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

The sales funnel .. everyone has heard of it, but do you understand it? Bet you don’t! The definition of the sales funnel refers to the process that companies lead customers through when purchasing what they sell. So in our game of lettings and estate agency, it’s the process of getting the property on the market through to securing the let /sale. It starts off with awareness. If they don’t know you even exist, nothing will happen. It’s all about getting the landlord/ potential house seller to become aware of the existence of YOU Mr Letting or Estate Agent. Most agents are great at that (grabbing attention).   But here is the tricky part. Once you have their awareness, you THEN need to EARN their interest. Only once you have earnt their interest can you earn their TRUST. Using childhood metaphors ... treat it like trying to woo someone of the opposite sex.   No one (worth keeping) goes straight to fourth base do they?   You have to go through all the bases .....

When I was an agent, one of the worst bits was dealing with the competition ..most were good and mutual respect was given and received .. apart from the bar$***d agents, the ones who dropped fees to get the business, even worse, the agents who told lies to get the business. Let me tell you what you should do about those two things of lying barstools and low fees Low fees   - Your competition can quote at whatever fee they want .. deal with it. It doesn’t matter whether you know that they don’t have the profit to deliver the results they are promising. It doesn’t matter that they are going to lose money. It’s irrelevant, the bottom line is this, you can’t do anything about their fees. You could try reducing your fee, but that doesn’t address their profitability, their promises, or that they can’t deliver. You can only create persuasive, differentiated value. Face it ... You can’t control your competitor’s fees . Lies   - It doesn’t matter that your competitor...

So it's all about trust .. yes .. but how do you prove trust to a landlord if you don’t have the property? How can you prove trust to someone you don’t know and unlikely to meet? You can’t look up landlords in Linkedin, the tinterweb or the Yellow Pages. Landlords don’t publish the fact they are a landlord (no one walks around with a badge that says “I’m a landlord” do they) .. so in a nutshell, you have to prove trust to a person (landlord) but you don’t know who they are, where they are and have never met. It all starts with groundwork .. the better foundations, the better system you have in the place, the greater the chance for victory. Next up is empathy , which is all about building trust and rapport with the potential landlord. The focus in this step is on the landlord, not on you and is a continuous process. You should relate to the landlord through the entire process and by doing so you are continually establishing, building and maintaining trust, empathy a...

I used to work for a large Corporate Agent for over 15 years. I loved it, but every once in a while I thought, do the big bosses up on high (not the Area Managers as I have always found that level of management as the stalwarts of agency), but the Head office bods, the MD, the Head of This and That, the Bean Counters and Marketing Dept people (don’t get me started on the Marketing Dept) have no ****ing idea what it’s like on the front line of estate agency and especially lettings?  The one size fits all mentality for estate agency used to work in corporate life and to a point, still kind of does, but it is lettings that scare me, because it doesn’t fit there. The only way it seems for Corporates to grow their lettings businesses are by acquisitions. Yes, there are a few diamonds in Corporate-land out there to prove me wrong, who I do talk to, but in essence, the Corporate techniques to gain new business in lettings is very 20 th Century.(landlords wanted leaflets, door kn...

Do you know what every homeowner in your town lies awake at three in the morning worrying about? Endless sleepless nights, tossing and turning in cold sweats, for weeks, months and years every night, until they cry themselves into a cold tear soaked pillow just as the dawn chorus starts?   ...... Transparent agency fees and vendor contact. Do you know what excites a landlord, what interests them, what makes them surf the web for hours on end? Let me tell you, Cheap fees , Tie in periods and here is the show stopper ... Accompanied Viewings ! I know its shocking, but these are the buzz subjects   (.. of course they bl**dy well arent .. slap yourself if you thought they were) A huge part of the reason for that is most estate and letting agents failure to understand one basic concept: no matter how great a service or agency, homeowners and landlords don’t really care about what you’re saying , especially when you chuck it out evry hour on Twitter, Facebook and Linke...