I honestly believe the big agencies with their big brands are living on
borrowed time, as the importance of an agency’s brand and branding to be
successful are slipping with every year that passes into the 21st
Century. In the 1900’s, when information was short supply, curtailed and slow,
people depended on a brand’s goodwill for quality assurance. However, things
have changed in every industry since the Millennium, and it’s a matter of time
that it will change in estate agency and lettings.
I honestly believe that anyone with enough
passion, drive, intelligence and patience can open up or even grow a stagnant
lettings agency (or lettings and estate agency) and compete and beat the mega
brands of Connells, Countrywide, YourMove, the franchised brands, even the
likes of Savills and Knight Frank. It won’t take a huge multi million pound
budget either.
The three barriers to opening an agency
Let me explain ..before social media and the
tinterweb, if you wanted to open an agency, there were three major
barriers to entry that used to exist as a gateway to estate agency/lettings.
These barriers were reach, acceptance and ability .. but now they no longer
exist
- reach – Today, anyone can publish content on the web for almost no investment. I have over 3,000 letting agents on a weekly basis read my articles for not one penny...all because of social media.
- acceptance – Today, you don’t have to be the Sunday Times to have your clients accept and engage in what you want to say.
- ability – You don’t need to be a journalist to write interesting stuff (but make sure it’s interesting otherwise they will drop you quicker than a lead balloon).
Anyway, let me tell you a story of my childhood to show why I say this
..
When I was
ten or eleven, my family and I went on holiday to North West Wales... boy was
it grey and wet. My father had just bought a new Ford Sierra XR4 x 4 - basically a one down from a Ford Cosworth,
but without the silly spoiler and boy was it quick .. like brown stuff off a
shovel it was. This car drank petrol for Britain and this was in the time of BU
(Before Unleaded). This behemoth of a car needed 4 star and if you could get
it, 5 star petrol (yes, there was such a thing).
Just like Tom
Cruise was running on vapours in Top Gun as he was about to land his F14
Tomcat, I can remember my father driving past three petrol stations, refusing
to stop as the petrol stations weren’t one of the large oil giants (such as
Shell, Esso BP etc) but they were one man band outfits such as ‘Yakeydar
Petrol’ or ‘Anglesey Oil’ that still appeared to have manual pumps,
where some old boy would even fill it up for you, because they didn’t trust
you.
Brand is everything Son
To my dad the
brand name was everything.“No, son, I’ve never heard of that one,” he would
say. “We’ll go with the brand, I don’t want to put second rate stuff in the XR4.”
..all the time, the petrol needle was further into the red than the Greek economy
.. we were on vapours!
Now, I want
to ask you a question ... I want you to
think for a second about the last few things you bought, especially decent
sized purchases . I don’t think I will be far wrong to think you went to a
search engine, looked over the reviews, asked your mates on Facebook, and maybe
even visited few comparison website sites. I bet in some (not all, but some) of
your buying decision was influenced by what lots of others said was the best
choice to make — in spite of a brand name or even brand recognition. Hell, I
bought this Lenovo laptop a while back because the reviews were ace .. I had
never heard of them, but thought, well if everyone else says they are good,
they must be? How many of you have decided on a hotel or holiday on the
feedback of a complete stranger on TripAdvisor?
What does Tripadvisor mean for Agency?
So what does
this mean for estate and lettings agency? I am not suggesting that having a big
brand isn’t a good thing, quite the opposite, all I am simply saying it’s not
enough anymore. Your brand will not, on its own, get you the business.
The tinterweb,
social media and the connection society we live in, the ability of anyone to
find out anything by going to a website called Google (other search engines are
available) , typing something into that site and the millions of answers,
millions of pages of info at your finger tips is something people would have
only dreamed about 20 years ago. It has levelled the playing field to the point
where a ‘nobody agent’ with a better collection of raving fans can compete with
the largest brands, in any industry,
especially agency.
Forget the
Online vs High Street agent model, that is an irrelevant question. Yes, there
is a place for a couple of big UK wide online agents but even then, look at the
likes of easyProperty, they aren’t exactly pulling up trees and making seismic
waves in the market.
