EP200 Drew Davies: The science of social selling

This‌ ‌episode‌ ‌of‌ ‌the‌ ‌Elevate‌ ‌podcast‌ ‌is‌ ‌brought‌ ‌to‌ ‌you‌ ‌by‌ ‌‌Connect‌ ‌Now‌  #

Intro‌ ‌to Drew Davies #

Drew Davies is a Brisbane prestige property specialist who has built a large following on Instagram of over 32,000 followers. 

After seven years in real estate, he now heads up his own business as a director of Place Estate Agents in Ascot, Brisbane.

In this episode: #

• How Drew went from broke to million dollar agent
• The role of the Wolf of Wall Street in Drew’s real estate career
• Establishing a brand on Insta and why it started with socks
• Why persistence pays off and hard work matters
• Tips for attracting celebrity clients, and why it’s important agents understand what suits them
• How Drew approached that viral Hamilton skate bowl house
• Why agents should embrace strategy, rather than hope

The road to real estate #

• Drew’s path into real estate was a little different to the norm. He studied architecture, and although he never became a registered architect, he worked in the industry for seven years.
• “I was never going to be the world’s best architect. A lot of the money was sort of drawing high rises and things, which really didn’t excite me at all,” he says.
• In about 2008, Drew read The Wolf of Wall Street by Jordan Belfort, and decided sales was the life for him, so he moved into recruitment.
• “Look, I was a pretty lousy salesperson to be quite honest, my training wasn’t great. I probably had a little bit of unjustified ego and I just really didn’t excel.”
• When Drew actually met Belfort, that all changed.
• Drew notes at the time Belfort was blanket hiring sales people for an event he was hosting in Australia, and Drew was among the ‘minions’ tasked with selling tickets.
• Drew and one other person happened to sell a lot.
• “Jordan was blown away. So as a bit of a thank you, he bought us tickets to LA to stay with him and his family,” Drew explains.
• On that flight, Drew got chatting to the other salesperson, who worked in real estate, selling Australian house and land packages in China.
• “So he would hold seminars in China and sell a lot of that product. And I was just being cheeky and asking him, what do you earn. And I was absolutely floored when he told me. So I literally decided on that flight, that’s it, I’m becoming a real estate agent. And that was it as of that day.”

The pain before the gain #

• Drew notes he started in the industry by reaching out to a connection he’d made at a party a few months prior. But it wasn’t necessarily an immediate success.
• “I didn’t even have a car at the time, so I definitely did not set the real estate world on fire from day one.”
• It took Drew about a year to find his feet and he came pretty close to bankruptcy before he made his first sale.
• “I remember the day that I realised it was going to work out,” he notes.
• “I was nearly broke. I mean, broke paying rent on a credit card and I had a really big commission hit. So it was the best of both worlds. I had the pain and then the pleasure. And that was it.”

No overnight success #

• Drew notes while there might be agents out there who enjoy overnight success, that wasn’t his path.
• The first big commission cheque came after a year, but the first listing he ever took on actually took two years to sell, and the market he entered was tough.
• Drew was selling in Brisbane’s CBD, where he could walk to appointments without the need for a car.
• “I guess not having any friends or contacts in the industry probably helped me because I didn’t know any better,” he says.
• “So every day I just woke up, cold called, door knocked, on repeat, day upon day upon day.”

Eye on the prize #

• Drew might have been operating in the Brisbane CBD, but his eye was on the prized suburb of Ascot.
• “Everyone always talked about Ascot having the biggest homes. I knew nothing about the area at the time. But that was always goal number one.”
• Ultimately, it took him two to three years to get his foot in the door of the suburb and successfully sell a listing.

His first million-dollar listing #

• Drew knew that if he wanted to leapfrog into the prestige property scene, he would need to make it into the million-dollar plus category of sales.
• His first million-dollar listing came in the form of a CBD apartment that he acquired through sheer persistence.
• “I was actually selling the property next door to it, which was $550,000, and every time I’d hold an open home, I’d just write a little handwritten note and drop it under her door. Just saying, ‘look, we had this many people through the open and this is what we’re seeing in the market. If I can ever be of assistance…’
• “And she rang me one day and I signed that up, sold it through social media and that was back in about 2015.”
• Drew sold the property through Instagram to someone living in the Middle East and it quickly translated to further sales, including a property in Hamilton.
• “The sellers of that apartment turned around at the end of the process and said, ‘you simply have to talk to my daughter. She’s trying to sell her home in Hamilton’. And that was the house that basically kick started my career.”

