Today we’re going to speak about what is probably one of the most important meetings inside of the vendor relationship management. The seller management meeting is actually a “setup to sell” meeting. A lot of agents claim to do it, but out of all of my coaching clients I have not seen anyone doing seller management meetings on a regular and consistent basis.
The setup to sell meeting should happen a day or two after you’ve been to the listing presentation and won the business. It’s critical not to do it right off at the listing presentation because there’s already so much information to process there, and it’s important to first set up the property to sell.
How do you judge your success in what you have done here?
- You get the property sold, and –
- You sell the property for a really great price.
The only way to get the property sold is to go through what we call the “indicators of interest.” Indicators of interest are pretty simple: How many inquires have we got? This then gives us the total number of inspections.
There are only two reasons why a property doesn’t get inquiry:
- We have no marketing, and
- The property is in the wrong price range.
As long as we’ve placed the property in the right price range, and we are marketing it correctly, we should see lots of inspections. Those inspections should generate second appointments. If a second appointment doesn’t happen after the inspections we know that people feel that the property is priced too high, and that makes other homes look like a better value to them.
Second appointments need to result in people requesting copies of the contract, and then making offers on the property. Never forget there are plenty of properties you will handle that have already been on the market with other agents, and every single time you do that your clients will say that they’re really unhappy because they never received any offers. The reality of that is, they never got second appointments because they didn’t have enough contract requests, because they didn’t have enough inspections, because they never had enough inquires on the home to begin with.
We have broken all this down into what we call our days on market, then the enquiries, which generate the inspections, which result in second appointments, and finally we get contracts and offers.
For days on market you can expect, for example, maybe 8 enquiries on the home by the 7th day, resulting in 8 inspections on the property, either through private appointments or at the open for inspections. From there you may receive one second appointment and one request for a copy of a contract, but the first week is probably too early to have any offers. We then repeat the process for days 14, 21 and 28.
Basically we are setting an expectation, but if there are no more requests for contracts, no additional offers, and especially if there are no more inspections or additional enquiries on the home by day 28, then we’re in serious trouble.
At this point you need to make sure that you understand the importance of competition. For any given property you are handling, there will be ten other homes in the marketplace, and five of those homes are going to be sold in the next month. Do you want to be one of those five homes that sold? Of course you do.
The way you will sell those homes is to be certain that the marketing you use is going to get you the enquiries, the inspections, the second appointments, the contracts and the offers that you deserve. Spend the extra $500 to get a larger ad in the paper, or go to a highlight listing on domain.com.au. Get the marketing right, and do what needs to be done. Now you can set your expectations where they need to be.
We may now be in a position to get early offers on the home, and it’s important to be aware of that so you know what to do when it happens. because it’s not about the number of days that you’ve been on the market – It’s about the number of days that the buyer has been in the market.
Remember, the role of the setup to sell meeting is to clearly define the indicators of interest, step by step what it takes to get you an offer on the property. Set benchmarks for what to expect by days 7, 14, 21 and 28 on the marketplace. Keep in mind the role of competition. Add to that the possibility of early offers, and be ready to seize your first opportunity to actually upsell your marketing.
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s coaching tip. If you need anything further then feel free to email me at josh@joshphegan.com.au.