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Estate Agent Uses Shitty Marketing Angle To Entice Homeowners To Sell

Written by The Landlord on 16 Mar 2010

So, check it out. I received this letter through the post the other day from Savills estate agent:

Education Sells Homes

I have a house in Bishop’s Stortford, and according to the letter, Bishop’s Stortford has great schools. Savills estate agent used that as an angle to entice home owners into selling their properties.

I don’t get it. Are these people bored, running out of ideas and/or insane?

If I wanted to sell my property, I would sell it. I don’t need a letter showing me GSCE data (from 2007, may I add) to convince me. Moreover, if I didn’t want to sell my property, I wouldn’t suddenly be enticed by the content of the letter. Am I suppose to think,

I live in an area with a great education system; I may as well sell my home.

Back to my point, I don’t get the point of the letter. I wonder how many homeowners were actually persuaded to suddenly try and sell their property after being given the GSCE data, when they initially had no intentions of selling. I can’t imagine anyone would want to make such a huge step of selling a property based on Savills inhouse research on GCSE results.

My spider senses tell me that this thoughtless ploy was just a waste of paper, what do you think?

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5 Comments - join the conversation...

AndyM2010-03-16 23:33:28 1) People are stooooopid

2) If you have children, surely you'd not want to move away anyway. Not at least to somewhere else that has worse scores.

3) People are gullible. See 1). 1

GillsMan2010-03-17 15:39:34 Unless I'm incredibly thick, that data is also wrong on a couple of counts:

1) BS is the 4th best in the country, not the second) (Tunbridge Wells and Horsham scored 468 and 461 respectively - unless it's 458 and 451, I can't quite tell).

2) The average house price in BS is £278,558. The average house price in the lower ranked Bath is £398,643 (according to Home.co.uk). So their claim isn't even backed up by figures. 2

AndyM2010-03-17 17:40:16 @GillsMan - their data is taken from a 3 year old survey, probably because BS rates better back then.

"BS" is quite an apt acronym... 3

The Landlord2010-03-18 07:50:46 It's also their "local inhouse" analysis, so it's not national or official Government data! Basically, it's not worth the paper it's printed on. 4

Margaret2010-07-28 00:42:29 I have to say, if you live in a great neighbourhood with great schools, why would you even want to sell? Since the credit crunch and the downturn of house prices I guess the estate agents had to think of something to increase potential sales! Good luck with that! 5