Positioning your Property correctly

No single marketing medium in isolation works on its own. My Coaching Tip today is about positioning your property correctly and to do that you need to understand how marketing to the modern consumer works.

As a real estate agent you need to think about where your buyers are going to see properties marketed. Most customers these days go to the Internet first, but there are other marketing mediums they are exposed to as well. You need to understand how to use all of them.

The modern consumer will see more than one item of marketing in their property searches. Beyond the different real estate websites and social media channels they visit, they’re also going to see things like window displays, magazines, emails, brochures and signboards. They may also be called directly by an agent, or referred to the property by other people.

It’s also important to understand that, especially in an auction situation, even if a customer doesn’t buy a property they can improve the level of competition on a particular sale just by bidding or making an offer. So you need to know which marketing mediums they used during their property search.

Using the law of contrast you can separate and differentiate the way you present a property by using the right mediums to really present it well. You need to be in every medium that the consumer is using for their property search, and understand the importance of positioning your property correctly.

What people are actually buying is a perceived lifestyle, and if you take shortcuts on marketing, you’re also going to take shortcuts on your vendor’s price. Clearly marketing and positioning are important to getting the best price possible for your properties.

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

Special Edition – Team Work featuring Alexander Phillips and Pru Kelly

This is a Special AREC Edition of the High-Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents featuring Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips. Today they’re discussing what really happened when Alexander entered the real estate industry. He talks about passion, drive and determination, and tells how he and his partners run their incredible firm in PPD. Alexander addresses topics like starting where you want to end up and making sure you can grow in your marketplace. They discuss office culture and being all-in with your work. Alexander emphasises working hard and loving what you do, and details tips to be successful.

The full-length version of Team Work featuring Alexander Phillips and Pru Kelly will be available exclusively to AREC attendees or on the Membership App.

Identifying Active Buyers

Someone you met three, six, nine, or twelve months ago may or may not still be an active buyer today. My Coaching Tip this week is about identifying active buyers, and I’ll tell you how to reengage with your buyer pool to know whether or not they’re in the marketplace now.

If you’re not getting the numbers you need at your open for inspections, there are some things you can do. Start with contacting all the buyers who have inquired on a property over the last 12 months and find out if they purchased, or if they’re still in the market.

The way you approach those potential buyers has a massive bearing on your success. Don’t put pressure on them, but do invite them to tell you about their current circumstances and feelings as to whether or not they’re looking to proceed with a purchase. If so, then find them the right home and they’ll likely come and buy it.

Now, most agents have come to rely on email and social media as their major lead sources, expecting to get a higher number of inquiries. But recent changes in legislation require a statement of information that forces quoting on every single home listed. It’s important that you communicate with your buyer pool about those new guidelines, and how market conditions shift and resettle according to demand and supply.

Make sure you maintain a good quality list of buyers who are in the market today. Think of all the people who have already registered or bid at auction, made offers on homes, or come back for second appointments. And watch the buyers who are coming to open for inspections over time.

You can also have a regular meeting in your business around identifying active buyers. Schedule 20 to 30 minutes each week to run through your best buyers in each price range with your sales team. Then you can map those buyers to the best properties you have available.

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

Ep 138 – Dealing With Buyer Enquiry

In this High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips talk about dealing with buyer enquiry. Josh reviews different kinds of enquiries and Alex outlines his team’s best practices for dealing with buyer enquiries and not missing any opportunities they present. They discuss how to handle email and response, and how to qualify buyers by their level of interest. Alex then relates a case study of a successful transaction from a properly qualified buyer enquiry.

Alex also discusses how presenting a price guide improves time management, and they discuss data gathering through website logins to qualify and progress interested buyers. Alex tells how he handles late-day enquiry calls, and the value of human interaction.

Paying for Leads

Do you want to build a business where you pay for leads, or do you want to have leads that pay? In this Coaching Tip I’ll show you why this is a decision you have to make, and help you sort it out for yourself.

