Our founder Mark Nicholson has always taken pride in his work and has been keen to adopt new technology to ensure that our property marketing is at the cutting edge. Mark was the first agent in the area to understand how social media can be an excellent vehicle for selling a property, and adopted video and interactive virtual tours before anyone else. Many of the marketing tools that we were early to adopt are still unique to Nicholsons in the area. 

For most estate agents, their marketing strategy is very simple, take some photos, draw up a floorplan, write a description and then upload those details onto rightmove. They then cross their fingers, sit back and wait for the phone to ring. Our approach is VERY different, proactive and structured. 

In this blog you will see how our unique and proactive marketing strategy works to ensure that we deliver the highest possible price for our clients, in the shortest amount of time and with the least amount of stress.

On the day we visit you, to take your properties details, our marketing process begins. Initially its all about wetting our audiences appetite for you property and creating FOMO - (a fear of missing out). It starts with us sharing a few photos and/or short video clips through our Facebook and Instagram stories, highlighting some of the interesting features around your home, whether its a beautiful kitchen, fireplaces, garden features, or a beautiful bathroom, we want to create excitement about whats to come. We will highlight the location, price and that your property is “coming soon”. 

Stories disappear after 24 hours but get huge engagement from our audience, we also share beyond our audience with the use of location tagging and hashtag.

It’s normal for this process to produce around a dozen enquiries of requests for further information about your home.

An example of our stories post can be found below. marketing is at the

Different people use facebook & instagram in different ways, therefore we need to make sure that your property goes onto these platforms in a variety of different ways to ensure it goes out to as many screens and users as possible.

At the same time as sharing your property to our facebook and instagram stories, we also share a preview video to our facebook and instagram pages. This video uses location tagging and hashtags the ensure they reach the largest and most relevant audience possible. 

Like with stories, these preview videos generate large numbers of enquiries for viewings and further details. In fact its common at this stage for us to receive offers on your home subject to the buyer having a viewing. 

We have invested in in a system called Lifesycle, giving our agency and our clients the full benefit of the most powerful Estate Agency software in the world. Through Artificial Intelligence, advanced techniques and using both our own data and social media, we are able to find the right people for the right properties, in a way never before possible anywhere in the world!

Whilst we are preparing the full advert for you home Lifesycle is working in the background 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, automatically matching your property to exactly the right buyers using our ‘Heads Up’ property alerts.  

Set up your own ‘Heads Up’ property by clicking here

Your property video forms part of your advertising on rightmove & Zoopla and at the same time as launching your property onto these sites, we share your fully edited property video to our facebook & Instagram pages. Unlike other agents our videos are descriptive, informative and engaging. We want to get across to the viewer your properties most saleable features, which could be local schools, location, transport links, gardens, quality of accommodation, outbuildings……. The list is endless. These videos, when paired with our interactive virtual tours, give home hunters all of the information that they need to make an informed decision on whether that home is right for them. This means that we don’t get unsuitable viewers wasting yours or our time.  

Facebook is great for groups, and we maximise on this by sharing your property in local selling, information and property pages. This creates a HUGE amount of reach and engagement for your property. Other users will also share your property on their own pages and with friends, giving you a snowball effect. 

It is common for our properties to be seen by over 10,000 local users on facebook within the first 24 hours. This is great for our clients because the greater the engagement we can generate ultimately will lead to more viewings and competition for your home - guaranteeing the highest possible price. 

At the start of the first coronavirus lockdown, we took the decision to invest in the interactive virtual tour technology from the industry’s leading supplier Matterport. This technology allowed us to continue viewings virtually, in stunning quality, whilst we were unable to conduct viewings in our clients homes.

The effect this technology has had on our business and our clients experience has been incredible. Our agents, and our clients, no longer waste time showing buyers around that are unsuitable for a property. Whether its the layout, the condition or the size and shape of your rooms, home hunters can now take as much time as they need to explore your property In the comfort of their own home, meaning they only visit for a physical viewing to confirm what they have already seen ahead of making you an offer. A further benefit of this is that it significantly reduces the amount of contact you have with potential buyers, reducing your risk of coming into contact with covid. 

