The playbook every vendor sees, before instruction.

Pricing strategy is the single biggest determinant of whether your house sells well, sells at all, and what it ultimately achieves. Aim too low and you leave money on the table. Aim too high and you carry the stigma — buyers know how long a property has been listed, and price reductions read as weakness.

I price on three inputs: recent achieved data in your postcode, current competing stock, and portal price bands. The output is a number you and I both agree on in writing, before I take you on.

Before any photography, before the listing goes live, I collect the PIQ from you. Material information rules from National Trading Standards make this mandatory; sales fall through when buyers find surprises late in the process.

I bring the form to photography day — paper or electronic — and walk through it with you in person. Tenure, council tax, EPC, lease length, ground rent, service charge, restrictive covenants, flood risk and listed status all captured up front.

First impressions land in the first ten seconds of the first photograph. I supply every vendor with a short guide covering the prep that makes those ten seconds work — clutter, kerb appeal, lighting, fresh flowers, what time of day matters.

For premium instructions, a professional declutter or full staging consultation is arranged (see step 04). For mid-market, this guide is usually enough to lift the photography by a meaningful margin.

For the premium tier I work with a professional home stager on a per-instruction basis. Staging is a paid service (typically £1,500–£4,000 for a half-day consultation plus a week of styling); for the right house, the uplift dwarfs the cost.

Staging isn’t styling for its own sake — it’s about making a buyer see themselves in the space. We focus on the three rooms that close every sale: the kitchen, the master bedroom, and the principal reception.

Professional stills are non-negotiable. For premium homes I commission four passes: daytime interiors, drone aerials, twilight exteriors and lifestyle frames (the dressed dining table, the pool at dusk, the dog by the fire). The set typically runs to forty to sixty considered images.

Industry data is unambiguous: professional photography accelerates sale by roughly a third and increases views by half. On premium instructions the gap is wider.

Every premium instruction gets a 24-page printed brochure — full colour, floor plans, lifestyle photography, an editorial piece on the area, and a personal note from me. Each viewer leaves with one. It’s a tactile takeaway that sits on a coffee table for a week.

The brochure also doubles as the document I send to qualified international buyers ahead of a virtual viewing. Print is unfashionable; it works.

Portal search behaviour peaks on Thursday. I list at 6pm Wednesday so the property appears in the top of “new to market” results from Thursday morning onwards. Premium Promotion on Rightmove, premium placement on Zoopla and OnTheMarket, plus the eXp Luxury site, all coordinated to the same time.

For premium homes there’s a “coming soon” run on social and the buyer database in the seven days leading up to launch — qualified buyers register before the public ever sees it.

Enquiries come in seven days a week — phone, email, WhatsApp. I take all of them myself. Every offer is presented to you with a verified buyer profile: proof of funds (or AIP), chain status, timeline, and the buyer’s history with other agents.

Qualified offers go straight to the table. Unqualified ones don’t. The result is a much higher conversion from offer to exchange — and the lowest fall-through rate in the £750k+ market across L1–L40 postcodes, by a significant margin.