Thank you our Week 6 sponsor:
Vitrine Media Australia. As well as being top of mind for the residents in your BDA, your agency shopfront also helps you stand out. With Vitrine Media LED technology, you can be on the cutting edge of window communications, connecting people to the store 24/7 by capturing their attention, attracting new customers and outpacing the competition to sell more.
Coaches:
Claudio Encina and Steve Carroll, realestate.com.au.
Coaching Links:
- See Claudio’s week 2 lesson where he spoke about defining your Why as well as incorporating it into your Ideal Day/Week
- For more information about Claudio
Video Notes/Transcript
00:00 Introduction and Session Overview: Samantha McLean
01:04 Business Development Area
Guys we’re into week 6 which is the halfway point and today’s session that I’m going to focus on is hyper local market knowledge, and this is pretty important because I work with a lot of different agents all the time. You’re either dominating or competing in a marketplace and I’ve always found the guys who dominate a marketplace and get the majority of market shares, there’s a couple of things that they tend to do and I want to share that a little bit with you today. I want to talk to you a little bit about a BDA. A BDA is what we call a business development area, also known as a farm area or a patch. But having a business development area.
The best way to hone in on an area is basically think about identifying yourself and being the mayor of that area. Choosing somewhere between 1,600 to 2,000 properties and no more and the goal is to gain about 30% market share. Okay? As a minimum. How long does that take, in my experience as a real estate coach and trainer with of the best agents that I’ve worked. The quickest I’ve seen a guy develop 30% market share is about 18 months, on average. It can take anything from about two to two and a half years and there’s a methodology behind it. High performance agents, I want you to also understand is 60% of their income comes from the business development area and 40% comes outside that business development area. That’s the model you want to start aiming for, okay.
02:40 Resource, Results, Research
The next bit is what is an expert and I want you to write down these three R’s. This is what an expert looks like to me. Number 1 is, you’re a Resource for the people in that area, okay, so you’re basically that point of resource from sharing statistical facts in the area or property prices, growth in that area, so you’re basically a resource and you’re sharing that information with them. They see you, the person, that gets the Results in the area, so days on market are low, you’re achieving maybe beyond and above owners expectations, so results is really important. And the other bit is you do the Research, so if you can work your way and say, okay. I’m choosing a business development area that I want to hone in on and I know you’ve mentioned, Jamie, like an area like Botany for example, and then you say to yourself. “Okay, here’s Botany, I’m going to look between 1,600 to 2,000 properties that I want to target. I don’t know how many properties in Botany all together right now roughly. 4,000.”
This is where I get a lot of agents, where I start to lose a lot of agents. They go, well Claudio there’s 5,000 properties, I really want to hit the 4-5,000 in that one suburb. The problem is is managing a good sort of plan with 5,000 properties. You don’t have the time, the energy and the resources to do it because you need to buy a piece of these peoples mind. When you’ve got 1,600 to 2,000 it’s quite manageable. Anything more than that it becomes really unmanageable and then I call it ‘spray and pray’. You’re going out there you’re spraying and you’re praying that a lead’s going to land on your lap versus going, getting to know those 1,600 people in that area intimately.
04:24 Being Seen as the Expert
Education-based marketing is more about you being seen as that expert all the time. A quarterly property review each quarter can really start to cement you as the expert. I normally say easy to do but easy not to do, you know and you get some agents that do it once or twice and they starting wondering. It’s expensive and they stop. But the idea is to keep it consistent and invest in something that’s going to be really powerful for someone, that they get something in their letter box. You can see it’s good quality GSM, it’s not cheap. It’s actually something of value.
05:00 The Call-To-Action Letter
Guys if you’re looking, I think where we’re going today is ‘data is king’ and I think you need to really look at building a database within a BDA. I remember reading a marketing book a couple of years back, a German guy, and he said that if you touch people 11 times consistently okay, you start to buy a piece of their mind. Again, what do agents do? They spray and pray and they sort of basically, sometimes they’re doing something in their core market or their BDA and sometimes they’re not. Depending on, you know, if I’ve got another listings, wow, I’ve got to go send something out to the area. But if you set up a marketing plan in your BDA which has got number 1, a call-to-action letter as a minimum. Number 2, a DL card which could have for example, some success sales in there that you may have. All right? With your face on the other side and you deliver that once a month for a course of 12 months. Two things happened, you not only buy a piece of people’s mind but secondly, because you’re in someone’s letter box all the time.
Even though they don’t know you, they feel like they trust you. That make sense? Even though they don’t know you, they feel like they trust you because consistency equals trust. Either from an E-newsletter, either from dropping a DL card in an area, to a call-to-action letter. The more times that you have a plan around that you start to buy pieces of people’s mind. What I mean by that is, after for example, say 10 months. My wife and I said, “place is getting too small we need to sell. Gee wiz that lady Melinda is always dropping stuff in our letter box, let’s call her in”. Why? Because maybe I’ve been putting it in the bin all the time. But that moment, because my focus is about selling at that point, I would think of Melinda.
Do you understand how a business development area is number 1, you need to choose 1,600 to 2,000 properties, divided between 3 to 4 zones. Minimum two things that you will have, you will have a DL card and a call to action letter. Even if you have listings or no listings and then on top of that, don’t forget we’ve got things like ‘Just Listed’ and ‘Just Sold’ right? In your core market. Which again pushes things out.
07:17 The Market Monitor
The next bit I want to talk to you about is a little bit about the market monitor. Subscribe to your alerts real estate portal, such as realestate.com.au, domain.com.au as you can see there. But a market monitor and I’ll put this through to you guys and email it through, looks a little bit like this and you need to do this manually. What I’d like for you to do is when you get an alert from the area that you’re looking after, your business development area, you’re going to pop it into a spreadsheet like you have up here. You can see agency, sales person, street number, name automatically. You’re going to put there the first advertised date and then on the last line you’ve got last advertised date. We just couldn’t fit the last bit but if you look at the last part of it, of the spreadsheet, there is a thing that says ‘days on market.’
What are we looking for there? We’re really looking for basically how that sale of that property’s progressing on a weekly basis because you need to spend one hour a week on product and market knowledge. We’re talking about being pros, not amateurs, pros. Pros know everything what’s going on in their marketplace. If you want to dominate this is what you need to do, you need to know every listing in your marketplace, track it every week. The other thing you need to be aware is, if you look on the column below all of that, on the left hand side. Basically market share, in here you pop in who the agent is. For example, it could be Ray White, could be McGrath, could be Coastline, whoever it is. It my BDA at the moment or coastline have two properties, McGrath’s got one, Ray White has one, couple of other independents have one and one. The market share will automatically come up because the formulas are there as is the ‘days on market’ on the other end will populate automatically. But the market share will tell you exactly where you are on any given week, how much market share you have.
Questions?
If you have questions for the coaches or for the Super Six tweet us @eliteagentmag #transform