Celebrity sales #

• Drew has sold numerous houses on behalf of celebrity clients, the likes of which include former Broncos captain Darius Boyd.
• Asked about his tips for attracting that sort of client, Drew notes it’s about working out what suits the individual agent.
• “I think you have to understand yourself and where you sit in the market, first and foremost,” he says.
• “I think everyone has certain times in their career where they think, ‘Oh, I would love to sell high price homes and have celebrity clients’.
• “But I mean, sometimes I look at people in the outer suburbs selling five $400,000 houses a week. And it seems like they’re just putting a sign up and sending out contracts. That looks like a pretty cool gig as well. You’ve got to work out what makes you happy.”
• Drew notes often the deals involved in high-priced properties are lengthy and arduous.
• But for agents looking to get into that market he notes they need to be comfortable with the fact nothing happens quickly.
• “It takes a very, very long time to nurture these relationships,” he notes.

Instagram – a guerrilla marketing tactic #

• Drew is currently the most followed Australian agent on Instagram, and he also has sponsorship deals as well.
• He notes he started building his social media profile out of necessity early in his career.
• “I had no money to market myself. And when you’re selling apartments, it’s actually quite expensive because you have to do a lot of direct mail. So I didn’t have a lot of money for that.”
• Describing social media at the time as a bit of a guerrilla marketing tactic, Drew also notes his timing just happened to be perfect.
• “It was just a very good time in the market to get on that platform. I think I started in 2014 or 2015, essentially the day I started my real estate career and just built it from there and it was just consistency.”
• He also took on some good advice from someone who was big in the space at that time, who told him to invest in a good camera.
• “He said just consistent posting is all it takes. Buy a nice camera, make sure the photos are good looking and make it consistent. So that’s what I did. And it was twice a day for a long, long time. Now it’s a little bit different, it’s once every three or four days.”

What to post #

• In the beginning, Drew didn’t have luxury property to post, but he did come up with some nifty ideas.
• “The only thing I could think of at the time was every morning, I’d get a coffee and I’d sit in the same spot. So, I’d take a photo of my coffee and the socks I was wearing. And as crazy as that sounds, at that point in time, it gained a lot of momentum.”
• Drew quickly gained 6000 followers, and socks started turning up in the mail at his office.
• “Then when it got to sort of that 10,000 followers, I had brands reaching out to me. Around that 10,000 or 20,000 mark BMW reached out to me and wanted to do some paid advertising.”
• Since then it’s snowballed, but Drew notes he is still very choosy about who he opts to work with.
• These days, Drew says he rarely posts about socks. With a wife, two children and an office of staff to look out for, he notes socks are the furthest thing from his mind, but the followers who have been with him since Day 1 have shared his journey.
• “A lot of the people that follow me have been there since very early in my career when I wasn’t successful, so being very honest throughout the journey has kept a lot of those people invested.”

Drew’s top Insta tips #

• For agents looking to build their Instagram presence, Drew offers the following advice:
• Be consistent
  • People tend to come out of the gates hard with regular posts but that soon drops off. If you’re seeking to build a following, you need to be consistent.
• Be authentic
  • If you’re being authentic, it won’t be hard to be consistent.
  • “It should be really easy to post because you should be posting about things that happen in your life, no matter how perceivably boring you might think they are, you will find a following.”
• Pay to play
  • “If you want to be followed on social media, unfortunately, nowadays you have to pay. And that’s how you get eyeballs on your page. So for me, I do a lot of my advertising for properties through Instagram and Facebook,” Drew explains.
• Leave your ego at the door
  • “You’ve got to leave your ego at the door and stop worrying about what people think of you. Of that 30 something thousand followers I have, I can guarantee you there is at least a small portion of those people that are watching, making fun of me or waiting for me to fail. And that’s fine. That’s part of it. And you’ve got to not worry about that.”

Not about likes or followers #

• Like Media Coach Imogen Callister, Drew agrees you can’t be on social media just for the likes or follows.
• “You’ve got to have a goal,” Drew notes.
• “If you go in to push your social media side of the business, because your goal is to have more likes or more followers, that’s a pretty flawed goal because there’s no outcome there.
• “It should all always be about getting your client a better result, a quicker result, and therefore increasing your own revenue. And if you can work backwards from that and figure out how to do it, you’ll figure it out pretty quickly it doesn’t come down to your amount of followers.”
• Although things change all the time, Drew notes at the moment he gets the most benefit from stories.
• “So if I have a property and I do a little walkthrough (nothing exciting, not a talk-to-camera piece) but just a little walkthrough, drop some cool music over the top with swipe up link to one of the portals sometimes, I can get up to 500 click-throughs from that.
• “Now if you look at the average amount of people who view a realestate.com.au ad or a Domain ad, it’s probably 5000 or 6000 the first week you launch for an average property.
• “To add 500 on top of that within the space of a few hours, that’s a big difference. So that’s something I try and do quite often without sort of flooding my audience with that stuff, but it can be a big help.”

