Every Agent Has A Story: Tara Bradbury

Our next story comes from Tara Bradbury, Director of BDM Academy, who shares the two key lessons she learned after leasing a home to a tenant without conveying crucial information about the owner’s inaccessible shed.

• Be diligent with your client communication and procedures; an abundance of information is better than a lack of.
• Take responsibility for your own actions and show your initiative, even when something goes wrong,

Transcript

Hi. My name is Tara Bradbury and I’m the director of the BDM Academy.

Today, my confession that I’m going to share with you is one that I’m sure many BDMs maybe have experienced. If you haven’t, I hope that you can use this as a learning tool to move forward with your career.

So it goes back to the early stages when I became a full-time BDM and was set up on a commission-only based role. I was definitely the BDM that was the style of ‘fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants’, always happy to bring in all the properties, hand them over, move on to the next one. I absolutely loved the sales aspect of the business development role.

That then put me in the position where I found myself probably not being as diligent as I needed to be when it come to communicating with the property management team and passing that information over.

We leased a property within the Maryborough area at the time, and that particular tenant had anticipated that the shed [was part of] the property they were going to have access to. I, unfortunately, didn’t actually pass on that information to the property management team when the property was advertised. So they then assumed, when they went into the property, that it was theirs for them to use, even though at the time they never actually had a look inside.

They saw the outside and thought, “Great, the boat will fit in here really well.” Once they’d moved in, obviously they did not actually have access to it and in fact, it’s a situation that many have experienced where the shed is being used by the owner; they’ve stored their own goods there.

The tenants were obviously extremely unhappy and dissatisfied. It was a large two-bay shed. They had a lot of bigger items that they were needing to have stored, so the responsibility for that particular situation came back 100% on my soul. To the point where, not only did I not make any commission out of that particular property, the client and the work that I was involved with for that property, I then also had to pay on top of that to ensure that their goods were stored over that lease period. That was how I was expected to take responsibility for my actions.

I hope that this story helps impact your day, allows you to review your checklists and your systems and procedures and how your handover process is happening within the business. Please do always make sure that you communicate well and share as much information as you can about the client – whether it be talking to your property management team face-to-face, through email, or utilising your trust account programs. Thank you.