23 Tips for Developers Selling Residential Properties

The press is awash with reports of green shoots. The stock market is surging with confidence that the recession is over but the fact remains it is still a very tough market for developers selling new and refurbished properties in the UK.

Here are some hints, tips and ideas which might just assist in the current climate.

1. What does your brand stand for? It is important to have a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) or a set of values so that buyers can choose your brand because there is a lot of property on the market. Do you stand for quality luxury homes, minimalist masterpieces? homes for young professionals. Who are your target customers? Where do they eat, play, work? Build a profile and this will help your marketing to be targeted and focused.

2. Start with your past satisfied customers. What can you learn from them, their feedback, comments, suggestions. How can you build a long-term relationship with them so that they are raving from the rooftops about you and will also use you again when they move. Have a professional Client Relationship Management Software program to ensure you can mailshot and keep in contact with your past customers/clients.

3. Create the WOW factor on sales. This needs creativity but flowers in a vase in their new home on the day of completion, a chilled bottle of Champagne in the fridge etc etc. Get people talking about you and saying "Wow!" this developers are amazing. It's often small details that really blow people away.

4. Get writing. Write blogs, e-zines, tweets on Twitter. Get your core values across. Write useful articles which are useful to homeowners eg. how to get planning permission for alterations, improving the energy efficiency of your home quoting a list of reputable suppliers who can install wind turbines, grey water systesm, solar panels etc. Remember is not who you know but who knows you which will determine if buyers select your product.

5. Give talks to local community business groups Chamber of Commerce, networking and breakfast clubs. Get your company's name out there.

6. Become known in the community for getting involved in good works by joining organisations like Rotarians, Lions, Round Table, Masons. Raise your personal profile.

7. Use video testimonials on your web site, blogs and on presentations on your laptop showing satisfied customers singing your praises. Get the customers to address in the video specific objections which potential buyers might have such as your homes/flats being slightly more expensive than your average housebuilder but they are high quality built to last and more substantial than the cardboard and foil houses built by Bloggs Developments. Get a professional company to do the video as you do not want it to be tacky. Post the video on You Tube. Starting building the legend.

8. Reward referrals of customers/clients handsomely and creatively. Send a voucher for a luxury hotel, sought after tickets to a local sports match etc.

9. Use creativity in designing your business cards, stationery, marketing material. Make sure people are talking about your company when you hand out your cards. Beeton Edwards' cards are made from unwanted junkmail and embedded with wildflower seeds so when you throw the away they turn into beautiful flowers. People go crazy for this idea.

10. Use a puppy dog close to secure a customer. Rent our house for a drastically reduced rent and if you like it after 6 months talk to us about buying the house.

11. Use innovation / creativity to differentiate your product.
Solar panels, heat sinks, lime and hemp walls, grey water systems. Something that grabs headlines, makes people sit up, attracts press attention. Read Edward de Bono's "Serious Creativity: Using the Power of Lateral Thinking to Create New Ideas" or Michael Michalka's "Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques" for guidance on using creativity/innovation in your organisation.

12. New homeowners invariably need the same things when they move into a house.
-new curtains
-plants, shrubs
-decking
-garden furniture
-hardwood flooring
-furniture

Design an attractive looking information sheet prepared with a list of suppliers with telephone nos. addresses, directions may be with discounts already negotiated on presentation of the information sheets/vouchers etc.

13. New homeowner need information on schools, colleges, pre-schools, churches, clubs, societies, sports teams.

Prepare an attractively designed information sheet with details of all the local schools with the headmaster's name and contact details. Include testimonials on the schools or links to the League Tables published on the government websites so they can choose which school. Consider giving out these information sheets at the enquiry stage so people can be wowed by your attention to detail. Local churches could have church times. Sports and social clubs could have details of membership fees and joining requirements. This document will take a long time to put together but it will be an invaluable resource. Get it laminated so it is constantly being referred to and make sure your branding is all over it.

