Here are the highlights from our Super Six session with CoreLogic’s Head of Property Services Marketing, Kylie Davis.
Coach:
Note: You can download a copy of the Buyer Perceptions of Real Estate Agents report here.
Key Points
- The relationship between agents and buyers in statistics
- The importance of buyer care
- How to keep creating constant referrals
Quote
“25% of our buyers said that they would definitely use the agent they bought from to sell their home.”
tweetVideo Notes/Transcript
You guys work for vendors. You’re there for them, they’re the ones that pay you. What’s the relationship that you have with buyers?
14% of buyers had a truly awful experience with the real estate agents that they dealt with.
Buyers understand that they are very much without power in this space, which is part of what upsets them a lot of the time – that they feel like they don’t have any power – and if you look at the numbers and compare how buyers felt compared to how vendors felt, consistently vendors had a better experience.
Well, here’s why. Because only 25% of our buyers said that they would definitely use the agent they bought from to sell their home.
Every time you buy, or every time you successfully sell someone’s property (and we’ll go into this in a little bit more detail) you have the opportunity to basically connect with two people, and to do a brilliant job for two people.
Every time you delight a buyer, you put someone in your bucket for the next time. This is becoming even more important in Sydney and Melbourne especially at the moment, because with listing numbers coming off, they are coming off not because people are scared they won’t sell their home, but they are scared that they won’t find something that they want to live in more.
That is kind of worrying them a lot, so increasingly we’re seeing that old rule of ‘sell first, buy second’ being turned on its head in some markets.
In fact, the people who are coming through your open for inspection are often kicking the tyres to see whether, “If I really like this place, then I will sell.” “If I really like dealing with you, then I will give you my listing.”
It’s really about coming back to that whole idea that we found in the vendor research that basically your open homes are an audition for you.
Here’s the thing. This is why buyer care’s important. If you sell 100 properties a year, are you okay with a 75% churn rate? Because that’s what the industry is averaging at the moment. For the 100 properties a year that you sell, only 25% of the buyers that you sell to are going to definitely use you, so 75% of the people who come through and end up buying properties from you are declining to put you in their audition bucket for services down the track.
The rhetorical question around that is that’s not a cool number, you should not be okay with that.
What are agents doing wrong in this space? They’re failing to see the value of buyer care as a whole. Not individually, you guys. Obviously, you’re all here to learn this stuff.
68% of our buyers said that their agents that they were dealing when they were going to between those 2-19 open for inspections had little or not interest in helping them find a home.
How you handle them in that audition process will determine whether they give you a call and ask you to come and list on their home. They will make these decisions over and above anything dropped into their letterbox or any other advertising that you do. As soon as they see you in action, that becomes one of the most important points that they use to determine if you’re going to be useful.
We know from this that you can build awareness through general advertising and sponsorships and listing advertising. But the minute you think about what you’re trying to do with that, you’re trying to make contact with someone. At an open for inspection, you’re making contact with someone.
So, the power of excellent buyer service. We know that if you stand out from the crowd, this is what will happen. The buyers that you deal with will be astonished and grateful, you will be in the top 14% of agents who deliver excellence to the buyers that they deal with.
As a result of that, those buyers will become clients for life, so every time you delight a buyer and you successfully sell them a property and they think that the service you offered was fantastic, they decide that they will definitely use you again. You start to win more referrals.
