Josh Phegan – Real Estate Training For High Performance Agents

When you begin to understand your business processes more completely, you can realize much greater success in the way you execute them. This is what our Coaching Tips email series is all about.

You know your database is central to doing business, but you may not be as actively engaged with it as you could be in your existing real estate campaigns. For instance, when you list a property you search your database for the buyers you know will likely be interested in it. What you may not think about, though, are all the people who live around that new listing, or who own property in the area, who also might want to know about it.

While you are doing the basic initial search for potential buyers, also use your database to list potential sellers, market appraisals, past clients, and landlords in the same area as your property listing. Contact those people, tell them the property is for sale, and ask them if they are interested in its value and final sale price. Also check on their own situation, because they just might be in need of your services, too.

When you start to think about your data this way, you are addressing three basic concepts:

How relevant are you to your customers?
It is quite relevant to contact a potential seller, a past market appraisal, a past client, or a landlord near this property to tell them about your listing in their area.

Are your customer contacts frequent enough?
Act according to the balance between frequent enough and too frequent by evaluating sales volume in a given area.

Are you building relationships through consistent communication?
By contacting all the key people in the area of each property you list and then sell, you stay relevant to all the people in your database and maintain those all-important relationships with them.

Agents have a tendency to focus on making new contacts, but it is vital that you stay in contact with the people you already know and keep those relationships active. It can mean the difference between a warm to hot campaign, or a cold campaign. As soon as you initiate the actual sale of a property, start prospecting: Make those calls to all potential sellers, all market appraisals, all past clients and all landlords in and near the area of the sale, and let them know how much the property sold for.

Staying active with current customers as well as new prospects keeps you relevant and drives the value of your business. You can also increase your open for inspections attendance by inviting all these people through during your conversations with them. This ensures that there will be other people present in the homes when an interested customer comes through, thus increasing perceived competition and sense of urgency to make a decision to buy. As a business building technique, understanding the process of geographic and relationship-based farming through expanded use of your database is clearly important.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip. If we can be of assistance to you at a coaching or training level, feel free to email us. Thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

When considering client categories inside your database, keep in mind that some individual clients actually belong in more than one category. What this implies is that your business should address them according to every area of the market where they are active, from sales to property management.

Let’s say you have a client who is a tenant in a couple of places, a landlord in a couple of other places, a buyer in one location and also a seller in that same location or elsewhere. All of your database categories relate to each other one way or another. Often that relationship comes together in a single customer. In essence this is a four-dimensional customer.

In real estate there tends to be a rivalry between sales teams and property management departments. These units could provide useful leads and resources for each other, but instead they fail to communicate or share information. Consider for a moment that a large client may have thousands of properties under management of which 8-9% will probably sell each year. Sales of those properties represent sales leads to the sales team, but the sales team rarely reciprocates with property management leads, even though they regularly receive that kind of information from owners and investors they meet at open for inspections. Your challenge is to bring your sales and property management teams together.

You can begin by establishing an in-and-out style leader board for numbers of referrals per month from each team to the other. Establish a measurement for referrals coming in from the sales team to the property management department, as well as referrals going out from property management to sales. In reality, you want more referrals coming in from sales than going out from property management. Remember, sales leads from property management to sales represent managed properties your business is losing, while sales of other properties represent income from those sales as well as new properties your business can now manage.

This is just one of many new ways to view the way the real estate industry works. Think how efficient it would be if a significant number of your sales leads came directly from property management. The only follow-up necessary would be to verify that the sellers are already owners in your market. Once you do that, you can contact those people and ask them if this is their first, second or third purchase. If it’s their second or third then you know they are potential sellers or landlords.

By establishing regular communications between teams, such as weekly emails to each other with greetings and a friendly reminder to share any leads they may run across, you set an expectation for referrals to be collected and shared. By breaking down the barriers between the sales team and property management department and getting them to work together, your business will become a truly full-service real estate business. In this way you will provide full customer service whether your customer is a buyer or seller, tenant or landlord, or all of the above.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip. I look forward to seeing you here again next week.

One of the most important skills in real estate is the ability to qualify clients. You need to know each client’s experience in real estate, their level of involvement, and their reasons for buying or selling right now. A lot of agents fail to ask the proper questions to get them the vital information they need, but there are really only three basic bits of information you need to know to qualify your client: Why, How, and When.

Most agents ask a lot of “When” questions such as, “When do you want to go to market?” or “When do you need to be moved into your new place?” or “When would you like for me to come by?” Then at the listing presentation level agents switch to “How” questions: “How do you want to see your property marketed?” or “How do you want to proceed with me as your agent?” The most important questions, however, are the “Why” questions.

“Why” questions tell you what your client’s motivation is to do a deal, whether buying or selling. Why are they buying/selling their property? Why did they choose to live where they are moving? “Why” questions are about death, marriage, divorce, relocation, financial gain, financial loss, or the client’s chosen lifestyle. Once you know “Why” then you know exactly which other questions you need to ask and what information you need to know in order to qualify your client. For example, you can easily ask your client, “Do you need to sell in order to be able to buy?” They will tell you yes or no, but you still need to know what their actual reasoning is and whether they might potentially be a seller or even a landlord.

Here is an example line of questioning you can use, beginning with “Why”;

Why are you moving? This tells you the client’s motivation.
When do you need to be moved into your new place? This gives you their timeline.
Where are you looking to live? This tells you about your client’s target marketplace.
Have you inquired about any properties, or been to any other opens? This tells you how involved they have been thus far in their process.
Have you bid on anything, or made any offers? This tells you how far they are in the sales process.

And possibly the most important question you have been working toward is,

Is this your first, second or third purchase in the area? If this is their second or third deal, then you know you are working with a higher-level client, possibly at property management level, and you definitely want to meet with them personally to view their property.

Whether you are writing fees of $50,000 a year or $2.13 million, you must understand the best ways to execute the qualification process. It’s all about establishing relationships with your clients that will build your business over time and make you the best real estate agent you can be.

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s Coaching Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next week.