Have you seen it? Surely if you have social media it was shared onto your timeline? Or did you hear about it on the radio? Or see it on the TV? A viral social media event quickly spreads these days and it seemed for a couple of days everyone was wanting to ask me about "The Never Ending Property" video.
Estate Agent Claire Cossey did what she's done before with a new property - change the lyrics to a well known song to make it about the house, and then record herself singing this new version over a backing track and include it with the marketing for the house. But this time, it took off. Really took off. At the last time of checking, the video had been viewed over 500,000 times on YouTube.
It's fair to say that it got a wide range of reactions. Was it cringey? Did it sum up everything that's wrong with Britain's housing market? Or just a bit of fun?
After letting the dust settle on the inevitable internet pile on and the compulsive need to pass a personal judgement - it was interesting to reflect on something that seemed to have been forgotten: as a marketing tool, had it worked?
Whether the video is to your taste or not (and the owners had requested it as they'd liked previous ones Claire had done), 500,000 views is a lot of eyeballs on your house that is for sale and over 1 million views of the listing on RightMove. Surely that's a good thing? It was certainly good for Claire and her husband's estate agency business - Just Knock. They had a significant rise in enquires. But what about the "never-ending" property? Not so much. Despite the hundreds of thousands of views, they received one offer that was then withdrawn (this might have changed in the weeks since then.)
But Claire wasn't surprised and whilst saying that she mainly did the video - like the others - because it gives her a chance to bring together her two passions of property and singing (it used to be her career previously.) She also said it was a way of standing out. But does it sell a house? Claire said:
"No - a house sells a house. The marketing and pricing sells a house. I can try my very best to make it look lovely and do the videos, at the end of the day if the pricing isn't right and the housing market isn't happy, it doesn't matter what you do."
This is such an important point - with or without gimmicks, if you don't market your house at the right price, it doesn't matter if you have the cast of West Side Story dancing through your house, it probably still won't.
I have to admit, I think Im might have been tempted by a Shakin' Stevens or Madness song. But don't worry - my website and branding might have been updated but I'm not going to start singing at you. And to prove it, you can find my latest properties here - I won't say they're going for a song, but hopefully they hit the right notes for you.
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