Ep 186 – Winning the Listing Presentation

In this High-Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents, Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips discuss winning the listing presentation with confidence and clarity. Alex says it’s all in the delivery and illustrates his point with recent client interaction and how he conducted his inquiry with them. Josh demonstrates the need for keeping the dialogue natural and asking relevant questions as you progress through the course of the conversation.

They discuss what to do if the customer says they want to think it over and suggest ways to give them a reason to contact you for more information, tell how to avoid misunderstandings about options and next steps, and know when it’s time to do the close.

Essential business processes and why they matter

When someone starts inside of your business, how long does it take before they actually get what it is that you do? In my Coaching Tip this week I’m talking about six essential business processes and why they matter to moving your business forward.

If it takes too long for your new hires to get up to speed, it’s because you don’t make your essential business processes clear. I’ll break down what it looks like to train for those processes, outline a formula for doing the tasks, and measure your results.

Next, I’ll show why this approach is critically important and how to go about teaching those processes to your people. Doing just part of the process doesn’t work. You have to do the whole process for each client and every situation.

If you don’t follow a process you won’t get the results you need. What you will have is an acute state of confusion where people are doing too many things and none of it is working, because no one has mastered the basics and no one is following the process.

The basic structure of what you do should be a logical flow. If it’s not, then you haven’t established your essential business processes and why they matter. First, get clear on all of this yourself. Then you can bring your people to the point of cognition much faster.

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

Alignment and why it matters

As a business leader, you must be clear about the mission that you really want to achieve.

My Growth, Leadership, and Management Tip this month is about alignment and why it matters. We’re going to talk about your vision and how to create an environment that will take it forward.

In this new financial year, you need to adapt to a different set of conditions. I’ll tell you how to adapt to win, not just adapt to cope. I’ll talk about the three types of talent you need inside of your organisation, and how to make sure they’re able to grow with you.

First is your talent development squad of people in training. Next, are your five-year A-players who will win every time you pass them the ball. And you have the one-year contract extension players who can stay with you as long as they’re writing minimum fees.

The challenge is to maintain all three types of talent. This is about alignment and why it matters. If you’re not developing new talent, you have a problem when someone leaves or retires. Consistent training ensures the growth that will carry your vision and your mission to success.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s Growth, Leadership, and Management Tip, and I look forward to seeing you here again next month.

Ep 185 – How We Drive Urgency

Today’s High-Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents features Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips on how we drive urgency with both sellers and buyers. Alex begins with how he progresses clients through his pipeline and drives urgency by knowing how ready they actually are. Josh talks about the qualification process and knowing the client’s problem, timeline, destination, and their reason for the move. He also demonstrates dialogue for getting the right answers to those questions.

Alex describes a recent sale to illustrate the process of handling a transaction correctly for a specific client’s needs, and Josh reminds us to stop trying to sell the house and start trying to solve the client’s problem.

Navigating the election

No matter where you are, election periods affect you across Australia. So in this week’s Coaching Tip I’ll give you some tips around navigating the election without putting purchasing and selling decisions on pause.

I’ll show you how you can play a really good game by doing the same thing you do each December. Don’t wait, go ahead and list auctions two months ahead depending on your customer’s sense of urgency around the election.

Election or not, what’s critical is that more people walk through open for inspections during the election itself, and especially on election day. If your open home is near a polling place you should definitely have an open for inspection on the day people vote.

There’s a lot of property-related policies on the agenda during an election, and that creates opportunities. Consumer decisions around selling and purchasing are affected, and there may be interest from investors looking to buy under the existing rules.

We’re in a phase of early recovery right now and you’ve got an opportunity to write a lot of income by navigating the election right. Get urgent buyers through your homes and making offers, and be the agent working whilst others are taking time off. The work you do now will set you up for the market once the election is over.

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

Ep 184 – Adjusting To Win

In this High-Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents, Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips discuss adjusting to win and not just to cope. Alex explains how he maintains his mindset for adjusting and reinvesting whenever the market changes. Josh coaches on making adjustments early and not leaving it until it’s too late, and Alex describes how putting on a new person changes the type of work the existing team is doing. Josh notes how having some safety cash in the bank gives agents more confidence regardless of market conditions.

They discuss why it’s important to commit to some simple disciplines to get the business moving again, how momentum can change the perception of the brand in the marketplace, and Josh observes that the team that wins consistently is the one that does the basics well.

Master the call

As a great real estate agent, you’re on the phone a lot. It’s critical that you project confidence whilst talking to people, so in my Coaching Tip this week I’ll help you to master the call and coach you on the basics that you need to get right.

What you do in the first 15 seconds is critical to connecting with the customer, so the first thing you need to work on is projection. You’ve got to sound like you know what you’re talking about, ask relevant questions, and be clear on the outcome of the call.

Accordingly, the last 10% of the call is where the money is made. That’s where you book the appointment, and to do that I’ll give you the dialogue for the specific questions you need, and I’ll show you how to ask them to get that result.

Getting in front of people is where you’re best in influence. The challenge is in keeping the calls short and productive. You’ll get to the point of conversion more quickly by using the critical path of questions, which I’ll outline and demonstrate for you.

The most attractive quality for anyone is to be confident in your own skin. You need to be prepared with your questions, and also prepared to put yourself into a position of possible rejection. Understanding what the client is trying to achieve is your goal.

The key thing is that no one inquires about a property because they’re happy with their current house. Your job is to master the call to discover their dissatisfaction and their vision and get those appointments made.

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

Peter Chauncy

Welcome to The Black & White Interviews, a Josh Phegan initiative to showcase the top agents we work within Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the USA. Our next Black & White interview series will feature Peter Chauncy, Top Sales Agent of McGrath Crows Nest.

