The Market Update Nobody Reads

Every month your board publishes its figures, and within a day or two a large number of agents in your market post more or less the same thing. The same headline numbers, often the same chart, sometimes the same caption. It is accurate, it is current, and almost nobody outside the industry reads past the first line.

The reason is not that people are uninterested in the market. It is that a number on its own does not tell anybody what to do, and most market updates stop at the number.

A statistic is an input, not a message

An average sale price across a whole region is a true fact about a place that almost nobody actually lives in. Your reader does not own the region. They own a particular kind of property, on a particular street, bought at a particular time, and what they want to know is what the figure means for that.

When you republish the headline without doing that translation, you have passed on a piece of raw material and left the work to the reader. Most readers will not do it, which is why the post gets a glance and nothing else.

The sentence that most of them are missing

The useful version of a market update usually contains one sentence that no board publishes. Something along the lines of what this means if you were planning to sell in the spring, or what it means if you have been waiting since last year, or why the figure moved in one part of your area and not in another.

That sentence is where your knowledge actually lives. You see the listings that did not sell, the offers that were withdrawn, the conversations in the viewings. None of that is in the published data, and all of it is what makes your version worth reading rather than anyone else's.

Narrower almost always beats broader

An update about one building, one street, one school catchment or one property type will usually be read more carefully than an update about an entire city, even though far fewer people are in a position to care about it. The people who do care are exactly the people you want.

It is also much harder for another agent to repeat. Anyone can copy a regional headline figure. Very few people can write about the particular set of streets you have worked in for years, and that difficulty is the point.

If you are wondering where the narrow detail is supposed to come from, it is already in your own year. The property that attracted twenty viewings and no offers, the one where two buyers competed in a week, the street where asking prices and agreed prices have drifted apart. You were there for all of it, and none of it appears in anybody's published summary. Three or four observations of that kind, written plainly, are worth more to a potential seller than a regional average they could have found themselves.

Say what it means, and be willing to be wrong

The reason many agents stop at the number is that the number is safe. Interpretation can be wrong, and being publicly wrong about the market feels like a risk to your credibility.

In practice the opposite tends to happen. An agent who explains what they think is going on, and why, is treated as someone who has a view. An agent who only ever reposts figures is treated as a noticeboard. The first one gets phone calls.

A question to sit with this week

Take the last market update you published. If you removed the numbers from it, would there be anything left that only you could have written?

If you want to take this further

Turning what you already know into something people read is a skill worth building deliberately. You can book a discovery call if you would like to work on yours.