Stop Selling - Start Breeding

Rawlings puts his head on the block and suggests that currently, when stock levels are low in a sellers’ market, the last thing agents should be doing is selling houses!

One of the questions I ask agents during my training sessions is “what’s the first thing you do when you list a property?” Usually, the same three answers tend to come back – “we upload it to the portals”, “we organise a social media campaign”, and “we contact our hottest buyers”. Wrong, wrong and wrong on all fronts. Well, not wrong exactly, but wrong enough to miss the most important point of all. Breeding! (Bear with me…)

If we look at things another way, and ask a different question – this time to agency business owners: “Why did you start your estate agency and what are your ambitions” the answer they might give initially would be things like “We saw a gap in the market to do better” or “We felt there was an opportunity to deliver a service that would blow the others out of the water”. Yadda yadda yadda!

These may be noble aims in principle, and for some, delivering an extraordinary level of customer experience may be a route to success (although I know many fabulous agents who don’t make anything like the money they could/should be making for their efforts). Most estate agency owners “believe” in delivering excellence, but the link between this belief and a highly profitable estate agency appears to be broken. That pesky competitor up the road, even the one that nobody seems to like, still seems to take an unreasonable large slice of the market share pie. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that we have been lying to ourselves. Your estate agency business doesn’t really exist in order to deliver customer service excellence to your customers, in the same way that my beautiful Apple mouse does not exist in order to feel good in my hand. Your business exists to make money so you, your family and your staff can have a good standard of living and enjoy a secure future. This must be your default position.

 So how does this impact on the answer to the first question about what agents do first when they list a property? What happens is when you give that new-to-market seller immediate access to your hottest buyers, you create a sale and your clients are delighted…BUT STOP! Does that feed your ambition to grow your business? It’s just one sale. You then do the same with the next, and the next. In this way your agency can only ever grown in a linear fashion, one sale at a time. List ten houses, sell ten houses. Wouldn’t you prefer it to grow exponentially? Well it can!  

And this is where the BREEDING comes in. Every instruction should breed at least another two. All you have to do is urge your negotiators, when a property comes to market, NOT to offer it to the hottest buyers first! Because those buyers are not compatible with your plans for business growth. The first people you should be offering the property to is those local homeowners, who would sell, if only they could find somewhere to buy. Whether or not they buy one of your instructions is irrelevant, as long as they list their property with you. And they are highly likely to instruct you if you have treated them royally, especially by giving them first dibs on the slightest whiff of a new property coming to market. Once you’ve stuck it on the portals, or indiscriminately plastered it around social media you’ve lost your chance to impress the people who matter most to your business – your future clients.

I’m not saying you should ignore your duty of care to your clients (although I’d still say your duty of care to your business and you family comes first). I’m just suggesting giving yourself a three-day head start before offering it to the hottest buyers, one of whom will probably buy it.

Look at the figures - if you task your negotiators to use every new instruction (or even tentative pre-instruction heads-up) to breed another two, then ten instructions become 30. Those extra 20 add another 40 and those 40 add another 80. Doing this just three “deep” turns 10 instructions into 150 instructions in just a few weeks or months.

And your reputation, based on an amazing customer experience, soars! Why? Because most agents still treat “not on market” homeowners as second-class citizens, whereas in reality, they are your easiest, most direct route to success in estate agency. What are you waiting for? Start breeding instructions today.   

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