4 July 2022

5 REASONS WHY A FLOOR PLAN CAN HELP SELL YOUR LISTING FASTER

Introduction:

“Everything I touch turns to SOLD!” 

TheClose.com recently called this one of the most cringeworthy real estate clichés. However, the real estate market has been so hot over the past couple of years that it's pretty much held true for every real estate professional. 

Low inventory and low interest rates have meant that properties were snapped up often within 24 hours of being listed. Agents had the luxury of devoting most of their energy to attracting listings, knowing that once they got the listing, it would sell - and quickly - even if they invested very little effort into the marketing.   

It's safe to say that those days are gone. The cooldown, alas, has begun. Interest rates (and inventory) have risen significantly across the globe, and reports of tumbling housing prices are emerging from almost every region: USA, UK, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Some are reporting month-on-month drops above 20%.

For the first time since the word Covid-19 entered the world’s vocabulary, real estate agents are having to fight to capture the attention of buyers. The old dilemma has returned: How do I market a listing so that it sells quickly? 

Let us answer that question with another question: Have you forgotten the selling power of Floor Plans?

Here are five reasons why using a floor plan can help sell your listing faster. Each one, taken in isolation, is justification enough to include a Floor Plan with each property you list. But when you add these reasons up, you might just discover that Floor Plans, though by no means a recent innovation in virtual property marketing, might just be the greatest weapon you possess in your quest to sell a listing quickly. 

1) Floor Plans Provide A Blueprint For The Imagination

Nothing helps prospective buyers map out their dreams like a Floor Plan. No matter how stunning the images of a property might be, it is the Floor Plan that connects buyers to a place, shows them where the images fit into the layout, and enables them to start planning their next move.

Striking images (like a jaw-dropping Hero Image) are without question the best way to stop an MLS scroller in their tracks. If there’s been one common finding over the past decade of NAR research, it’s that images are the most important feature to someone who is searching for property. But without a Floor Plan, buyers can have a hard time taking that next essential step - visualizing themselves, their possessions, and their lives inside a home. 

When you include a Floor Plan alongside striking imagery, you help the prospective buyer move onto the next phase of the purchase process: visualization. 

Without a Floor Plan, the buyer can have a hard time tying even the most dazzling images together to get a sense of whether the layout of a home is right for them. And it is only when a home buyer can develop this sense that an emotional connection can occur. 

Furthermore, once a buyer has gotten serious about a property, it is the Floor Plan they will return to again and again - both before and after they have viewed the property in person. 

2) Floor Plans Increase Clickthrough By Up To 52%

No click, no sale. In fact, no click, no chance of a sale. Not in this real estate climate anyway, where the MLS is the starting point for over 90% of real estate transactions, and where 99% of buyers begin their search online.  

Credible research from both the US and the UK indicates that a Floor Plan will increase viewer clickthrough by over 50%. 

Research by Rightmove puts this number at 52%. But the significance of this stat is compounded by their additional finding that 1 in 5 property shoppers will completely ignore a listing if it does not include a Floor Plan. 

Perhaps in the scorching hot property market over the past two years, some agents were able to get away with omitting a Floor Plan from their marketing materials. When buyers are climbing over one another to secure a property and purchasing places sight unseen, it can be tempting to cut corners in the marketing department. 

If you are an agent hoping to transcend the cooling new reality of the real estate market, this statistic alone should convince you to include a floor plan with every listing you post. 

3) Floor Plans Are The Perfect Portal To A 360° Virtual Tour

The 3D Floor Plan is the perfect counterpart to a Virtual Tour. It allows the participant to choose which room they begin the tour in, it provides instant visual coordinates so that prospective buyers have an immediate birds-eye sense of the house’s layout, and it looks spectacular!

If the coronavirus pandemic caused one lasting shift in real estate, it’s that it has made the 360° Virtual Tour an essential feature when it comes to marketing a home. 

The Virtual Tour became so influential over the past two years that the New York Times declared “The open house is dead.” 

Now, this was a massive exaggeration, but what is no exaggeration is that buyers almost universally now prefer to visit a home via a Virtual Tour before asking to view it in person.  And over the past two years, those looking to buy a home have expressed a sharp drop in their desire to view a video tour of a house, in favor of the interactive, and self-guided Virtual Tour. 

Agents love Virtual Tours because they prevent them from wasting time showing properties to the merely curious. If you’re selling your home, allowing people to tour it virtually means that you don’t have to make yourself scarce every time some tire-kicker comes by and wants to tap at your proverbial wheels. 

And the perfect complement to a Virtual Tour? You guessed it: the 3D Floor Plan. Have you ever taken a Virtual Tour that’s attached to a 3D Floor Plan? This is the ultimate way to get a sense of a home’s layout, and no listing stands out quite like those that include this dynamic one-two punch. 

4) Buyers Want To See Floor Plans When Searching For Property 

Floor Plans are important to potential buyers. How’s that for a reason to include them when selling your house?

National Association of Realtor’s 2022 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends Report has once again determined that (after professional images and informative copy) Floor Plans are the third most important website feature among those who purchased homes for sale over the past year. 

When NAR asked buyers what they most wanted to see in a listing, Floor Plans outranked video tours, neighborhood information, agent contact information, information about recently sold properties, interactive maps, information about upcoming open houses, related real estate news or articles, and the ability to make a virtual listing appointment. 

Oh, yes, it’s easy to overlook the Floor Plan. But don’t underestimate its power. 

5) Your Competition Appears To Have Stopped Using Them

Our 2021 US Real Estate Listings Analysis revealed that only 16% of listings included a Floor Plan. It certainly can’t be because they are difficult to obtain. We can turn even the crudest sketch into a sexy-looking Floor Plan that sells homes!

If you are a real estate agent looking to sell a house faster, perhaps this fifth reason to use a Floor Plan will be the most compelling - your fellow agents seem to have largely stopped using them. 

Despite the overwhelming interest of property buyers, despite the increased clickthrough that professional Floor Plans generate, only 16% of US real estate listings (from this time last year) included a floor plan. 

Perhaps you were aware of our 2021 US Real Estate Listings Analysis. It is the most extensive and comprehensive analysis of US real estate thus far conducted. We assessed over 25 000 US listings for various attributes, including the presence of Floor Plans and Virtual Tours. 

The assessment was conducted during the peak of the housing market boom and did suggest that agents were letting up on their marketing efforts (possibly because everything was selling so quickly). 

Our report was picked up by many mainstream news outlets, including the highly regarded Realtor Magazine, which concluded: 

“Many real estate agents may be missing out on a big opportunity to market their listings online through virtual tours and best professional photography practices …”

Now that the cooldown has begun, perhaps it’s time to ask yourself, are you one of these agents?

If you're not sure how to acquire one for your listing, check out this astonishing video where our co-founder Brad Filliponi shows you how to create a Floor Plan with nothing but a sheet of graph paper, a pen or pencil, and your own two feet.

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