In case you missed it - part 1 ... http://how-to-grow-your-lettings-agency.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/beating-purplebricks-and-yopa-at-their.html
Part 2 continued ..
Part 2 continued ..
The most important thing in
estate agency
Before I give you the answer, let us see
why all of us are in estate agency .. to sell a home owners properties for the
best price to the best buyer. But we don’t do it for fun though .. we do it to
earn money.
Let us follow the chain ..
To earn money – you need to be paid
To be paid – you need to get exchange of
contracts
To get exchange of contracts – you need
to get the property sold stc
To get the property sold stc – you need
an offer
To get an offer – you need a viewing
To get a viewing – you need the property on the market
To get the property market on the market
– you need to be called out for the free valuation by the homeowner
.. and that’s the most important thing
in estate agency .. how do you get yourself on the list as one the three agents
called out for a free valuation?
How do homeowners choose the
three agents they are going to call out for a free valuation?
We would hope people would mystery shop
all the agents in our town, so you could show how awesome you and your
colleagues were. How breathtaking your new offices are with LED lights and your wallpaper map on
the back wall.
You would envisage they have been doing
a tally for the last six months, every day, writing down the number of listings
each agent in your patch has put on each day on Rightmove.
Of course, they would be then
calculating the average time each agent takes to sell each of their properties,
and creating a lovely spreadsheet?
.. and it goes without saying, they will
spend 30 minutes on every agents
website, to compare for resolution of images, ease of use etc etc
Of course not ..
They just ring the first three agents
that come into their head.
Boards breed boards .. well of course
they do. People are like sheep. If people see lots of Haart boards for instance..the
name Haart will be in their head and they will say to themselves, conscious or
sub consciously, well every one else is using Haart ..they must be OK .. and it
goes full circle to the next homeowner a few months down the line.
So all you have to do is get the name of
your agency in the homeowners head before they need you .. so they think of you
when they do need you.
So how do agents do that? How do they
market themselves, their brand?
They throw out messages like this ..
We are the best
We have this many offices
We have sold this many properties this
month
We have won this award
We are brilliant
We are ace
We are the best
We have a buyer waiting
Thinking of Selling – us use – we are
brilliant because …
Thinking of Letting – us use – we are
brilliant because …
Me . me .. me .. me .. me .. me … me
All agents do is talk about themselves –
sorry – that’s like going to a party and meeting a bore who just talks about
themselves all the time.
Whilst your competition is screaming and yelling
to attract todays house seller, focus your attention on the home owner who is
thinking about moving in the coming few months. Educate them, Interest them, intrigue
and most importantly, help them in advance of their move, so when it is time to
put their house on the market .. they think of you.
Time and Attention
Every person in Britain sees on average
2,000 adverts a day .. be that on TV, all the adverts in a newspaper, ads in
magazines, banner ads on the web, ads in facebook or linkedin, ads on the back
of a bus, ads on a radio programme .. this list goes on.
You ignore them nowadays don’t you ..
and that is what people are doing about your estate agency ads .. and here is
why …
There are two critical resources in this
world, that are in always and unremittingly in short supply. You can’t buy it and you cant sell it Those
scarce resources are TIME, and in light of today's internet and the information
overload it gives us, that means that there's a vast shortage of ATTENTION. This
shared shortage of time and attention is something unique to today's 21st
century internet world.
Estate Agency Marketing
Estate Agency Marketing is the nemesis/pain
the backside of anyone trying to save time.
By constantly interrupting what we are
doing at any given moment (with the use us leaflets, pop up banners, free
valuations – get them here, landlords wanted leaflets, properties urgently
required leaflets) ….. the estate agent who disturbs us not only tends to fail
at selling their service, but wastes our most coveted commodity, time.
In the long run, therefore, 99% of Estate
Agency Marketing is doomed as a mass marketing tool.
That is why people don’t sign up to your
mailing list – they will be bombarded with phone calls and sales messages,
that’s why people don’t sign up for your Twitter account – all they will get is
‘Use us we are ace’ promo tweets.
What’s the alternative?
