How is your office going for listings? Would you sell more if you listed more? In Australia and New Zealand, many real estate people are facing the same challenge.
Some offices that complain about a shortage of listings were suffering the same affliction pre-COVID.
If that describes you, it’s time to do something about the problem. If you don’t build stock, you will waste a good boom.
There are some ‘levers’ you can pull to boost your stock levels.
- Marketing
Your agency must become a ‘marketing factory’. There are three ways to market for listings and you must have all of them working for you.
This is hardcopy marketing. You should blanket your area with proven, effective leaflets and direct mail. It takes time to build momentum from marketing and you must be consistent. Every month, every property owner must hear from your agency. This is branding in action.
Digital
You should have an effective social media marketing campaign, but more importantly, you must have a consistent direct email marketing campaign. Sure it takes time to set up, but you’re missing listing enquiry if you aren’t contacting potential clients as often as possible.
Personal
How much prospecting for new listings is your team doing? Regardless of the market, some salespeople will always say they’re too busy to prospect. But is there a higher priority now? You can’t sell what you haven’t listed.
- Follow-up
Leaders often say that the standard of their salespeople’s follow-up needs improvement. Now is the time to work on that improvement – diligent follow-up has never been more important.
As the leader, do you speak with every client who’s listed with your agency? It is important to know that your clients are being looked after by your salespeople.
- Present better
If a salesperson is losing listings to competitors, you must work on improving their presentation. It takes as much time to get a listing as it does to lose a listing. The better the listing presentation, the higher the present-to-list ratio and the higher the number of listings the agency has available to sell. Incompetence is a huge cost to a real estate agency, and I mean huge!
- Close better and more often
Are your salespeople getting the listing at the initial appointment, or do they often need to return for a second attempt?
If they aren’t closing most listings at the first presentation, they may need a better presentation and they will almost certainly need to learn to close better and more often.
A good way to improve your salespeople’s listing presentations is to have each one present to you in a role play.
Replace what you sell.
A good discipline for every agency and every salesperson is to replace what you sell. If you made 5 sales in the month, you must replace them with at least 5 listings. Keep this discipline alive and you won’t run low on stock.
I’m a great believer in fixing persistent problems and fixing them properly – once and for all.
Listings are out there and if we want more sales we must find them. More marketing and more prospecting carried out consistently and over the long term will have you saying, “Low on listings? Not in this office!“.
Gary Pittard