How Much is the Average Cost in Marketing Auckland Apartments

Apartment Specialists Podcast No: 43

Summary:

In marketing Auckland apartments, you need four important components that will entail some costs at the seller's end. These costs are not much but are essential in getting buyers interested and in raising your apartment's value.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hello, Andrew Murray from Apartment Specialists and today I will be talking about how much it costs to market an Auckland apartment.

There are four costs involved in marketing your apartment. Firstly, your apartment improvements. This includes your cleaning, fixing the apartment, staging the apartment, those kinds of things. Then you’ve got professional photos. It’s extremely important to have the apartment look as big as possible and in the best light. Then there is your online presence. This is your advertising on sites like TradeMe. Then finally, is your required documentation. This is the pre-contractual disclosure statement which your body corporate charges you for. You can't market your apartment without this. If you don’t have this, you can't write up a contract.

I will briefly go over these four points but before I do - the marketing is the most important part of selling your apartment - you cannot skimp on this. This is what real estate is. It is advertising to as many people as possible and doing it the best way possible. If you don’t market the apartment well, in most cases the price it can achieve is affected. If an owner doesn't do what I recommend to advertise their apartment, in a lot of cases, I'll walk away from that apartment because it means I can't do the best job I can do.

Let’s go over the four costs involved in marketing. Number one is the property improvements. If there is anything wrong with your apartment, i.e. it’s really messy or you know it's got a hole in the wall, you’ll want to have that fixed and have the apartment cleaned. Even if you have tenants in place, this can still be achieved. Generally this will incur a cost, for example if a certain appliance isn't working, you need to get a cleaner in there, or say the deck needs to be water blasted.

Secondly, the professional photos. The cost for these is between $250 and $350 in the Auckland CBD. This is extremely important and not very expensive at all, so you should make sure to get these done.

Number three is your online presence. The biggest advertising site is TradeMe. That's where most of your buyers will go to look at listings. Your cost for this is around $1000 and this includes being featured but varies significantly based on list price. OneRoof and RealEstate.co.nz are about $300 and again vary base on list price. This isn’t making the apartment a big feature as that is a waste of time. It doesn't actually bring higher prices or many more views or buyers from my experience.

What I didn't list as a cost is advertising in the newspaper. That’s because this is unnecessary. It's changed. This market has changed so much in the last 5 years. Buyers looking for listings go online. There is a huge difference between houses and apartments. Imagine that you are looking for a house. You know the area you want to be in, you’ve seen a photo of the outside of the house and it’s in the area and the street you want to be living in. So, you are going to go to an open home to look at that house. Now imagine apartments. There are 20,000 apartments in the Auckland CBD for example. You see a photo of the outside of the building. What does that tell you? Absolutely nothing. So, in the apartment market it is very different. When buyers go online, they need to see 2, 3, 4, 5 photos of the property at least. We advertise with about 13 or 14 photos, if not up to the maximum of 18 photos. This is so the buyers can walk through the apartment and see if they actually like it. That’s what marketing is.

Advertising in newspapers doesn’t bring buyers so we don’t recommend it. It's just making me and the company look good, so it's a waste of time because it's all about marketing your apartment.

Now to number four, the required documentation. This is your pre-contractual disclosure statement. This is charged by the body corporate on average at around $250 plus or minus GST. Some body corporates don’t charge for this and some charge up to $350. I've averaged the price to $250. So, on average, the cost to market your apartment is around $1800 to $2000 all up for a mid range apartment. It is an absolute must to market your apartment properly.

Next week, I'll be talking about how you can help your agent sell your apartment i.e. how you can give him the maximum opportunity to get the highest price.

Cheers.