Lee Woodward will be speaking at Prop20 in March and April. To register for this event visit proprea.com.au.
What’s your background?
I started in real estate when I was 22. I was a plumber prior to being in real estate, which was a really important part of my career.
In my first year in real estate, I hit the top two per cent of agents in the country. There was a lot of publicity around my career at that time, due to the mass volume of transactions I was able to do. Yet the year before I wasn’t even in real estate, so I was always being asked: “How did you do so many transactions when you weren’t drawing from a client base”.
But I worked out very fast how to drive opportunity through business, and buyer management was how I did it. I got so many referrals from people that didn’t buy from me.
Towards the end of my sales time, I was asked to do some training for the First National group, which was the network I was selling with, and I suddenly fell in love with training.
What’s your area of expertise?
There are so many different types of trainers, and there’s a difference between speaking and training. Speaking is very much, “This is my life. I did it this way. If I can do it, you can do it”.
Whereas training is structural.
Two weeks ago Dane Atherton at Harcourts rang up in need of a prospecting program for his team. He wanted it to have visuals, scripts and dialogues and structure.
There are thousands of speakers out there who talk, which is great. But if you need to build a system or a model, that has a full diagram, a beginning, middle, and an end, with audio and multimedia, that is what I do now.
I call it TOD, or training on demand. Most of my time now is spent on custom, in-house, online learning programs.
What will you be speaking about at Prop20?
My topic is VPA. VPA in my world stands for value performance advertising. In the old world, it’s vendor paid advertising, which is such an old conversation.
The future of real estate is about staged marketing. It’s not about just one thing, just putting it on the portal, or just doing an open. There’s a whole production line that an owner needs.
The portal’s fantastic, but agents make the mistake of putting it on the portal at the wrong price, and they don’t stage the marketing. By the time you get to the portal it should be priced right.
There’s a whole series of steps you can do before the portal, to make value performance advertising work.
It moves from VIP, to social, then into database marketing, and then use the most powerful channel once you’ve got the price adjusted. Agents think the portal’s going to reduce the price for them, and it doesn’t. It does it damage.
