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Australia’s top agent claims that finding meaningful points of difference by "focusing on what went right" has been critical to his success.
Speaking with Real Estate Business, James Tostevin of Marshall White said discovering what wins over your clients is vital to beating your competition.
“When a good agent loses a listing, you can be sure they’ll chase up the vendor and ask why they missed out – which is a good thing.
“But something that not enough agents do is focus on what they do right, they should be ringing up their clients and finding out the things that ultimately tipped the scales in their favour,” Mr Tostevin said.
“Whilst you’re going to be dealing with a different personality in the next few days, if you can uncover something that consistently beats the competition then those things are the points of difference you need to focus on in your presentation.”
Honing in on meaningful points of difference has been the biggest focus for Mr Tostevin over the past year.
And the work has paid off, according to the winner of last year’s Real Estate Business' Top 100 Agents ranking.
“We’re continually having record-breaking months and I’m on track for the best financial year I’ve ever had. But we’ve got five auction weekends in May, so it looks like the whole team is going to have the best year ever,” he said.
While taking a step back from coaching and industry training, Mr Tostevin has been focusing on growing the Marshall White brand.
“We have our four main offices which I help train, but we also have Marshall White One, which has a lot of younger people who handle properties under $1 million, so I put a lot of time and effort into developing them,” he said.
But he is looking to make a return to the stage at this year’s AREC.
“The appeal of my training is that I’m at the coalface, when I get up on stage and say "this works", it’s because it’s something that I do and I know it works. But as a practicing agent it means I don’t have as much time to help educate the industry," Mr Tostevin said.
“While I’ve had to take a step back from speaking, AREC is the exception. There’s a lot of prestige attached to AREC and I’ve always had enormous respect for John [McGrath] and what he’s created.
“To get up in front of that many of your peers is the ultimate challenge, and I enjoy being challenged.”
James Tostevin will be joining the likes of Jordan Belfort (The Wolf of Wall Street), Aron Ralston (Inspiration behind the movie 127 Hours) as well as many other industry trainers at this year’s conference.
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