The alternative is Property Guru
Marketing, which offers the home owner and landlord an opportunity to agree to
be marketed to. By only talking to homeowners and landlords who have agreed to
be marketed to, Property Guru Marketing guarantees that home owners and
landlords pay more attention to the marketing message.
It allows estate agents (and letting
agents) to calmly and neatly say what they have to say, without fear of being
interrupted by other estate agency firms. It serves both home owners /
landlords and estate agents in a reciprocal exchange.
Property Guru Marketing urges home
owners / landlords to participate in a long-term, collaborative marketing
campaign in which they are compensated in some way for paying attention to
increasingly relevant messages.
Just think if your promotional message
being read by 70% of the prospective home owners / landlords you send it to
(not 5% or even 1%). Then imagine that 10% respond.
That is what occurs when you cooperate
and interact with your prospective home owners / landlords one at a time, with
individual messages, exchanged with their Property Guru over time. Property
Guru marketing is expected, individual and pertinent. Anticipated home owners /
landlords look forward to hearing from you.
Too much work?
Where is the catch?
If you have to customise every home
owners / landlords message, that's prohibitive. If you're still thinking within
the framework of traditional estate and letting agent marketing, you are so
bang on the money.
But in estate agency, targeting home
owners / landlords individually is not as difficult as it sounds. Property Guru
Marketing takes the cost of disturbing home owners / landlords and increases it
out, over not one message, but hundreds of messages over multiple delivery
methods.
And this leverage leads to considerable
competitive advantages and profits. While your estate agency competition
continues to bang out the same old estate agency rubbish that might have worked
20 years ago, interrupting people with their awful, use us, cheap fees,
landlord/properties wanted, we are ace leaflets and pop up banners and getting
sod all in return, your Property Guru Marketing campaign is turning strangers
into friends and friends into house sellers and fully managed landlords.
Estate Agency is like finding “lurve”
The best way to compare traditional Estate Agency Marketing (which 99% of
estate agents do) with the Property Guru
Marketing is with a story about finding love. (Everyone loves a story about
love!)
We have two agents, the first agent is
our traditional Estate Agency Marketer
and the second agent our Property Guru
Marketer
First, let us look our traditional
estate agent Estate Agency Marketer.
The story (or analogy) I would like to tell/use is where the Estate Agency Marketer
(for the purposes of this story – I assume he is male) buys a tailor made
Savill Row mega priced suit, the latest (£1,000 a pair) Italian leather shoes
from Milan and a flashy £500 pair of ultra cool sunnies walks into a singles
bar.
The Estate Agency Marketer walks up to
the nearest lady in the bar, gets down on one knee and proposes marriage.
He gets turned down. So up he gets,
walks 6ft to the next lady, drops his knee and pops the question again… and
does this to every lady in the singles bar.
If the Estate Agency Marketer gets nobody to say yes after spending the
entire evening dropping to his knee and whipping out a ring, it is obvious that
the blame should be placed on the threads and the fancy footwear – so go and
get another suit and tomorrow and go to a different singles bar.
Does this sound recognisable, it should.
It's the way most estate agents look at the world.
With their “use our agency ‘cause we are
brilliant” marketing, they are interrupting people and hope that one in a
hundred will go ahead and use their estate agency… just like the man in the
singles bar.
Plenty more fish in the sea
Plenty of you reading this will be
married or in a long term relationship (which is as a good as marriage). Is
this how you got to be in your marriage?
No – you did something a lot more sensible…
you asked someone out on a date
The Property
Guru Marketer goes on a date.
Just like you and your marriage .. if
the first date goes well, then two of you went on a second date, then a third,
then a fourth, so on and so forth until both sides really got to know each
other, always talking, sharing ideas, educating each other, intriguing each other
so after quite a few dates, you get to met the inlaws ..and finally, after months and months (or even years) of
dating, the Property Guru Marketer proposes
marriage.
Property Guru Marketing is just like dating. Just as dating turns strangers
into friends and friends into life long partners, Property Guru Marketing turns strangers into friends and friends
into lifetime house sellers and landlords.
To be continued in part 3 on Saturday - only on this blog