These days a lot of agents are taking their leads from lead-generation websites. The reality, though, is that a lot of those leads are already sitting inside of your database. So where do those customers hang out before they need you?

The best estate agents are focused on putting themselves wherever their potential sellers are. These are places like open for inspections, email inquiries, and people already in your database. So there are hundreds – even thousands of leads actually leaking on the inside of your business every year. You need to find where the leakage is and fix it.

I advise working from a four to seven year timeframe based on the perspective that when you enter someone into your database that person will become a seller in four to seven years. Your job, then, is to identify what their reason for moving will be, what they don’t like about their existing home, what problem a new home would solve for them, and when that move might happen.

There are a lot of things you can do to generate leads, but paying for leads is just not necessary if you do two basic things: Focus on the one or two lead sources that will make you incredibly powerful, and retain the customers you already have.

For me that’s about open for inspections, working my personal network, and working past clients. People who do really well in business have repeat and return customers, so make sure you build those relationships to ensure customer retention.

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

Ep 137 – Scaling and Building a Team

This High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents features Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips talking about scaling and building a team. Josh begins with remuneration and bonus structures, and Alex offers guidelines to consider when bringing people into the team, with emphasis on clarity and transparency around commission incentives. They discuss different models of compensation and Alex talks about combining performance and numbers, and when to deliver bonuses.

They also discuss rewards and recognition other than remuneration. Josh reminds us that driving specific skills and developing people inside of your team helps your business grow. Be clear around standards and expectations for each level of pay and bonuses.

Fear of Price Reductions

Pricing a property is critically important to get the momentum you need to sell it. In my Coaching Tip today we’ll face your fear of price reductions by understanding why they happen, and I’ll show you how to make the pricing work for your market dynamics.

Price reductions happen. Whether it’s changing market conditions, or that your market knowledge wasn’t as good as it should’ve been, you’re going to have to have that conversation around making a price reduction. The sale is in trouble if you haven’t had enough inquiries on the property, not enough inspections, and no second appointments.

It’s the second appointments that show interest, and you need those to make sure you get an offer. In my business, we make sure that by day 14 every property we have on the market has an offer. This is important because the most urgent customer is the one that pays the most. Your job is to find that customer.

Look for the people who have already sold a property and need to move, or have already made an offer elsewhere and failed. They’re ready to do a transaction and as soon as they find that particular property they want they’re going to come look at it. Pricing is what will get their attention, and to get it right you need to go to other open for inspections in your area to see the other homes currently competing in the marketplace.

My lesson here is, don’t wait until it’s too late. You know if you’re already in trouble, and it’s your duty as an agent to go have that conversation with your owner around getting the property priced down just enough that you can get it sold. It’s everything you do leading up to the price reduction that determines its success.

That means doing the work of speaking with every single one of your owners each and every business day about new properties coming to market and recently sold buyer feedback you’re hearing, and price indications you’ve received. Remember it’s the client’s right to maintain their asking price if they wish to, but it’s also your job to push past that fear of price reductions and facilitate that price by knowing what the market really looks like.

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

Ep 136 – Buyer Urgency

In this High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips discuss buyer urgency and its relation to market circumstances. Alex says it’s you as the agent who needs to progress the buyer and get the deal done. Josh describes a buyer who has a genuine desire to buy and worth your interest. Next, Alex tells how to create competitive urgency with only 1 to 3 buyers, and Josh reveals which buyers already have a sense of urgency to buy and how to spot them, while Alex tells how to make the most of that opportunity.

Josh recommends doing buyer pipeline meetings with your team, and Alex details what those meetings should cover. They discuss how to create urgency between buyers, and Josh advises understanding who your best buyers are and bringing them in to see your properties.

Is your pipeline working for you?

What a great agent does is help people make decisions so they can have a much bigger future through property. But first, you need listings, so in my Coaching Tip this week I ask, is your pipeline working for you? And I’ll explain how to make that happen.

