We booked a webinar for agents on the same Friday morning the NFL came to Melbourne for the first time in history.
That was not our strongest piece of calendar work. My colleagues were watching the game in the room next door, and we opened by thanking anyone who’d picked us over the football for the sacrifice.
What stuck with me afterwards wasn’t the result.
The 49ers flew out a week early. They spent that week teaching flag football to kids in Melbourne classrooms. They went to a children’s hospital. They sat in the crowd at the MCG for an AFL elimination final, as spectators, watching a game most of them didn’t grow up with and, to be fair, most of them fighting jetlag. They turned up at a pub on three separate days and let people take photographs with the trophies.
The internal name for the campaign was Paint Melbourne Red.
Let’s be honest about where the heavy lifting happened, though. It wasn’t only the players. Their comms team and the travelling reporters spent the week raving about Australian hospitality and having their minds blown by our coffee, which is a cheap trick on a Melbourne audience and it worked completely. They made us feel seen and appreciated, which is not something a visiting sports team owes anybody.
The Rams flew out the Wednesday and landed Thursday, for a Friday game.
And the Rams were the home team. They’ve held the NFL’s Australian marketing rights since 2022, they’d sent players out for clinics back in March, and they flew in their veteran equivalents of a Matthew Lloyd and James Hird for the weekend.
What they didn’t do was the week where nothing was happening.
By Friday, a city with no reason to care about either team had picked one. San Francisco won by twenty in what was, on paper, someone else’s home game.
I’m not going to argue the classroom visits won the football. They didn’t. But they’re why a city that had no dog in the fight turned up with a side already chosen, and that isn’t nothing.
The part nobody has answered yet
Making a city feel something is the easy half, and it’s the half everyone photographs.
Every kid in those classrooms felt great on the Tuesday. That’s not in question.
The question is what happens in October. And in March. And next season, when the trucks have gone, the trophies are back in a cabinet in Santa Clara and nobody is filming.
Does anyone from that week ever hear from them again?
I don’t know. Nobody does yet. That’s the real test and it hasn’t been run.
Which is the same test an agent fails most weeks of the year, and it has a name.
The missing middle
A fortnight ago in this magazine I wrote up Tom Panos on stock as oxygen. If half your listings sell, thirty sales needs sixty listings, so fill the funnel.
On our webinar, Adam Joske said Australian agents have an obsession with lead generation, always chasing the next person.
We host both of them, so it would suit me to pretend they agree. They do, but only end to end. Panos tells you how much has to go in. Joske is interested in what happens to it once it’s in there.
He calls the gap the missing middle.
It’s the appraisal that doesn’t convert and doesn’t die. You were good in that lounge room. They felt it. And then they told you they’re not selling immediately, but they will be. Six months. Twelve. Maybe eighteen.
That’s your week in Melbourne. The room went red and then you flew home.
Joske sold in Melbourne for 28 years and now coaches. He says he’s been through around 500 agents’ businesses in the past few years and it’s broken in nearly all of them.
“It’s the number one neglected area of our business.”
The sum
He puts a strong agent’s hot list at twenty or thirty names, and the warm list behind it at around two hundred.
The list discussed at every sales meeting is a tenth the size of the list that never comes up.
He also ran a patch of a thousand homes in Elsternwick. At five per cent turnover that’s fifty listings a year available in the entire territory, if he’s good enough to get them.
Two hundred warm sellers is four times a year’s worth of patch, and every one of them has already let you through the front door.
Why nobody works it
It would be easy to say the middle goes unworked because people are lazy, and I don’t think that’s true of anyone I’ve met in this industry.
It’s that it’s very hard to action something you haven’t put a date on. A hot seller arrives with a deadline attached and the deadline does the managing for you. A warm seller arrives with a season, the season moves, and it sits behind everything that’s actually due this week and the twenty other things competing for the same Tuesday.
So after five or six weeks of having nothing new to say, the calls stop, and nobody decided to stop them.
Joske reckons that’s how he beat his main competitor on the long ones, eight or nine times out of ten. He wasn’t winning those in the lounge room, he was winning them by still being there in month eleven.
What he sent in month eleven was pretty ordinary stuff. A conveyancer he’d actually used and could vouch for. A comparable sale two streets over. Something on the negative gearing changes.
What he never sent was the check-in call, and he was specific about the words, which are words most of us have used this month.
Just calling to follow up.
Just want to see which way you’re leaning.
Just touching base.
His test before anything leaves your hand is whether it makes the other person smarter, or just tells them how well you’re doing.
The rest of it, including his list of fifty things to send someone who isn’t ready, he walked through on the recording. It’s stuff he normally keeps for coaching clients.
What actually makes someone feel something
Here’s the bit that connects the two halves of this, and it’s smaller than it sounds.
Joske takes his notes during the call, not after it. Headset on so his hands are free, typing while you’re still talking. The second child on the way. The son who plays soccer. The garden that’ll need doing before it goes to market.
Eleven months later he asks how the soccer is going, and whether they’d like the name of a good gardener.
You wouldn’t be doing this job if you weren’t good at talking to people, and I’ve never met an agent who needed teaching how to connect with someone in their own lounge room. That isn’t the gap and it never was.
The gap is having a system that makes each of those conversations count, and makes two hundred of them possible instead of twenty.
That’s what the whole week here was, once you strip the sentiment off it. The classrooms, the hospital, the pub, sitting in the crowd at the footy. None of it was inspiring in the moment and none of it needed to be. It was logistics, planned months out, aimed at people with nothing to offer anyone except turning up. Who then turned up, and cheered, at someone else’s home game.
For principals there’s a four word version of all of this. We’re all good at asking an agent to show us the pipeline. Almost nobody asks the second question.
Show me your warm list.
Ask it once and you learn something before anyone answers. You learn whether the list exists, or whether it lives in one person’s phone and their memory of the conversation, in which case it isn’t the office’s list and it leaves when they do.
The disclosure
iD4me is a real estate data platform, we hosted the session, and Joske is one of our ambassadors, so the only product line I’ll bother you with is the one that matters in this new world of compliance. Every record in our platform carries its Do Not Call Register status and we hold the source trail behind it, so when an owner asks where you got their number, there’s an answer.
The follow up
Somebody is going to sit down in a quiet week in February and work out what, if anything, they do next with a whole city that got interested in September.
There’s a lot riding on that answer. Growing the game outside America is a long play and the NFL has never pretended otherwise. But there won’t be another match here for at least a year, so right now there is nothing to sell anybody, and no reason for one of those people to think about it again unless somebody gives them one.
Twelve months out, real intent, nothing to transact today. You’ve met that person.
The February decision won’t be photographed and nobody will report it.
None of it comes down to the week they spent here, though. It comes down to consistency, which is a much duller word than engagement and the only one of the two that pays. One brilliant week is a tour. Doing it again in March, and next season, and the season after that, is a market.
You’ve got two hundred people waiting on the same answer.
The full recording of Adam Joske’s session with Peggy Ford, iD4me National Sales Manager, is available here