“Are you sure this is a good idea?”

That’s what my inner voice kept whispering (and what some of the senior management were asking!!).

Because I was recommending something wild:
No brochures. No price lists. No property details released at all.

Just… hype.

I was working client-side for an SME housebuilder, preparing to launch a £12M+ development in Winchester. A mix of 14 apartments and houses – small in number, but big in price for the market.

I’d spent months building the strategy. Nurturing a database of hundreds. Creating intrigue to keep people hooked.

And then… nothing.

We held back everything.
And I kept asking myself – am I mad?

If it didn’t work, I knew exactly what would happen. I’d be out the door.

Then came the tipping point.

The phone was ringing off the hook with people begging us to take their reservation (2 years before completion!!). We had to launch a booking system just to control the madness – like a concert ticket drop.
The first 90 appointments vanished within minutes.

I’d never seen anything like it.

And on launch day, we had 250 people physically queued outside the door.

Every home sold within 45 minutes.

At record-breaking prices for Winchester.

If we’d had more to sell, we could easily have kept going.

That day, I learned the science and psychology behind creating real supply and demand tension.

Since then, it’s become a formula I’ve repeated time and time again, and one I’ve baked into our training at ANTLER.

It started as a risk. It became a blueprint.

P.S. If you look at the photos, you’ll see one photo before the chaos ensued, and another about 5 mins in – when a property sold, we’d remove the shield to let everyone in the room know it had gone. Madness!!!