What I hear a lot of agents say is that they’ve got a pipeline of potential sellers, but none of those are coming to market. Or if they are you’re getting a whole heap of listings one month and then no listings the next. The problem is that the industry is hooked on looking for listings right now instead of understanding why a customer might move in the future.

Your job as an agent is to understand what it is that the client is really trying to achieve. Maybe they’ve just had a baby, or they need to move to a new school zone before the new school year starts. You have to discover the client’s dissatisfaction and get clear on their vision for the next property.

To work your pipeline and progress your customers you need to find out who they are and where they need to be in their process. Fear is a great motivator, but so is clarity of vision. You have to distinguish the difference between genuine delays and delay tactics. Getting face to face with customers allows you to have that emotive contact and really understand the challenges your customer is going through. Then you can help them jump their hurdles.

So is your pipeline working for you? Because if you have listings, and you can connect with the reason a customer wants to move, and you can then help them drive their dissatisfaction to the point of saying, “You know what? Now’s the time to go!” then you’ve become an agent.

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

Managing your Pipeline

If you want to be successful at surfing the biggest waves in the world, you need to be able to read the signals. Likewise, learning to read signals from your prospective clients will help you to successfully deliver more sales and avoid a wipeout.

Even the world’s best surfers fear Hawaii’s deadly Banzai Pipeline. The surf reef break off Ehukai Beach Park is notorious for huge waves and even bigger wipeouts. What’s all this got to do with real estate? To successfully ‘hang ten,’ you’ve got to be prepared, know which breaks to catch and where to jump on board the wave. It’s the same when working your metaphoric sales pipeline. To be a great agent you need to read the play and know which people are going to enter the market next and when.

That sounds daunting, doesn’t it? Let’s break it down.

1 . Visualise
Agents who can see what’s coming up take action and work towards those goals. Every time you meet someone who is a potential seller, write their details on a sticky note and pop it on a whiteboard or office wall under the month they are coming to market.

2. Stop, Collaborate and Listen
Who would have thought Vanilla Ice would have excellent sales advice? Not me. But this is the perfect approach to planning ahead and laying your pipeline with solid foundations. No cracks to be seen. Every Monday hold a ‘Pipeline Review Meeting’ where you assess your upcoming buyers on the whiteboard and how you can progress them through the sales process.

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3. Iron First, Velvet Glove
Have you ever noticed how potential vendors shut down when you bombard them with marketing? You call with market updates and they can’t get off the phone quick enough; offers of free appraisals are denied and your pamphlets end up in the recycling. What happens is agents become too forceful and say ‘I’ll ring you in six months’ time’. Instead, turn things around and give a little control back to the client by asking smarter questions that lead them to think they’ve come up with the idea.

Key questions to ask could be:

– What could I do to help you from here?
– What might the next step be?

These questions are so simple, but they allow you to find out how potential clients really want you to follow up with them. Once you’ve done this you can take a slightly firmer approach and begin setting expectations.

It’s called permission-based marketing. Ask:

-Would it be OK if I sent you a little monthly video that covers what’s happening in the local market?
-What I’ve done for others like yourself is give them a quick call when we have a significant listing or sale in the area. Can I do that with you?

4. Don’t let Time Lapse
What happens when the client does nominate a timeline that’s months away, you ask? You gently reel them back in. If the client says, ‘we won’t be coming to market until July’, you ask:
Great, so what are you hoping is going to change between now and then?

If we had a buyer for your property today and they wanted a longer settlement, what would you want us to do?

5. Find the ‘Why?’
Too many agents focus on how and when a client will come to the market, when what they really need to zero in on is why the client is coming to the market – or not. It’s only once you learn to hit potential vendors over the head with a feather rather than a sledgehammer that you’ll understand how to ask better questions, allowing you to tap into your client’s mindset and overcome their objections.

This article first appeared on Elite Agent: https://eliteagent.com.au/managing-your-pipeline-josh-phegan/