In the
estate agency and lettings game nothing is more important to your business as
free valuations (.... and when I say free valuations, I also mean market
appraisals). To have a viable estate
agency and lettings business, you must have those free valuations. Without free valuations you will have no
business and therefore you need lots of them.
Funny but some estate agents and lettings agents miss this quite obvious
point end up spending their time on other less financially rewarding
activities. Why do they do this? I have
no idea, I really don’t. But let us be
brutally clear about this, no free valuations equals no properties to sell (or
let) .... equals no money coming in ..... equals financial ruin.
I might even be as bold to say that
you aren’t an estate agent or letting agent .... but you are in the free valuation
generation business. Say that phrase to many agents and they will
say they are an estate agent to which I reply “fine” .... try being an estate (letting)
agent without free valuations. What you
agents have to embrace and realise is the fact that it is the number of free
valuations you have which will either grow your business, keep you in business
or put you out of business. Nothing else
about your estate or lettings agency business will have as big an impact on it
as the number of free valuations that you have and then convert.
In a booming
market there are usually many agents relying on passive free valuations. In fact, I believe, that most of the estate
agents market relies on them even in the bad times; they just wait for the
phone calls or emails to ask them for a free valuation. I call this free valuation receiving. Unfortunately, estate agents who are in the
business of receiving free valuations may find themselves selling very few
properties when the market drops. On the
other side of the coin if you actively focus on generating free valuations through
direct and focused marketing activities, you will always be doing the best you
can even in a poor property market. If
you count on the market to deliver you free valuations when times are good, you
better count on it to take them away when the times are bad.
Putting
aside the conversion rate of your free valuations, which is a completely
different story (and argument) your number one issue is getting more free
valuations. The catch is that generating
free valuations is not something that can be just turned on or off some good
estate agents make the mistake of turning off free valuation generation when
they think that they have more business than they can handle, they turn it off
and six months later they suddenly realise that the market had shifted slightly
and now they don’t have enough free valuations.
You see the important message here is that the generation of free
valuations always is a switch that has to remain on even when you have enough
free valuations walking through the doors and you are selling enough
property. Even if you have too many free
valuations that is a good thing because you can then pick and choose what
business you have and go for the cream of the crop.
The bottom
line is this, if you want to succeed as an estate agent or lettings agent, you
need free valuations and plenty of them if you want to succeed and grow your
business you have to turn from being a receiver of free valuations to a
generator of free valuations, only then can you take the business to the next
level.