly with the sale valuation and survey of residential properties, the mailing list is still the key tool to successfully helping us to sell, hopefully, your property or to put you, as a potential purchaser, in touch with the properties we have to sell.

Chris Rees MRICS
Managing Partner
Direct Line No. 01562 826801