The easy answer is “How long is a piece of string”.

It really is a question that no agent truly knows the answer to. Typically, you will hear “I’ll have this sold within X days/weeks”. No agent can ever guarantee this – they haven’t got a clue.

The best answer to this is to give a time frame of when you should expect interest and viewings. Typically, when you put your house up for sale, your property gets seen a lot, and we mean A LOT, in the first 2-3 weeks of marketing.

I’ll give you an (really horrible) analogy, but it does work. Bear with me…

If you’ve ever been to a car boot sale, then you’ll notice the people that are getting ready to open their boot and people are swarming around the boot to see what’s inside. It’s the same with property. Now I am clearly not comparing your property to the boot of a car, but more the way humans interact with something that is ‘fresh’ & ‘new’.

When your house lands on Rightmove or Zoopla, they fire out an email to their mailing list all at once, so of course, you get loads of people clicking on the advert to see what the house is all about. Similarly, those who miss the email, but are searching Rightmove/Zoopla each week will often notice properties on the search that they haven’t seen before and naturally click on them.

Potential buyers will skim past the properties that have been on for a period of time, but they will click on the ones they see as new or recent. So your activity in the first 2-3 weeks is very high – here’s a typical graph of what happens 

Once you get to week 4, everyone who is actively looking has pretty much seen the property and you now start to rely on new buyers coming into the market.

So really, the answer to the original question is; if you haven’t received an offer on your property within 4 or 5 weeks, then you may need to consider why your property hasn’t sold. I’ve written extensively about why a property hasn’t sold – there are 5 main reasons.

I’d be delighted to try and help by going through the 5 reasons with you, obviously with absolutely no obligation of having to use my services – feel free to give me a call.