Over the past four weeks, we have very much focussed on lettings, from looking at the lifetime value of a landlord and finding new landlords to financial services opportunities, and my intention was to continue with this theme of maximising income from your existing lettings book with this blog too. However, a conversation this week intrigued me enough to digress slightly. Whilst the focus of this blog is on sales, I think you can apply the same principles to many other tasks, especially lettings.
I think one of the challenges agents currently face, and certainly, a question I hear a lot at the moment is “ how do we improve productivity with less staff?” and this often leads to discussions about some of the great PropTech products available right now. Some of them really are mind-blowing and I often hear myself saying “if only I had that when I was a negotiator/lister/branch manager’. I also think there are some fantastic outsourced solutions available which every agent should be exploring.
But, and its big but, no amount of PropTech is going to make your business great. It’s not going to do your job for you. What it will do is improve efficiencies and automate processes, but the processes still need to be in place and have a desired result which can then be measured.
In a conversation I had this week with somebody I deem as a successful agent, they mentioned they were overwhelmed with viewing requests. I casually threw out “I presume you are only accompanying your ‘A’ stock viewings?” This was met with silence. “ You know- ABC or 123 your stock?” Still nothing. So I explained ABC and 123 stock and pipeline which the agent is now implementing in the business.
Given this agency is always in the top 3 for market share in a highly competitive town with 20+ estate agencies, and given the fact that they didn’t grade their stock, I thought it would be worth sharing on here.
The term ‘flogging a dead horse” is an idiom that means particular effort is a waste of time as there will be no outcome.
As estate agents, we know that a property that is overpriced with unmotivated vendors is unlikely to sell. So why don’t you grade your stock and focus the time and energy on where you will make some money.
Available Stock
‘A’ - Motivated and priced correctly. These are the ones to focus the most amount of energy on.
‘B’ - Motivated and incorrectly priced or priced correctly but unmotivated. Spend time moving these into A’s or C’s. If its priced incorrectly but the vendors are motivated, spend time educating them and bring the price down moving the property into an ‘A’. If it’s priced correctly but the vendors are not motivated and you don’t believe can be motivated, why are you bothering?
‘C’ - Unmotivated and incorrectly priced. You are flogging a dead horse. Ask yourself - is this the best use of your time and money?
Similarly, are you grading your pipeline to make sure your sales progression team are chasing transactions they can ACTUALLY impact?
‘Grade 1’ - will exchange this month
‘Grade 2’ – could exchange this month
‘Grade 3’ – can’t exchange this month
I know where my focus would be.
In lettings, if you have high demand and low supply could you be grading your applicants based on need to move? Could you be grading the property management jobs in order of urgency?
Finally, getting to my point - PropTech is great with the right processes. You need to have the processes in place and then add the tech to assist. If I was an agency owner right now, I would be looking at both the consumer and internal user journey, planning out the processes and then speaking to the team at kerfuffle to get the right tech or partners to assist me at every stage.
Read the previous blogs
Read the first blog in the series here: Lifetime value of a sales customer vs lettings customer
Read the second blog in the series here: A simple script to help generate more revenue from lettings
Read the third blog in the series here: A very popular question with a very unpopular answer!
Read the fourth blog in the series here: Let Only - To renew or not to renew, that is my question!
Read the sixth blog in the series here: Does one size fit all?
Read the seventh blog in the series here: How can you get landlords instantly?
