While house prices appear to be stabilizing, many agents continue to report that instructions remain in short supply so agents are vying for every new instruction.

Winning that instruction may mean finding new ‘USPs’. Metropix report that more and more agents are using floor plans to improve their success rate. Brian Farrell of Metropix suggests that the increase in the number of floor plans generated by their system is a market response to consumer demand.

“Over the past three months, we’ve seen 23 per cent more plans created with Metropix than during the first quarter of this year and an increase of 51 per cent over the fourth quarter of 2008. In fact, July saw the highest number of plans created in the past 12 months. There’s also been a seven per cent increase in the number of customers using the service in the last three months, compared with the previous two quarters.”

“Clearly these figures are not in keeping with stock levels in the market which strongly suggests that agents are responding to consumer demand by introducing floor plans into their marketing and/or extending their use of plans to every property”.

Rightmove reported that properties marketed with a floor plan attract 30 per cent more interest than those without one. 85.5 per cent of respondents in the biggest ever home moving trend survey carried out by The Academy deemed floor plans to be useful/essential.

The Digital Property Group say buyers consider floor plans even more important than detailed room descriptions.

www.metropix.co.uk