Our seller sold her two-bedroom home at 1/3 Victoria Street, Inverloch on 28 August 2026, after 113 days on the market, three qualified buyers and four offers. The campaign generated 265 enquiries. Three came from the country's largest property portal, which returned 2,196 listing views and a single email. The rest, along with the buyer who paid the most, came from advertising we built, aimed and re-aimed ourselves.

A house with a but

Two thousand views and one email

The listing ran as a Premiere campaign on the major portal, which is the most expensive product available. The portal will happily report that the campaign was exposed tens of thousands of times, and that number means nothing. Exposure counts every occasion on which the listing appeared somewhere, including in the peripheral vision of a person scrolling past it on the way to something else.

The only portal metric that records an actual decision is listing views, because a listing view is a buyer choosing to open the property and look at it.

Over the first 96 days there were 2,196 of them, 71 per cent arriving through search results. Buyers looked at 95,261 photographs, opened the floorplan 2,962 times, played the video 157 times, expanded the map 258 times, downloaded the Statement of Information 13 times and saved the listing 59 times.

A further 2,576 people were notified by saved search alerts, generating 106 clicks. Two eBrochures went out to 151 and then 216 recipients, with click rates of 15 and 17 per cent.

All of that activity produced one email enquiry and eight phone or SMS reveals. Four buyers added the property to an inspection plan. None registered for an inspection. Across the entire campaign, our CRM recorded three enquiries attributable to the portal, out of 265 in total.

3 of 265

Enquiries traceable to the major portal across the full 113-day campaign.

Every seller in Inverloch is paying for portal exposure, and very few are ever shown what that exposure actually returned. Listing views, enquiries, inspection registrations, and where in the state the traffic came from. Those numbers exist for your campaign too, whether or not anybody hands them to you.

If you would like to see what your own home would realistically draw from each channel before you commit to a campaign, that is where the first conversation starts.

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This is not a complaint about portals, and we will keep using them. A portal is a shop window on the busiest street in the country, and a seller should be in that window. What a window does not do is walk down the street, find the four people in the state who want a compact single-level home on a shared title near the Inverloch foreshore, and tap them on the shoulder. The portal's own report made the point for us. Its "audience also viewed" panel showed the same buyers circling eight other Inverloch listings. Those buyers were comparison shopping. Nobody was matching them to anything.

Two hundred and fifty-seven conversations the window never had

The remaining enquiries came from somewhere else entirely. Targeted lead form advertising on social platforms delivered 257 of the 265 enquiries on this campaign, with a further four from general channels and one from the property's own website.

The mechanic matters, because it is the opposite of a shop window. A lead form advertisement is served to an audience we have defined, inside the app the buyer is already holding. The buyer registers interest without leaving that app, the details land in our CRM within seconds, and we telephone them. There is no waiting for the right person to think of searching for the right suburb on the right day.

Every one of those 257 people is also a named buyer who raised a hand about this style of home, and that database outlives the campaign it was built for.

Where the traffic actually came from

Every property we list is given its own address on the internet. This one had 3victoriastreet.com, with its own domain and security certificate, the 3D tour, the floorplans, the video and the full detail, and a tracked QR code on the signboard so that the sign works at ten o'clock at night when the office does not.

Between 7th May and 28th August that site took 5,100 visits.

Seventy per cent came from a mobile phone. And 4,063 of those visits, roughly four in five, came from Melbourne. Inverloch, Wonthaggi and Cape Paterson combined accounted for fewer than twenty.

That single number changed how we ran the rest of the campaign. The buyer for this house was never going to be a local upgrader. She was going to be someone in the suburbs of Melbourne, on a phone, thinking about a smaller life near the water.

The buyers were not pricing the house

If you are being asked to reduce your price this week

Ask for the feedback in full before you agree to anything. Then read it the way we read this one, and work out whether those buyers were valuing your home or valuing the thing they wish were different about it. A house that is too expensive and a house that is being shown to the wrong people produce almost identical feedback, and only one of the two problems is solved by a lower number.

