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/

Leadership Purpose

As a real estate agent, a leader, and a business owner, you need to understand not only what drives you, but also what drives your people. In my Growth, Leadership, and Management Tip this month I want to help you get really clear about your leadership purpose and why it’s so critically important.

We are all leaders inside of our own lives, but we don’t always recognize what actually drives us. Some people will say they’re driven by money, but it’s more about a desire for significance. We want to feel that what we do makes a difference. Your income may be most important to the quality of life you can provide for your family, or the security that buying assets and growing your net wealth will bring.

The key is to get to know what’s important to your people so you can help them achieve what they want to along their own leadership journey. Have that conversation with your staff individually about whether they’ve bought their first property or their next investment property, and what they’re doing to ensure that their career as a real estate agent will lead them to financial success.

The purpose is critically important to designing your business because it’s the foundation your business is built upon. In my own firm our purpose is to inspire estate agents to achieve their potential. For great real estate agents, it’s all about helping people make better decisions for a bigger future through owning property. Whatever you do, and however you do it, everything you do maps off of your purpose.

Knowing what drives your people as individuals is also part of your leadership purpose as it helps you spot when they’re doing things that aren’t conducive to becoming the type of person that they want to become. You can then give them a reminder when it’s needed. Find out what their drivers are, and they will drive your business.

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

Buyers & Buyer Hitlist

If you want to really turn your business around, it’s important to identify buyers who have the highest level of urgency. In this week’s Coaching Tip I’m going to give you crucial information about buyers and the buyer hit list.

In the course of your real estate career you’re going to meet a lot of buyers. They’ll contact you by phone, by SMS, by social media, or through the major real estate websites. Some will walk through your agency door. If you run three to five open for inspections on a Saturday, you could meet 20 to 100 or more people in a weekend.

Some of those potential buyers are more important than others. How can you identify them? They’re the ones making the next steps in the purchasing cycle. They’re making an offer, or meeting a second appointment, or the last to leave the open. They’re the ones who return your calls.

Out of all the people you meet in each campaign, there are 3 to 5 who are actively looking for the right home to purchase and are ready to develop a trust relationship with you. These are the people you put on your buyer hit list. I recommend that you hold a buyer pipeline review meeting every week to pinpoint the customers who need to buy right now.

The buyer who pays the highest price is the person with the greatest urgency. These are people who just sold a property, are relocating for a job, or want to buy the property next door to develop their existing property. Once you identify these people, then you do your very best work with them.

So the key to doing great buyer work is understanding buyers and the buyer hit list, focusing on the customers who are in an urgent situation that will motivate them to take action, and helping them find the right property for their needs.

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

Ep 135 — Delegating In Teams That Work

This High Performance Podcast for Real Estate Agents features Josh Phegan and Alexander Phillips talking about delegating in teams that work. They begin with how roles change as you go from one assistant to an entire team. Alex advises starting with the right people for your organisation and paying them what they’re worth. He also notes knowing what you want and making sure they know as well. Josh lists tasks you would allocate to your team, and Alex tells how roles are assigned, how they evolve, and who makes those decisions in your absence. They also discuss dealing with ego conflicts between team members.

They discuss pulse meetings and frequency of meetings, the importance of responsiveness and how your team makes that possible, and how intensity actually reduces stress and allows you to do more business every day.

Step-by-Step Growing A Team

At 30 transactions per annum you’re going to need to put on your first assistant. In my Coaching Tip today I’ll show you step-by-step what growing into a team looks like, and help you plan for putting on new hires smoothly.

Building a great team is a necessary step for scaling your business because there’s a limit to what you can accomplish alone. First, you’ll need an assistant to take over the administrative work. Some agents try to scale by giving that person a lot of buyer work and cold prospecting. But this assistant really should be taking on all of the admin level tasks so that you can stay dollar focused.

The easiest way to scale is to start with your own productivity. Your time needs to be spent on the phone and out at appointments each and every day. Your assistant helps you scale by handling all the marketing, property preparation, property styling, contracts and other legalities, and getting vendor approvals.

Once you get to six or seven listings per month you’ll be ready to grow into putting on a second person. This will be someone capable of doing your buyer and prospecting overflow work. These are special tasks that you just can’t get to, but are critical to producing results, like doing more open for inspections. As you build your team, be careful of titles. Clients won’t like seeing an “Assistant” handling their campaign. Title that position as a “Co-Agent” who is working with you directly.

Finally, growing into a team means investing in each individual you hire. You’ll need a clear personal development plan to train them for the skills that will be useful to you. Build a high-quality team that’s fully capable of doing the work so you can actually go on holidays or take a Saturday off if you need to. Back your people in so they can do their best possible work for you.

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