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At the 27th annual Australian Real Estate Conference (AREC), Brisbane agent Tony O’Doherty urged agents to never forget the importance of an active and interpersonal approach to lead generation.
Today at the 27th annual Australian Real Estate Conference (AREC), principal at McGrath Estate Agents, Bulimba, Tony O’Doherty, shared his strategies to maintain professional relationships and achieve sales success.
According to O’Doherty, his path to real estate success and agency management resulted from a lengthy journey that started when he moved to Brisbane from Ireland.
After dropping out of school at 16 without professional experience, O’Doherty believed “all the odds were against him”. Yet, he found that the real estate industry was a landscape where he could build a career through hard work.
“Real estate is one of those industries where it just doesn’t discriminate. You get an opportunity, and you run with that opportunity. The sky’s the limit,” O’Doherty said.
While O’Doherty said that the market he first entered was highly competitive, he emphasised that this dynamic offered him an opportunity to quickly establish himself at the head of the pack.
“For me, in short, I outworked everybody else. I got into a market that had very established players, but often, with established players comes complacency,” he said.
In his early period as an agent, O’Doherty said that he built up his professional network by picking up the phone and ringing potential clients – a proactive approach to prospecting from which he has never wavered.
“Our game is not glamorous, despite us all presenting very glamorously. Our game is not glamorous at all; it’s just about how or she is willing to make the most calls and hustle,” O’Doherty said.
“I didn’t wait for my phone to ring; I just never stopped working to ensure that people knew who I was, what I could do, and what services I offered,” he added.
Throughout the prospecting process, O’Doherty highlighted his underlying belief that “energy is infectious” and explained that personability is often why clients don’t immediately go for the most experienced agent.
“If you can get in front of a potential client, you can out-energise the high performers. You don’t need to have 100 sales behind you. You just need one, and you need that one to turn into another,” he said.
While O’Doherty acknowledged that the importance of servicing buyers can sometimes fall to the wayside for many agents, he urged professionals to remember that buyers are “incredibly valuable, and always will be”.
“If you’re in a market like mine, you meet 30 buyers through that campaign. That’s 30 future potential vendors, and most likely two or three current vendors,” he said.
When interacting with buyers, O’Doherty said that agents should always take advantage of every opportunity to meet clients’ diverse expectations and needs.
“Half of my listings at the start, most of them at the start in the first couple of years, were people I had a positive impact with and on as they were buyers,” O’Doherty said.
“It’s fundamentally massive. If you’re not looking after your buyers, somebody else will be, and they will not be your future selves,” he added.
The key to this constant approach is opening the line for constant communication with buyers, with O’Doherty stating that he uses WhatsApp to keep buyers in the loop.
“We use WhatsApp as we believe that if we can give them the information before they need it, they’ll always assume that we’re across everything,” he explained.
By consistently offering exceptional service to all potential clients, O’Doherty said that an agent can establish themselves as a trustworthy presence in their local market and create a self-sustaining pipeline of business opportunities.
“There are three words that I often say: energy, honesty, authenticity, which are three fantastic words to follow you around as a personal brand,” he concluded.
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