If you would like a second read on the feedback you have been given, send me the address. There is no cost, and no expectation that you change anything.

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We held twelve open homes and recorded twelve private inspections, and the feedback was consistent enough to be useful. The living area was too small. The second bathroom sat in the wrong place.

Most of all, the driveway. One buyer withdrew before inspecting once she understood the access ran past the house. A couple in their fifties loved the location but said it still felt like part of the house behind, and told us they would need to build a new driveway and a substantial fence. Another buyer said the lack of fencing left her feeling exposed.

Price indications from those inspections landed in a tight band between $700,000 and $800,000, with a single outlier above it. On paper that reads as a pricing problem, and a good number of agents would have taken it to the owner as one.

It was not a pricing problem. Read the feedback again and almost nobody was valuing the house. They were valuing the driveway. Those buyers wanted a different property, and they were quietly discounting ours until it became the property they wanted. That is a targeting problem wearing a pricing problem's clothes, and reducing the price would have solved nothing except the owner's equity.

It is worth saying plainly that this was a hard stretch for the owner. Reading the words "too small" and "shared driveway" every Saturday afternoon, about your own home and your own garden, wears on a person. What we asked her to do was hold her nerve while we changed the audience rather than the number.

Cutting the audience down until it fit

We rebuilt the targeting around the buyer the feedback had described in negative. If the objectors wanted a bigger house on a private block, then the buyer was the person for whom compact, single level and low maintenance is the entire point, and for whom a shared driveway is a detail rather than a dealbreaker.

Downsizers and seachangers, mostly from metropolitan Melbourne, mostly older, and in our experience very often a woman making the decision.

The campaign ran to a 30 kilometre radius around the property plus custom audiences built from our own buyer data, aimed at 45 to 65 and over, with creative that led on the things the right buyer wants and the wrong buyer overlooks. The garden. The single level. The deck and the shed. The walk to the town and beaches.

Then we put it in front of them.

That retargeted campaign drove 2,407 clicks through to the property's own website, more than the portal's entire listing view count for the campaign. The audience data came back exactly as the strategy predicted, with the heaviest engagement in the 55 to 64 and 65 and over brackets, and a female skew in every bracket above 35. Nine of those people walked through an open home, which is nine more than the portal's inspection registrations produced across the whole campaign.

Six inspections in forty-eight hours

Across nearly four months we recorded twelve inspections. Six of them fell across a single weekend, immediately after the retargeted campaign went live.

The buyer was one of the six.

What the seller said afterwards

And what the buyer said

If your home has a but

Most homes have one. A shared driveway, a bedroom that is really a study, a road that is not sealed, a bathroom in the wrong spot, a floorplan that made sense in 1994.

A home like that does not sell on reach. Reach simply delivers a larger crowd of people who want something else, and every one of them leaves behind a lower number and a slightly more anxious seller.

A home like that sells on precision. It sells because somebody reads the feedback closely enough to work out who the right buyer is, and then goes and finds her, which is work that no portal listing has ever done or was ever designed to do.

This campaign took 113 days, and for most of them it looked slow. What was actually happening was that we were narrowing, week by week, until the audience was the right shape. Then it took forty-eight hours.

So tell me what your but is. Whether your property has already been to market once without selling, or you simply feel yourself apologising for something every time you describe your own home, that is the part worth talking about before you sign anything with anybody. I will tell you honestly whether it is a pricing problem or a targeting problem, what your realistic buyer looks like, and what a campaign built to find her would actually involve.

No obligation, and no pressure to change agents if you already have one.

Leo Edwards is the principal of Inverloch 3996 @realty, a digital-first agency serving Inverloch, Cape Paterson and Wonthaggi. A RateMyAgent Agent of the Year for Inverloch in 2023 and 2025, he caps his listings so every campaign gets principal-level attention, and builds each one in house through 3996Studio. He can be reached at inverlochatrealty.com.au or on 0472 523 445.