If you are going to win your dream listings and landlords, you are going to have to pursue them over time. You have to play the long game, working on them for months (if not years for portfolio landlords), and hence most agents dont do it
This means that you have to communicate with them at a tempo and rhythm that keeps you top of mind, without being a pain the ar$e, annoyance or a time waster.
Here are a few ideas to help you persevere while preserving your professionalism.
1. Relationships with Potential Vendors & Landlords are More Important Than The Listing: You have a choice to make as you persist in your business generation. If you choose to push hard for what you want (the listing), being overly forceful and pushy to gain the listing you want, you will be proving to the vendor / landlord that what you want is more important to you than the relationship. The do whatever it takes attitude is useful in your chasing, but it should not incorporate the absence of integrity and caring that reinforce all great relationships—including business relationships. If you must pick between having what you want now (the listing) and having the relationship, select the relationship everytime I say. This is how you play the long game in all business, and it is what allows you to persevere.
2. Always Give Value in Everytime you Speak: In every message, phone call or email, you as a Valuer have the capability to create value for the other person. You can share some news about what is happening in the property market that may help them. Also, you have a opportunity to learn something about your prospective landlord or vendor that will enable you to better serve them better in the future. You are not only influencing their view of what they are doing and how they as a landlord or homeowner might do better, you are also influencing their predilection and inclination to work with you by influencing the relationship. If every telephone call or each email is a straight-up ask for the listing and nothing else, you are not giving value.
3. Persistency Commands Consistency: One of the main differences between Agents who expertly persist at their craft and those who don’t is that they don’t think of this work as ‘just developing a relationship’.
Pay attention here Valuers and Listers. If you call your lost free vals on the day their sole agency runs out or that portfolio landlord once a year, you honesty really aren’t being persistent – are you?
Pay attention Negs, if you only call every quarter with nothing to say apart from “Are you still looking for a house”, you are ticking the box, and that means there is no real honest interest in the punter
Great Estate Agent’s persistence necessitates consistency of communication over time, without expectation of anything in return. Its like your social media, if there are long expanses of time where you disappear and go deep undercover, the absence of consistency makes it really easy for portfolio landlords or potential vendors to ignore your request for their time.
Being professionally persistent as an Estate Agent isn’t tactical, instead it’s totally strategic. It is has to be a central pillar principle when it comes to producing the listings and managed stock you want, quite simply, it’s how you play the long game to win as an agent