Your first two weeks on the market decide everything

Ask most sellers when they think their home will sell and they will say something vague about the spring market, or after the summer holidays, or once mortgage rates settle. Ask an agent who has been paying attention and they will tell you something quite specific. Your first two weeks on the market decide the whole sale.

Why the first fortnight matters

When your property goes live on Rightmove and Zoopla it gets a burst of attention that never comes back. The portals push new listings to the top. Buyers who have saved searches for your postcode get an email straight away. Agents on the buying side flag it to clients who are actively looking. For fourteen days you have the market's full attention.

Get the launch right and you get multiple viewings, competing offers, and a sale price that often nudges above the guide. Get it wrong and you spend the next several months trying to recover from a bad first impression.

What a good launch looks like

Four things need to align.

Price

It has to match what recent sold prices in the area actually support. Not what you paid, not what you need, not what you hope, and definitely not the highest of the three valuations you were given. Buyers today have every piece of comparable data at their fingertips. If your number is off by even five per cent, they know.

Photography

You get one chance to catch a buyer scrolling through fifty properties on their phone. Bright, wide, professionally lit photos with a floorplan and a proper description will get people through the door. Grainy iPhone shots and empty rooms will not. This is not a place to save money.

Presentation

Small things matter. Fresh flowers, clean windows, a tidy garden, a warm hallway. You are not trying to impress a design magazine. You are trying to help buyers picture themselves living in your home.

The plan

What happens on day one? Who is calling registered buyers? When are the first viewings? Who is following up on feedback? A serious agent will have this mapped out before your listing goes live.

When it does not go right

If those four things line up, you generally see strong interest inside a week and offers by the end of the second. If they do not, you will get a small number of low quality viewings, feedback that is polite but not committed, and no offers.

The instinct at that point is to wait it out. Buyers will come round to your price, you tell yourself. The market will pick up next month. It rarely does. Every week your listing sits stale, the portals push you further down and buyers start assuming there is something wrong.

The one thing to remember

The most useful advice I can give any seller is this. Treat your first fourteen days like a launch, not a listing. Get every piece of it right before you go live. It is far cheaper to prepare properly than to try to fix a bad start.