By the time somebody fills in your enquiry form, they have already decided you are worth a phone call.
That decision was made somewhere you were not present, using information you did not choose, and mostly on a phone in the evening.
Worth knowing what they were looking at.
What is the first thing they check?
The developer, not the project.
For anything under construction the buyer’s largest risk is not the layout. It is whether the building gets finished, on time, to the standard promised. So the first search is usually the developer’s name, and often the developer’s name with a word like reviews, complaints or delay attached.
What comes back is largely outside your control, which is exactly why it is worth knowing what it currently says. Search your own company name in an incognito window and read the first page as a stranger would. Most developers have never done this.
Where do they actually look?
Four places, in roughly this order.
Google, on the developer name. The search results page itself, including the business profile with its reviews, before anyone clicks anything.
Property portals. Where your project sits alongside every competitor, with prices, and where the comparison you cannot control happens.
Local groups and forums. WhatsApp groups, resident associations, city subreddits and Facebook groups. This is where delay stories circulate, and it is almost entirely invisible from inside a marketing team.
Your own website, last. Often after they have already formed a view elsewhere. By the time they arrive they are confirming an impression rather than building one.
That order matters. Most marketing budget is spent on the fourth thing, and the decision is largely made during the first three.
What are they looking for that we are not showing?
Evidence of completion.
The single most persuasive thing a developer can show is a finished building with people living in it, and it is the thing that appears least in project marketing, because marketing is organised by project and the finished ones belong to a different campaign.
A buyer looking at your renders is trying to work out whether renders from you turn into buildings. If you have completed four projects, photographs of those four projects answer the question every render raises.
If you have completed nothing, say so plainly and lean on the team’s record elsewhere. A first project that admits it is a first project is more credible than one pretending otherwise, because the buyer will find out in five minutes either way.
Do reviews really matter for property?
More than most developers assume, and in a specific way.
Nobody chooses a home because of a star rating. But a Google profile with eleven reviews, four of them describing a two year handover delay, ends the conversation before it starts. And that profile appears next to your name in every search, including searches by people who came from your own advertising.
Two things are worth doing. Claim and complete the profile, so it is yours and it is accurate. And ask residents in completed projects to review, at handover, when goodwill is highest. Not incentivised, just asked.
A profile with forty genuine reviews absorbs the occasional bad one. A profile with six does not.
What about the delay stories in local groups?
You cannot delete them, and trying makes it worse.
What you can do is make sure the accurate version is easy to find. If a project was delayed, and most are, a page on your own site that says which project, by how long, and why, is far better than silence. It gives anyone researching a primary source, and it signals a developer who does not hide from the question.
This feels dangerous to marketing teams and it is one of the strongest trust signals available in this category, precisely because nobody does it.
How does this change what I should build?
It moves effort earlier in the journey.
Most developers build the project site and buy traffic to it. That is the last step of the buyer’s research and the first step of the marketing plan, which is backwards.
Before the campaign, make sure the developer name searches cleanly. Complete the business profile. Get the completed projects online with photographs and handover dates. Make sure the portal listings match your own pricing rather than contradicting it.
None of that is glamorous. All of it is being checked before anyone fills in your form.
What is the one thing worth doing this week?
Search your own developer name in an incognito window, on a phone, and read the whole first page.
Whatever is there is what your buyers are reading before they decide whether to call you. Most developers find at least one thing they did not know was there.
We audit what a buyer finds before they reach your site, because the campaign lands on top of whatever is already there. Tell us what you are working on.
