When uncertainty hits, businesses either crumble or thrive. A director has shared the strategies that helped their business outperform competitors and reach new heights despite challenging conditions.
As the market experiences a massive slowdown, with buyers opting to wait and sellers shifting their strategy, agencies can continue to achieve solid sales with the right strategy.
According to Jellis Craig Manningham director, Andrew Keleher, the key to maintaining momentum in various markets came down to an eye for expansion, good leadership, a strong database, and technology investment.
Keleher said a large part of his office’s strategy has been acquiring other businesses, expanding his team with new, skilled salespeople, and giving the office scale to navigate most markets.
“We’ve bought four or five businesses in the last 10 years, and that’s helped us grow to 1,700 plus sales a year now,” he told REB.
“We sell more homes, and we have more open houses, and we meet more people; it also means that we’ve got a deeper pool of potential buyers to deal with.”
Keheler also said that when new agents came into the business, they were motivated to push themselves harder after seeing the performance of his team.
“Naturally, they grow from being a 20-sale-a-year agent to a 50-sale-a-year agent. And as they grow, our business grows.”
To win listings in times of low stock, Keleher said his agency was focused on demonstrating its solid results and track records to prospective vendors.
“We pride ourselves on working very hard, having great option success, having multiple bidders at auctions and vendors, with potential vendors seeing that.”
Additionally, Keleher said agencies that proactively kept their database up to scratch and updated frequently would be able to bring potential buyers to open homes.
“It’s about just trying to work out, how do we get our database to have better data and more enriched information?”
To maximise time, Keleehr said his business had invested in AI buyer data matching capabilities, which categorised potential purchasers based on the specific features of a home they were looking for.
“We’re not wasting their time with properties that don’t suit, and the goal is to offer properties to them prior to them going to market, which gives the vendor the upside of a sale without the stress.”
Most importantly, Keleher said data matching enabled property campaigns to begin stronger, with open homes in the first week having bigger turnouts.
Amid the advancement of AI, Keleher said his business was focused on rolling out new tools in a way that still maintained a human connection to keep buyers and sellers engaged.
“Most buyers have a few false starts before they transact, and it gets too hard, so then they drop out of the market.”
“We’re trying to keep warmer with the use of technology, with the use of more SMS and emails and target marketing to see if we can bring people back into the market, warm them up.”
However, he said the most important thing was to establish a genuine connection by getting on the phone and ringing buyers to understand what they wanted and cater to their needs.
While agents often earn less money in slower markets, Keleher said he liked to encourage his team to use the conditions as an opportunity to grow their market share.
“We try to focus on just showing them that if they do a little more than they would have traditionally done, given they’ve got a little bit more time with fewer people coming through the opens, they’ve got a better chance to reconnect with clients.”
To motivate their teams and keep them focused regardless of the market conditions, Keleher said an office leader should have good direction and be ready and available to help their employees wherever needed.
In addition to being empathetic and understanding, he said good leadership sometimes required being firm and pushing his team to achieve results.
“Sometimes it’s up to us to give them a kick up the butt to get going. It’s easy to get a little bit depressed in these markets and say, ‘hey, things aren’t working that well, so I’ll just take the day off, or I’ll go home at two o’clock’.”
“You need to push a team hard because they will appreciate it in six or 12 months when the market turns and all of a sudden they’ve got a great list of potential clients they’ve got to work with.”
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