High Street vs Online is the wrong
question you should be asking
However, if
you are starting an agency today or want to grow one, in my humble opinion, you
don’t need to have an expensive piece of real estate sucking up pound notes
like a Dyson on speed. Don’t get me wrong, having a piece of glass on the High
Street is very helpful, but it is not ‘the be all and end all’ of whether you
will succeed .. we have all seen these agents who open with their fancy
‘lardydedar’ offices, for them to shut the door after 12 months.
.... a High Street
office doesn’t equal success.
So, if you
are starting your own agency, and you are going online (or High Street), I am
more than happy to give you my thoughts and opinions on what I would do (or not
as the case may be) by either dropping me a note via email or picking up the
phone.
Today, all
landlords and property sellers want is someone who cares. Companies don’t care,
less does the brand, but people care. One phrase I hear constantly in the
property business is this,
.... lettings/estate
agency is a people business, not a property business.
How do you compete against the big
brands?
When you
start your agency or you are finding it hard to grow your agency, you look at
these mighty brands, and you ask yourself, ‘How the hell can I compete against
these massive chains of agents?’ With this in mind, I think the question you
should be asking is this, “is this agency owned, organised and run by people
who will allow the people who work there to care?” Generally, the bigger the
firm, the answer is nearly always a big fat “no”.
That might
sound harsh, but I speak to many people in the industry, especially during the
last 18 months. I have only come across three Area Managers who
work in Corporate sphere, who I thought, Wow. The rest have been magnolia
tinted number crunchers. You see caring is fickle, volatile, hard to manage and
regulate and often expensive in the short run. I feel sorry for the people who
work in such environments, to have bosses who don’t care about their staff, who
see them just as a number who provide numbers for the spreadsheet. Your own
people in your offices must be cared for first, then in return they will care for the customers more.
It is a great dishonour to
the loyal staff members because the long term upside is huge.
Brands are not so important nowadays
I think in
agency (both lettings and sales), there is a trend with the bigger firms to
over emphasise the significance of their branding, their networks, their fancy technology,
even processes and efficiency. I know why they are doing that, but perhaps,
it’s an idea that might just be flawed.
All thriving,
successful companies centre everything around the needs of people because
people are the in essence the final consumers of every product and service.
Without people, every great business in the world would be worthless and estate
and lettings is no exception: it is people (agents and their landlords/vendors/purchasers)
who make the decisions about what to buy and when.
Yes, you
could always try and beat them with cheap fees, but even if you do get the
business, you won’t get much money from it, because you are doing your stuff on
the cheap. Or you could try and beat them at their own game, and spend
thousands in advertising and sponsoring everything from every roundabout in the
town to the village fete (the last one does work quite well actually!) ... or
you could play your own game. Embrace a new way of doing things.
Your Brand is You .. not the logo
Your brand is
YOU .. not some fancy logo like the other agents who hide behind the facade ‘all
fur coat and no knickers’ (definition here https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/all_fur_coat_and_no_knickers )
You
are the difference .. not the brand, not the logo. If you can be the most
caring, most trustworthy, most honest, the most hardworking agent in your town
.. then you will win. People ultimately choose to do business with people they
like and trust.
..
but here is the issue, how can you prove that, if you don’t have the properties
to sell or let in the first place? It’s like the chicken and egg .. you need to
prove trust/caring/hardworking etc., to get the property but you need the
property in the first place to be able to prove trust/caring/hardworking etc.
Ten ways to prove Trust without
having the property
..
but you CAN prove all these things (trust/caring/hardworking etc )without
having the property .. here are ten ways to do it
1.
Trust
is transferable .. I don’t care what you say, but if someone says to you, you
need to go and speak to that guy, he knows what he is talking about, their
trust is transferred to you. The amount of times my clients have told
me (and fellow clients in out Facebook Group) of landlords who recommended their
lettings agency, but that landlord who recommended them had never met my client,
let alone used them. Word
of mouth is one of the most successful, by far, to prove trust,
because here is the best bit .. trust is transferable. If someone says I’ve heard
good things about you from people I know, the entire relationship changes. You
get the benefit of the doubt. When someone recommends a plumber to you, do you
question what they did for them, how much it cost, did they have the correct
certificates .. no, because you trust that person, that is good enough ..
landlords recommend you to other letting agents
2.