14. Inform the buying process. Go beyond the normal Pre-Contract Enquiries information and try to pre-empt the Additional Enquiries which solicitors might raise and present the information in an innovative way. The sheet could contain Rates and water rates information (rateable value, multipliers etc.) Council tax information, cable TV suppliers, Broadband suppliers with their comparitive speeds and details of any extra equipment needed. Details of neighbourhood watch schemes, residents associations.

Find out if the potential buyers have any specialist hobbies or activities eg. if they were a mad keen cyclist you could tailor the information sheet to include specialist cycle shops, details of local cycle clubs. If they were a keen musician give details of the local MU representative, local pubs with live music, local music shops supplying equipment.

It is hard work but you are creating the most amazing resource. I hear your outrage. I am housebuilder not a blasted Information Centre. Trust me on this. You will blow the competition out of the water if you do this well.

15. Work ten times harder than the competition. Start work earlier and finish later than your competitors and leave them wondering how you gained the edge on them.

16. Improve your personal learning. Sharpen your saw as Stephen Covey, author of "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" says. Read books on management, selling, self-improvement. Listen to self-improvement tapes. Attend seminars. Learning is a life-long process. New ideas could have a dramatic effect on your success as a business. Read Jeffrey Gitomer's "The Little Red Book of Selling: 12.5 Principles of Sales Greatness". Rated as one of the best business books in the world-it's dynamite. Just hope your competitors don't read it too as life could get interesting.

17. Find a mentor or two who has made a fortune selling houses. They are sure to be full of gems and pearls of wisdom and may want to give back to the industry and give you a helping hand with contacts, leads etc.

18. Cultivate the right friendships. Move in the right circles whether it be golf, shooting, cycling, polo, opera, theatre. Get friendly with the right type of person who will become your friend and then a potential buyer or referrer of business.

19. Write your financial and strategic goals down and keep reading those goals every morning. Put them on the bathroom mirror, the sun visor of your car. Somewhere where you will keep seeing it. Visualise the goal being achieved. Read Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich". Goals that get written down get achieved.

20. Use humour in your literature. People love to laugh. This could be a print newsletter, e-zine, blog etc.

21. Get your sales force professional trained. They all need to know all of this stuff. People loving buying but hate being sold to. Make sure your sales force are trained properly by an outside professional. It will be money well spent.

22. Hold weekly sales meetings which are engaging, fun and involving. Get in good cakes and luxury coffee.

23. Reward the right values in your sales staff ie. not just sales achieved but positive testimonials from clients, referrals from other agents due to legendary service provided, repeat business from satisfied existing customers. Reward the sales staff who are building relationships and using innovation and creativity.

I hope that has created some food for thought. It's a tough market but there are buyers out there. The landscape is a bit more brutal though and buyers are pulling out and time-wasting especially as they don't have to do local searches anymore. They are viewing, requesting HIPS packs and so it is important to stand out from the pack. Happy selling!

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10 Ways to Speed up a Commercial Property Transaction

One of the most frequent complaints clients make in relation to commercial property transactions is how long it takes to progress a sale or purchase or the grant of a new lease. However, there are several things that clients can do to speed up the process.

1. Get lawyers involved at the Heads of Terms stage. This avoids lengthy negotiations on key points later. Some parties will refuse to concede a point in later negotiations if it stated in black and white in the Heads of Terms even though they are not contractually binding.

2. Get the Seller's solicitors or Landlord Solicitor's to send out the documents electronically so that the Buyer's solicitors/Tenant's Solicitors can amend up electronically which saves time when preparing final engrossments for signature, saves money on copying multi-coloured drafts, saves legal time in trying to decipher illegible hand-written scrawl.

3. Use email and telephone/text instead of fax and letter throughout the transaction. Seems obvious but you would be amazed how many solicitors still use snail mail adding weeks to a transaction.

4. Consider a well-structured time-limited face to face meeting if there are a host of sticking points to avoid lawyers getting entrenched in legal minutiae and cracking up obscene levels of costs.

5. Hand deliver documents to speed up the final signing and completion. Another obvious one but often over-looked. Not always possible if your lawyer is miles away.

