John Duncan MBA BCA Licensed Real Estate Salesperson (REAA 2008)
Key 1.3: Achieve more listings using SalesPartner processes
We believe you will achieve more listings if you can show potential vendors how your systems are being used to market and sell existing vendors’ property. At the same time your processes should demonstrate your mastery of the systems you would use to find the best buyer for their property.
Pro-Active marketing and databasing is about opening doors to more listings with these pro-active marketing keys to successful client relationship management.
A small diversion: several years ago my wife Cecily and I were dining at a restaurant in Nelson near a large group of diverse personalities having a pre-Christmas get together. These were people from different ethnic groups, a range of ages, mostly extroverted, determined to enjoy themselves, with lots of experiences to share, who looked like they worked together well, with some tension but plenty of good humour. In other words, they looked like a real estate agency. I was surprised that I couldn’t identify any of the people personally. So keen to be proactive and not having a full knowledge of the different agencies in the area I introduced myself and sought to determine their agency identity. I learned this was a Christmas party for Victim Support - a local government agency tasked with helping victims of accidents and crime. If you feel you could cope in a role with that agency then you will be well suited to cope with the emotional side of real estate.
So now you have joined a real estate firm you need to give everyone you know and meet an opportunity to contact you when faced with a real estate decision.
It follows that you should take every opportunity to send information on the properties for sale by your office to potential clients. Who is a potential client? Rick DeLuca’s definition was “if they know I am in real estate and I know how to contact them then they should go in my data base as a potential client.”
With SalesPartner the information you send will always include your contact details. That is in place of the person who listed the property. This improves the flow of enquiry back to you and reassures people that you are working in their market place.
There is an important point you should not miss. We believe you should send information on property to potential buyers or customers you have met but most importantly you should also send information on available properties to potential vendors you want to become your clients.
In New Zealand it is the vendors who pay real estate commissions and they are also interested in the market. Every time you send them details of your offices’ new listings, invitations to open homes, details of recent sales and news about the market you are demonstrating the systems you have to find the best buyers for their property. Every potential vendor whose property you appraise should be treated like a potential buyer until they make a decision to list. They are after all, the people that you want to buy your services. This is pro-active marketing.
You should take every opportunity to make these communications personal by adding your own comments on the properties, the market, recent successful sales and even the weather.
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Some firms have elaborate online systems to allow potential buyers to log in, enter their price and other requirements and be automatically emailed with matching properties as they come on the market. We call this the “wet and forget” approach. Its main drawback is that it doesn’t help build a relationship between the client and the salesperson, but there are other drawbacks which we will come back to.
The key process for you to master is building a database, recording your contacts and the activity you complete with them and matching these contacts up with properties. With SalesPartner these processes are easier than ever before.
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