Pressing the Flesh ... I love to speak to Steve Frost
from Martin and Co in Chelmsford. He has people walking in off the street, and
when the receptionist stands up and says, ‘How can I help you’, he has lost
count at the number of people who have said, ‘I want to talk to him, point
towards Steve at the back of the office, the man that writes the article about the
housing market every week in the paper ’
.. most turn out to be
landlords. See his blog and you will see why he has landlords coming to him,
two or three a week .. Ring him up yourself and ask him .. this is his blog
.. http://chelmsfordproperty.blogspot.co.uk/
3.
Have we met before? Network,
network, network.. if you have interacted with someone in some way before they
see your marketing material, blog, your newsletter etc etc, be that at the
local Conservative Club, Golf Club, Rotary Club, PIN meeting or Chamber of
Commerce etc etc, even if it’s for 30 seconds, that will alter the reaction
that person will have when they do see your marketing material for the first
time.
4.
Can
I have your autograph? Taking it to the extremes, the
number of letting and estate agents who adopt the principles of being the local
‘Property Guru’ who get stopped in the street is amazing.. in fact Paul
Tobias-Gibbins, no word of a lie, was asked to market a property because of the
weekly articles he puts in the weekly newspaper about the local property
market, but the owner also asked for his autograph!
5.
Scarcity – The early bird gets
the worm – One of our letting agents who adopts the landlord
farming principle (we call ourselves farmers), so Farmer Singh from South
London is doing wonders with his blog, with the VIP area on his blog for
landlords, where they have to enter their contact details to get access to the
best Buy to let deals .. however, the way he does it is truly sublime ...
6.
Are you interesting? If I spend my time, reading your
blog, listening to your podcast or reading your newsletter, what’s in it for me to listen to
what you have to say? If you are
interesting .. people will start to trust you.
7. Old
ideas vs New ideas Everybody loves talking about the
property market .. there is nothing new in that. But by writing meaty articles
about the local property market each and every week, you are making landlords
think about their property in new ways .. and if you can get someone to think
and you are interesting .. human beings like things they are interested in and
by eventually getting them to like you .. from that, trust emerges.
8.
Google Results
on the first page of Google are more trusted. It’s so easy to get to the top of
your towns ranking with a good blog about your town’s property market .. Google
loves fresh content. Farmer Chris from North London, six months after starting
his blog, is ahead of Rightmove, Zoopla and the big boys when you type his
‘town’ and the words ‘property’ and ‘blog’ .. how good is that?
9.
How long have you been showing
up? Having a blog, and
constantly posting shows you deliver every time. Farmer Daniel, a letting agent
from Hertfordshire stopped doing his blog for a few weeks. In our Facebook
group for letting agents who adopt the principles of being local property gurus,
a group where we share ideas, he said last week, “Haven't written my blog for a while due to dealing with
other ****** recently but decided to kick it off again this week with a couple
of BTL deals and a nice piece about development projects.. in my town. Posted
it everywhere yesterday and have had 4 calls already. 1 accountant called who
has lots of properties, 2 being refurbished and there's a good chance I'll get
to let both. I thought I'd let you know to encourage you keep writing your
blogs. Don't be an idiot like me and stop for a couple of months - you must
keep the machine going as it really does work”.
10.
The Punters .. they just love ya’ Honestly, if you have been doing
this for while, this article writing, this becoming the town’s local property
guru, people will talk about you. Farmer Rebecca from Middlesex says all her
friends have told her, without asking, everyone in their suburb is talking
about her newsletter and blog. These people won’t ring you up and tell you that
.. but they are talking about what you write .. because middle aged property
owners are interested in the property market .. and you are the source of info,
the mother-lode of news, the fountain of knowledge with thoughts and info on
the local property market ...
Bottom line is this my fellow
agent, you will be judged, so surely its best to plan on being judged in the
best possible light and be that trustworthy agent?
Want to
read more? I am the Author of the Landlord Farming Blog which
has over 280 posts going back to 2013, on attracting landlords to a letting
agency http://how-to-grow-your-lettings-agency.blogspot.co.uk/
Want to
listen to more about the ideas I mention? Listen to the UK’s
first iTunes approved Podcast for Letting Agents, a podcast on
how to improve your lettings agency.
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/letting-agent-podcast/id1014892281
Want to
visit my website? Hereis is www.christopherwatkin.co.uk
Got something on your mind? I’d love to know your thoughts
on this topic – please leave a comment, or if you are shy, email me at christopher@christopherwatkin.co.uk