Your website is quoting against you

A landlord with four flats in a converted terrace rings you on the Monday. The call goes well. You know the street, you know roughly what the ground floor will let for, and you agree to meet on the Thursday. He puts the phone down, opens his laptop, and types your firm's name into Google.

You are not in the room for the next four minutes. Your website is.

What the site says while you are not there

He is not reading your copy. He is looking for a signal that you are a working firm with money coming through the door, and he takes that signal from things you have probably never thought of as arguments. How the photographs look, and how long ago the news page last moved. Whether the whole thing works properly on the phone in his other hand.

He reads a decade-old design as a firm that has stopped investing in itself. That is not a fair conclusion. He draws it in seconds anyway, without ever putting it into words.

Sites of a certain vintage are easy to spot even for someone who knows nothing about the web. Serif WebPlus, a desktop web builder that plenty of small UK firms bought on a disc, shipped its last version in 2016, and on 31 August 2018 the online services those sites depended on were switched off. Anything still running from that era was made in a program nobody can buy. Firms in that position often cannot change a single word of the site, which is its own separate problem, and the visible symptom is always the same: a featured property that was let years ago, sitting at the top of the page like a notice on a shut shop.

The chain down the road looks like the expensive option

Your prospect has other tabs open. One of them belongs to a national brand or a regional group with a marketing budget. Their site is fast, full of photography, and updated every day by someone whose only job that is.

He has no way of judging whose surveying is better. He cannot compare your negotiation to theirs, because he has not seen either. So he uses the evidence in front of him, and the evidence in front of him is presentation. The polished site reads as the serious option. Yours reads as the cheap one.

You may well do better work than the chain. A firm your size has fewer landlords to keep happy, and the principal is often the person doing the work rather than a trainee two months into the job. None of that is visible on a website that looks like it was finished in 2013.

What counts as proof

The other thing his tabs have that yours does not is evidence. Open half a dozen independent property websites in your own town and you will struggle to find any. A services page, an about page, a contact form. Nothing that shows the firm has done this before and done it well.

Three things do that job.

Completed work with numbers in it. A short entry saying what the instruction was and how it went. Photographs on their own will not do it. Say a mid-terrace shop had stood empty since the previous tenant walked. The entry says how long it had been sitting, how long it took you to let it, and on what terms. A landlord reading that is doing arithmetic against what his own void is costing him, and the moment he does that arithmetic you have stopped being a cost and started being the answer to one. Even six of these, kept current, put you ahead of nearly every site you just looked at.

Named people, photographed properly. He is deciding whether to hand his property to strangers, so show him who will actually turn up on the Thursday. Name, photograph, qualification, how long they have been doing this locally. A stock image of two people shaking hands over a laptop tells him nothing. He has seen that photograph before.

Photography of buildings you actually deal with. A generic skyline says you had no photographs of your own. An hour with a decent camera on the streets you work gives you a site that could not belong to anyone else, and it quietly proves the patch you claim to know.

None of this is difficult to produce. It is mostly writing down things you already know, which is why so few firms get round to it.

The fee is being judged before the meeting

Here is where it costs money. You quote a management percentage, or a professional fee for a survey, and it is a proper figure because you do proper work. He has already spent four minutes forming a view of what your firm is worth. If the site suggested a two-person outfit running on habit, your fee now has to argue against an impression you did not know was being made.

Sometimes that shows up as an outright no. More often it shows up as a haggle, or as a landlord who goes with the chain and tells you afterwards that the fee was much the same. You never find out that the website did it.

A prospect will forgive a small firm for being small. What he will not do is pay a serious fee to a firm that does not look like it takes itself seriously. Those are different things, and the second one is fixable in a matter of weeks.

We can tell you what fixing that would cost before the next landlord opens his laptop. Ask us for a quote.