  • Total number of sales in a year = 110
  • Core market: Naremburn, Crows Nest, Artarmon, Cammeray, Cremorne
  • Ranked in the top 10 agents for REB Australia last 5 years running
  • No. 1 Salesperson for McGrath Estate Agents
  • REINSW Salesperson of the year 3 times
  • REIA Salesperson of the year once
  • Average days on market is 24
  • 80% Auction vs 20% Private Sale
  • Advice for new agents: Be prepared to work very very hard and play the long game, it takes time to become successful in any business. Be positive, enthusiastic, authentic & invest in yourself.
  • Overcoming challenges: You need to let go to be able to grow and get to the next level so develop a great team and have an open book policy on strengths and weaknesses to help each other improve. Develop structure early on to ensure that you have a balanced business which allows you to grow. Get a coach early on!

We wanted the opportunity to showcase the top agents we get to work with and share their secrets and insights of how they have become exceptional agents in their marketplace and made their way to the top. Each month we will feature a new agent. The full-length version of these interviews will be available exclusively to Josh Phegan Members, giving you a great opportunity to learn and grow from the top agents and their strategies for becoming million dollar agents.

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No More Solo Offers

It can get demoralising pretty quickly when you’re the only person showing up for your open for inspections. In my Coaching Tip this week I’ll tell you why having no more solo offers is the one thing you need to concentrate on, however tempting it may be to take the first offer you get.

There are three people involved in every negotiation: the owner, the buyer, and the next buyer. It’s this second buyer who is most important because they make the current buyer look good.

I’ll explain how you can use this second buyer’s offer to show your seller why the first buyer’s offer is the one they should accept. The one key thing that drives markets is urgency. It’s the reason a buyer is willing to pay more.

The lesson here is to always present offers in context. There has to be a second, lower offer to compare so your seller can clearly see how much of a premium they’ve actually got. That’s why no more solo offers can be taken forward to your sellers, and it’s how you’ll ultimately bring more deals together.

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

Align or die – The reality of why so few companies ever last the test of time

Imagine you were fired. A new CEO was installed, what would they do next? It’s the hallmark question of great CEO’s, rethinking what’s possible, reimagining, realigning and rebuilding.

The number one thing leaders need to do in turbulent markets is to reinvest – into people, process and resources. You’ll never cost-cut your way to greatness. To build a great business, you need to be super clear on your operating system.

That operating system is built on three foundations:

  1. Purpose – why you’re here, what you do for the customer, the ultimate quest. Nintendo’s – make people smile. Compass – to help people find their place in the world, ours, to help estate agents achieve their potential and reach financial freedom.
  2. Mission – a set of specific numbers – think the number of sales, properties under management, customers served.
  3. Values – the set of rules of how we play the game. If people don’t know the rules they can’t play by them if the leaders don’t live out the values, neither will anyone else.

You can get by without them for a while, you can spend a lot of money creating an exceptional brand, but if it’s not underpinned by those essential its starts to break. You won’t know why people grate on you, why certain behaviours keep happening, and you can’t align your team to achieve the mission. Even worse you can’t hire, manage or fire to those set of values.

Values aid in fast decision making. You’re taking all the decision responsibility out of your arena and placing it into everyone else’s, so more people are making significant decisions more often.

The mission is critical, as you get clear on the intent of the organisation. What’s incredible is that we measure market share of listings and sales, but we don’t measure market share of properties under management?

Instead, we have people go on quests to gain a net 100 properties per annum, but is that an audacious goal? What if the market is 10,000 properties and we have 300 under management? What happens if we have 3,000 and the market size is 3,200? You have to know where to grow, is it about building saleable value? Cashflow? Or a mixture of both?

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When you get clear on the mission, you deploy the right resources in the right spaces, with the right people. You then use those values to ensure the right behaviours. You realise that essential business processes need to be in play and understood.

Simple things like:

  1. How we generate our revenue
  2. The markets we serve
  3. How we generate leads
  4. Our listing pitch
  5. How we sell properties in under 28 days
  6. How property management and sales work together
  7. How we recruit
  8. How we grow people
  9. The payment models for teams
  10. The growth drivers of the business
  11. The meeting rhythm, consistency and overall etc

So where do you start?

Get your executive team together. If that’s you all good, if it’s a team of 10 even better. Set aside 13 days a year for planning. A 2-day annual planning session, a quarterly and a monthly planning day. Aligning focus is incredible.

Keep the mission the mission. It’s that simple. Will this or won’t this help us to achieve the mission? That should be the guiding decision around what projects to pursuit to ensure the business achieves it.

Align your resources. There are amazing people in your business who are completely underutilised. What functions are performing well? What functions need work? We use ‘what worked well and even better if’ process to assist in guiding decisions.

Measure. Your dashboard is crucial. Decide on the key numbers, when you need to meet, and how frequently you need to meet so you can adjust and take corrective action. For salespeople, I look at listing sales and income, month to date every week, and buyer appointments, market appraisals and listing appointments week to date. I review them every Friday at 4 pm, so then I can adjust for next weeks activities and outcomes.

Never grow tired of speaking about the purpose, the mission and the values. Ray Kroc built McDonald’s on quality, service, value, cleanliness. He said those words a billion times. If it’s good enough for Ray, it’s good enough for you. Define your values and stick to them.

Intent leads to organisational clarity, which lets you train for technical competence. Hold yourself to high expectations and others will follow.

This article first appeared on Elite Agent: https://eliteagent.com/reimagine-realign-rebuild/