Explore one of our Matterport Interactive Virtual tours below.

You would expect that all estate agents would produce exceptional photos, but I can tell you that this isn’t the case. In fact we see more poor quality photos from other agents than we do great quality photos.

Taking great photos starts with setting the camera up correctly, at the right height, on a solid tripod, with the correct aperture and shutter speed. Finding the best angle is an art as much as it is a skill. But it doesn’t end there…. editing photos to look their best and adding blue skies on grey days, will show your home in its best possible light. Making a great first impression is essential to maximise the amount of interest in a property and ultimately guaranteeing the best sale price.

We edit all of our photos, on all of our properties, guaranteeing our clients homes get the maximum online exposure. According to rightmove on average our properties are viewed in detail on average 89% more times our local competitors*

Floorplans are a must for the majority of home hunters, and are often the first thing they look at. Whether selling or letting, we produce clear and accurate floor plans for all or our properties. If your visited by an agent that doesn’t offer floor plans as standard, show them the door… 

Below are a couple of examples of the improvements that our photo editing makes.

To maximise your selling price and minimise the stress and disruption that marketing a home can have on your life, we encourage all of our clients to use our open house viewings service.

An open house allows us to do all of the viewings in one go, meaning you only need to have your property in “show home” condition once, leaving you to get on with your normal day-to-day life the rest of the time.

We have a marketing period of 1-2 weeks in the run up to the open house, allowing us to fill all of the available viewing slots, with proceedable buyers, who have confirmed that they have explored your Matterport virtual tour and studied your property’s video.

Our team cover the open house meaning you can go out for a stress free day, take the kids out, visit family or go on a long walk with your dog. Once the last viewer has left, our team will wipe down your work surfaces and door handles with anti-viral wipes, lock up and then give you a call or send you a message letting you know that you can return home at your leisure. We will leave your home exactly as we found it, you won’t even know that we’ve been.

Covid restrictions mean that we cant have everyone in the house at the same time, so we allocate slots of 15-30 minutes per buyer, depending on the size of the house and the demand. Our team time the viewings perfectly to make sure that potential buyers pass each other on your driveway so that they can see that there are other buyers interested in your home. This again creates FOMO (fear of missing out) and encourages buyers to make strong initial offers swiftly. 

We hold most of our open house viewings on a Saturday, as that is the day that most buyers are available, its common for us to receive offers on the day of the open house, and by Monday its usual for us to have several offers to work with.    

Below is a time lapse from one of our recent open house events.

After an open house event, it is common for us to have multiple offers from proceedable buyers on your property. At this point we will guide you on the best route forward to ensure you secure the best price, from the best buyer. We have several ways to deal with this situation including requesting best and final offers / sealed bids, or holding an auction for your property. Let’s explore the options.

Best & Final Offers / Sealed Bids - Best and final offers / sealed bids are requested by a set point in time. We ask everyone who has offered to submit a “no regrets” offer, along with their full financial proofs, ID & solicitor details. With this information we are able to check the buyers position, and pass these details onto you, for you to make a decision on the overall best offer. We will of course give you guidance if requested. We will not disclose any of the offers to other buyers. 

Auction - The main difference with an auction is around the transparency of offers. In a auction every potential buyer can keep a track of the other offers made and decide whether they with to improve on that offer. Often in an auction bidders can get carried away and offer more than they may have done at best and final offers. An auction provides a seller with more security, as the buyer pays a non-returnable deposit upon winning the auction, and has a set timescale to complete. The down side to auction is that an auction legal pack has to be produced by the sellers solicitor and this can take several weeks to produce, also the buyer has to pay a fee and this may also influence their offer amount. 

Whichever option you choose your fee will remain the same and our team with guide you through every step of the way.

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*data provided by rightmove for the period of August 2021-October 2021 for average property detailed views.