The ratio: personal versus property posting #

• Asked about the ratio Drew uses when it comes to posting about property and personal stuff, Drew notes again it comes down to the goal you set for why you’re on social media.
• “So for me, at this point in my career, I like my Instagram for the fact that my clients can log on at any point in time and they see how I live my life when I’m not selling property.
• “And hopefully it should align with everything that I tell them in my professional life. No, I’m not at the pub. I’m not out drinking. I’m not usually really doing anything but hanging out with my family or selling real estate.”
• Drew explains he’s often asked whether people should have a dedicated personal page and a dedicated professional one, but for him he says the answer’s no because having it all in the one space adds that  level of authenticity.

The Hamilton skate bowl house #

• Drew recently had huge success marketing and selling a property in Hamilton that came complete with a full-sized skate bowl.
• He played this feature to great effect gaining national media attention in the process.
• “It was a very, very peculiar house, because it did have a seven or eight-foot deep concrete skateboard bowl in the house. Not a miniature one, you know, a full-sized concrete skateboard bowl in the living room, and the owner was really toying with the idea of just acting like it wasn’t there. He didn’t want to take photos of it. He just wanted me to sort of talk people through it when they turned up.”
• But Drew felt It was something they had to harness for publicity and he also believed there may be people out there who would genuinely want the house for the skate bowl.
• Drew created a video which shows him skateboarding at the house. And it went viral, appearing on realestate.com.au, Domain, and also Sunrise and Today
• “I jumped in that video and myself tore through a couple of suits, tore my calf muscle as well,” Drew says.
• “But it did get coverage and a lot of leverage. We got a live interview on Sunrise because of them seeing that through social media. Because obviously once you’ve got that asset of the video, you do sponsor it and push it into certain places throughout Australia.”
• Buyer interest was also strong.
• “Yeah, I was shocked. There’s probably three or four people including someone who’s extremely famous who showed interest in the house, you know, skateboarders who had done very well.”

Drew’s approach to mindset #

• Drew notes real estate is the type of career where people can become intent on showing others how well they’re doing, and that can be discouraging for new agents.
• “I’m really mindful that a lot of people actually get put off the industry because they think everyone else is doing so much better than them, when in reality, they’re not,” Drew says.
• Instead of looking to others, he suggests new agents should instead focus on the basics, including:
• Time management
  • Drew notes a lot of people say they’re too busy, but are there more hours in the day that they could be utilising better?
  • “I’m up at 4am, 4.30am every single day and I’m not the best time manager in the world, but if I need to go to the gym, it gets done at 5.30am to 6am. If I need to spend time with my boys, it gets done from 6.30am until 7.30am.
  • “No matter how busy you think you are, you’re probably not.”
• Laser-like focus
  • Drew also notes he sees a major mindset difference in the agents who are looking to get through work so they can go off and play and agents who are focussed on achieving a result.
  • The latter will put social activities on the backburner in the knowledge this deal with lead to further opportunities.
• Meanwhile Drew notes he would offer his younger self the advice to “work harder”.
• “I spent a lot of my life thinking, I was busy thinking I was working hard and it wasn’t until I found any sort of success in real estate that I really understood what it was to throw yourself into something completely.

Drew’s team #

• Over the past couple of years, Drew has been building his team, and social media has played a key role here as well.
• Both staff in his personal team came to him through Instagram, while many of the agents and staff who have joined Place Ascot also knew him through social media.
• “It’s good for other agents to understand how I operate. And a lot of those agents after watching me for six months a year, two years, decide that, ‘Hey, that’s something I align with. I might reach out to Drew and see if that’s something that I can be a part of’.”
• He also notes the reality is most people following an agent on social are other agents, “so you might as well use that to your advantage”.
• Meanwhile, Drew’s plans for the future include building his team further. At present Place Ascot has a team of 23 and the hope is to add a couple more.
• “Obviously the goal is always to do bigger and better business. Personally, I’m pretty comfortable. I’m pretty happy. I don’t have huge ambitions. I think business wise, we’re always looking to grow and expand.”

Final takeaway #

Drew notes four years ago someone told him “hope is not a strategy”. He used it then to close a listing and it’s helped him more recently.

“I think far too often, far too many agents leave it to hope. They think, Oh, well, you know, the buyer will either come up or the seller will get realistic but really that’s our job. We can’t sit there and hope for anything, it’s up to us to get that deal done.”

Links and resources mentioned #

• The skate bowl house in Hamilton
• Imogen Callister – How to build a world-class social media strategy
• The Wolf of Wall Street – Jordan Belfort

Drew Davies on Elite Agent

• How to build an online brand

Connect with Drew

• Website
• Instagram
• LinkedIn