3 letters that can turn viewers off your realty listing - "P.O.A."

Just how does 'POA' (price on application) and missing out other property details affect the viewings of your listing?

When listing your property for sale or your property for rent, you can include a lot of detail - from the essential (number of bathrooms and bedrooms), to the useful (amenities, floor area, land area) and much more, but how does this information affect the likelihood that people will view your listings, or make an inquiry?

With over 5,000 properties listed at Barbados Property Search, we have undertaken a study to see how this information (or the lack of it) reflects upon the page views your listings receive.

Properties For Sale - information presented vs listing views 'lost'.

No major surprises here in the order of things - the most important thing people look for when viewing a For Sale listing is the price. However, it is interesting to note just how big the difference in views when no price is shown on the listing - a whopping 96% LESS views.

What this means in practical terms, is that for every 100 people looking at the For Sale listings on Barbados Property Search, the property with no price information is missing 96 of those potential viewers.

Lack of photos sees a 77% drop in views, showing just how important that first impression is, even on a listing page with other properties. With nothing to grab the attention of the visitor, they simply continue scanning down the page for something that does.

Curiously, there is only a 12% drop in views when no location is given. This could be due to a number of things - the fact that as Barbados is relatively compact, location while important, is not as decisive in searching/viewing properties as it might be in the US or the UK.

For local (Bajan) viewers, they may know where the property is located from the description/information provided and so an exact location is of slightly less importance. This may change once we launch our mobile phone 'app' which will include navigation and route planning for property viewing though... stay tuned.

Long-Term Rentals - information presented vs listing views 'lost'

Again we see with long-term rentals properties how critical price information is.

Not displaying price results in a loss of 98% of views. In other words, only 2% of people viewing a list of rental properties will click on and view a property without a rental price. 

So out of the ~2,000 people a month (as of 1st April 2013) viewing our long-term rentals page, you could be missing out on 1960 views of your rental property, simply by not listing a price.

Differently from sale properties, location is much more important for long-term rentals. Viewing the site analytics (visitor data) we can see that a lot more people use the map search facility and click on the 'nearby' properties on the listings when searching for rental properties. This explains why those properties without a map marker receive 72% less traffic.

Photos, and that all important first impression, still make a big difference too but are less catastrophic to the views than the for sale listings, lack of photos seeing a 41% drop in views.

Vacation Rentals - information presented vs listing views 'lost'

As would be expected, having no photos on a vacation rental is near terminal to the views your property will get  - not many people would risk flying to a foreign country to stay in a property they haven't even had the chance to inspect through photos, so this is to be expected - a 92% drop in viewings when photos are not added.

Visitors also tend to search by coast (South Coast, West Coast, etc.) when planning their vacations, so not including location information sees a huge hit on viewings as well.

The interesting one to note is that while losing 16% of views when not showing pricing, it is not as important as we have seen in the For Sale and Long Term Rental listings. This is likely because holiday-makers are more willing to inquire and enter into dialogue about the costs involved, as many of our member realtors will know from experience.

In Summary

While the fact that not including photos, location or prices reduces the success of an advert is no surprise, the surprise is perhaps the level at which these factors drop the views your property listing receives. It is also interesting to note how the priorities of different details affect each property listings type (for sale, for rent, vacation rentals) - it is not a universal pattern.

In summary, price and photos are essential to any advert and, especially with mobile browsing on a map becoming more popular, location is going to become critical too. So, spend the extra few minutes putting together the complete information for those property listings and reap the rewards of all those extra enquiries!

Data Source: Barbados Property Search, with over 5,000 property listings for Barbados - for sale, for rent and vacation rentals - the last quarter (from January 2013) was analysed for each property type, comparing directly the number of views for properties with, and without, the specified detail field. This data was used to create the graphs and statistics used in the report.