Depending solely on numbers and statistics about past sales could risk your chances of attracting new clients. Here’s how to engage plenty of vendors and boost your business.
In a competitive industry, agents need to find new and more efficient ways of communicating their track record and experience to appeal to prospective clients.
According to Property Analytics director and founder, Andrew Stone, agents can build credibility by turning their past campaigns into detailed stories, rather than relying on sales volumes and complex data.
Stone said storytelling can help agents make their experience more tangible to prospective clients, particularly when supported by relevant campaign data and examples.
He said that consumers tended to assess professionals with regard to what outcome they could achieve for them, as opposed to surface-value characteristics and sales quantities.
“That’s what vendors see in you as an agent – what can you do for me? What’s your story?,” Stone said on the REB Discover podcast.
To portray themselves in the best light through storytelling, Stone said agents should keep a detailed record of the properties they had sold and provide this information to vendors.
“Maybe you’re starting out, and you’re still learning – you want to eventually be in a place where you’ve got a richness of insight and information that you can make tangible to people,” he said.
Regardless of the market conditions, Stone said agents can pull out specific cases and walk vendors through how they managed to sell properties in similar situations.
He said while newer agents usually couldn’t highlight their sales quantity, they could build their credibility by describing their prior sales in as much detail as possible.
“You might be an agent that says, I’m not the number one agent, but I can tell you how my campaign went hour by hour, how we played it, what I learned from that and can take to your property.”
Visuals are key
To support the narrative, Stone said agents should map out their experience with a visual chart, avoiding overloading vendors with complex information.
“You have the ability to pull it up digitally on your phone, your iPad at any time and say, ‘look here’s the 200 properties I’ve sold in the last five years’,” he said.
“You can click on any of your prior sales, pull up photos and talk about the campaign – it’s proven to be a powerful tool for individual agents because it’s the ability to demonstrate their knowledge.”
He said visuals were a more effective way of getting data across to prospective clients, helping them remember the information, compared to long lists which can be harder to process.
“Agents can pull up the actual URL of the sale, show photos, add insights in terms of buyer statistics, who end up buying it, etc.
“It’s providing substance, credibility, while also being accessible and dovetailing nicely with stories that you’re already telling as opposed to pulling out your stats folder,” he said.
Risks of AI
When showing data to clients, Stone warned against excessive AI use, warning it could seriously undermine agency integrity and backfire if it was noticed.
“It’s designed to be flashy and pretty, but if it lacks in substance, you’re going to get called out pretty quickly,” he said.
“AI is only as strong as the data that you put in. When you plug in bad data in, and it’s spitting out incorrect facts and figures, you’ve done yourself more damage.
Stone said he knew some agents who used AI to build market share graphs and ended up with inaccurate data, but their vendors didn’t know any better.
“If you come up against someone who knows his market, and the agents in it, and you’re telling them you’ve got an 80 per cent market share of two-bedroom units, they’re going to call you out.”
“That can actually have a real halo effect in terms of your brand, your integrity.”
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