How To Get More People To Use Your Lettings and Estate Agency Blog

Chris Watkin:                The biggest fear of estate agents I find is that they want everyone to love them and therefore fear rejection. Whilst letting agents, they want everything to be perfect and fear criticism. Why is that and how can those agents get over those feelings? Tom Panos:                   Well firstly, how can they get over their fears? Whether you're in lettings or whether you're in sales, people are not looking for a friend. They're looking for their problem to get solved. So that newest friend is your strategy. What you want to do is be a heavy hitter that gets a result for him. Tom Panos:                   So number one, take away this belief in your head that the way you're going to get business is because you're their mate. They're not looking for mates, they've got mates. They're looking for someone to solve their problem. That's the first thing. Tom Panos:                   The second thing is on this ability to handle reject…

Chris Watkin:                Employing millennials in Estate Agency. Do you have the same issue that an awful lot of people in the UK have employing them in Australia? Tom Panos:                   Yeah. The challenge that we've got is, and I don't know who it is, Christopher, but someone has lied to a big group of people and told them, "You don't have to work hard. You've just got to work smart." So there's this group of people who are millennials, who have been told, "Don't worry about the hustle, don't worry about the grind. You can use technology to cut through all of that and you won't have to work hard." That is an absolute lie because technology is there to complement, not substitute. Tom Panos:                   What I find is this — that a lot of the millennials struggle with the concept that you've got to put in a decade of solid work to build a career that is going to far outweigh being a footballer, which is only going t…

Chris Watkin:                Tom, you said, "I'm not a product of my circumstances, I'm a product of my decisions." What does it actually mean to estate agents and letting agents?
Tom Panos:                   What it means if you're a lettings, you're an estate agent, whatever you are in life, I don't know. You're a schoolteacher, you sell... you're a mortgage broker. What I'm saying is that every decision and every action and every thought you've had prior to this moment, has got you where you are now. And that you shouldn't have a victim mentality to say, "You know what? Circumstances in my life have created it. My parents brought me up the wrong way. I got ripped off by my business partner. I'm actually ugly-looking. I actually didn't go to a good school."
Tom Panos:                   What I'm saying is that things get better by choice, not by chance. And that you have the ability to make decisions that change th…

I get a feeling some of you aren’t posting on social media because you are scared.
People are not posting because they are scared a post, a picture, a video wont get the same number of likes and comments to their prior posts. Quite literally, people are not sharing stuff with other people, which whole reason social media works because they are $hit scared the next post isn’t going to perform as well as their killer 100+ likes and mega comments post did last week, last month, last year .. so they dont post at all.If you live your life based on your facebook likes or comments … you are in a exposed place.
That’s not your fault and its not social media’s fault, its a human problem. The reason we feel that way is because of the need to be part of the tribe. We all want to get along with the others in tribe because we need to be loved and liked by the tribe ..so we don’t get kicked out the tribe (with the ultimate consequences of no food/shelter/warmth and protection from note being in the…

Chris Watkin:                Tom, too many agents are worried sick about increasing their fees due to a lack of property sales and the tenant fee ban coming up. How do they get over that fear? Talk to me. Tom Panos:                   I think if you're an estate agent, you've got to go in to a listing presentation with the view that another estate agent is going to charge you zero. And then I know that sounds weird and I know it probably doesn't happen, but you need to go in with the premise that potentially someone's prepared to charge zero and that your job is to be so good that they basically give you a standing ovation and they say, they're not going to get up and say fantastic, right. Chris Watkin:                Get the pointing out ... Tom Panos:                   Correct, that's not going to happen. I don't think people in the UK do that, but I think they've got to ... Chris Watkin:                Do they do it in Oz? Tom Panos:                   No t…

Chris Watkin:                Why is it important that UK estate agents listen to what you have to say Tom?
Tom Panos:                   It's not mandatory. It's not life-threatening. I think to myself, why wouldn't they? One of the reasons is that for the last 15 years, Chris, what I've done is gone backstage and looked at the thoughts, attitudes, practices, structures, mindsets, marketing models of people that do 100 deals a year, people that write a million dollars in gross fees, Aussie dollars, which is around £500,000, and you learn a lot. You learn a lot from actually talking to these people. I think that if I'm an estate agent in the UK, I would love to find out what is it that someone successful doing that I can rip off and duplicate in my own business?
Tom Panos:                   What I've learnt in the time I've worked with UK agents, there is pretty much no difference on things such as how you win business, prospecting, developing a personal brand.…

Chris Watkin:                Tom, what's the most common reason why estate agents don't do prospecting? Talk to me. Tom Panos:                   The most common reason is that they suffer from the concept of the gap. That is that there is a gap between doing something and being rewarded for it. So most estate agents ... There's this great experiment. It's called the marshmallow experiment, and this experiment has been tried all over the world many, many times. What they do is they get a room like this, they get these three year old kids and they say, “Here's one marshmallow. If you can hold that marshmallow and not put it in your mouth for five minutes, when that clock goes to one, we're coming in and giving you a second marshmallow.” Tom Panos:                   What does the research show? Experimenters walk out, and then they've got a video camera that is going in. They're looking at the kids and what happens is there is one kid that gets a marshmallow…

Transcript of an Interview between Christopher Watkin and Tony Morris
Tony, how do you keep up the morale of the Negs and the Valuers and the branch managers as a boss when it's tough out there in estate agency land? Talk to me.
Tony Morris:                 The key thing you just said there is, as the boss, you are the leader, you are the captain of the ship. How you come to the office, how you act during turbulent times is absolutely critical to your troops. You're going to be stressed, you're going to be under pressure, it's part of being a good boss. But the first thing is, are you setting the right example? If they hear you bitching and moaning, you are giving absolute permission for them to bitch and moan. That's my first point. Point number two is, it's a mantra that we talk about in our sales management training to branch managers and it's something that is so easily forgotten. Catch them doing something right. How often do we see them and go up and sa…