6. Set up arrangements and protocols with like minded solicitors firms to agree on the use of standard PLC documents, PLC pre-contract enquiries and to agree that no unnecessary enquiries are raised.

7. Seller/Landlord supplies a "Sellers Pack" like a HIPS pack but much more comprehensive including all relevant title documents, replies to CPSE enquiries, copy planning documents, Building regulation approvals, asbestos survey reports, Energy Performance Certificates, Disability Discrimination Audits to avoid unnecessary enquiries. Consider putting a local authority search, chancel check, drainage search and environmental report which will save weeks in delays waiting for these searches. An information sheet summarising key title issues and replies to pre-contract enquiries similar to that provided on new builds can be enormously helpful to a Buyer's/Tenant's solicitor.

8. Get estate layout plans approved well in advance of any plot sales by the Land Registry and get the Land Registry to approve any lease or Transfer in advance to flush out any boundary issues or future title requisitions saving everyone time when submitting searches and their applications for registration.

9. Get Tenants to prepare a pack of references in advance for Landlords in connection with applications for licence to assign/sub-let. These take ages to organise and can hold up the issue of a draft licence to assign/licence to underlet.

10. Get your lawyers to use case management software to speed up the process of document creation and workflow.

The legal process can be accelerated by adopting some of the suggestions referred to above. There may be many other ways of speeding the legal process. We specialise in creating new and innovative ways of speeding up the process. Have a word and we will get our green thinking hats on (a reference to the legendary thinking professor, Edward De Bono's book "Six Thinking Hats")

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A happy accident: 2 books that changed my life

I was sent a couple of books by my brother by accident a couple of years ago. He got confused with Amazon One-Click and hey presto! I was the proud recipient of Leo Hickman's Life Stripped Bare: My Year Trying to Live Ethically
and Felicity Lawrence's Not on the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on Your Plate. I phoned my brother and thanked him for very kind generosity and he cursed his incompetence but did have the good grace not to ask me to send the books back (he had only intended to send me a CD which I had also received-not a CD and 2 books).

Leo Hickman writes for The Guardian and his book recounts in a very amusing and light-hearted fashion his attempts to lead a more green and ethical life. He tells tales of his struggles with a wormery that gets out of hand. He has 3 experts who give his life an ethical audit and despite having no car, he gets a strict dressing-down from the experts. Since reading that book, I have too embraced the ethical way which ends up being a series of compromises. Whilst I try my hardest to lead a life which is both green and ethical, it is difficult to impose these standards on my wife and 4 children. I try to lead by example and we don't do badly. We recycle everything that is recyclable. I often buy books from 2nd hand book shops. When read, I drop the books off to Oxfam. I compose decomposable waste and use it on my garden. I don't have a water barrel -tut! tut! My car is not electric but it is a Renault CO2 low carbon Clio (139kg of CO2 per mile). I use Lush products which are made without animal testing from fresh natural ingredients with hardly any packaging which includes solid shampoos and moisturisers in containers which Lush takes back. I have struggled with solid deodorants which don't work and you start whiffing at about 4pm which is very unpleasant for all concerned! I then got involved in developing the Social Responsibility Policy for my last law firm and this policy is now being rolled out firm-wide so I have left a legacy of good work there. Ultimately, I would like my new firm's offices to be constructed from Lime and Hemp by my client who builds eco-sustainable housing but this is a little way off yet. So all in all this book has had a massive impact on my life but leading an ethical life is a series of compromises. A trade off between one value and another and it leaves you with a constant state of feeling slightly guilty. A strongly recommended thought-provoking read.

Felicity Lawrence also writes for The Guardian and her book lifts the lid on the so-called green credentials of some of the big supermarkets. This uncovers some of the disturbing facts about some of the most frequently purchased food items in supermarkets including chicken, eggs and salad. A lot of this has been covered since by Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall in their Channel 4 TV programmes but there are some truly nightmarish facts in this book which are likely to alter your eating habits very rapidly. It won't make you vegetarian but it may push you further to the organic/free range/local produce range of foodstuffs. Another cracking read.

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