Every Saturday, one of Australia’s best-known real estate coaches gets on a call with his own coach, who asks him about a dozen questions and challenges his thinking.
Claudio Encina has been in real estate for 30 years and coaching for close to half of them, and he has never once considered himself finished. He borrowed the reason from one of his own clients, who signed up for coaching with the best explanation I’ve heard: “I can’t see the picture when I’m in the frame.”
Few people turn up in the Elite Agent archive more often than Claudio. He wrote Ask the Coach in the magazine almost from our first issue, he and I dreamt up Transform together in a WeWork cafe in Neutral Bay, and he has coached round after round of it since – which means the archive holds him teaching the same craft across every kind of market: the 2018 correction, the recovery, the frenzy, and the rate-rise grind that followed. The stuff that survives all four is the stuff worth writing down.
And his story is better than most agents know. He started at LJ Hooker Bondi Junction in 1995, when there were no coaches in Australia to copy.
His first one was an American named Bob Bohlen, who he saw speak at a 150-person conference at the Sheraton on the Park and whose program he paid $5,000 he barely had to shadow. When his listing conversion was stuck under 50 per cent, his next coach – Mike Ferry, then the biggest name in American real estate coaching – told him: “Son, you need soft skills,” pointed him down the highway to Los Angeles, and sent him to a five-day Hollywood acting course. “That’s where I learned the art of communication.”
Every word below is his, exactly as he said it. Here are 30 of the best.
On getting yourself to work
1. One day or day one. His greatest professional fear isn’t a lost listing. “If you wake up twelve months later and you’re still the same person that you were twelve months ago” – that’s the thing that scares him. The question he opens every new year with: are you planning to copy and paste last year? “You can make the choice between one day or day one.”
2. Willpower gets you so far. Why-power moves mountains. Claudio’s why was written at 38, after the worst year of his life – a new coaching business down to two clients, a mortgage that wasn’t getting paid, and a wife in hospital from the stress of all of it. He walked out of that hospital “like a different man” and rebuilt the business door to door. His coach made him read his why every day for six months, then keep it in an envelope by the bed. “Read your why until you own it. I don’t need to read my why anymore because I own it.”
3. You have seven seconds to beat your mind. The mind hates hard work, and if you negotiate with it for longer than a few seconds before a call session, it wins. His fix is borrowed from Mel Robbins – count down five-four-three-two-one and pick up the phone – and it comes with a warning about how reasonable the excuses will sound. As an agent he kept a Disneyland photo of his kids next to the phone with a speech bubble added: “Come on, daddy. Book one appointment today so we can have an amazing holiday.”
4. Worry about your drift habits, not your success habits. Everyone has three success habits they’re proud of. He’d rather you name the three drift habits – “the things that actually pull you back”. Checking your phone first thing. Notifications on during a call session. “I would focus on more on the drift habits than I do on the success habits.” The success habits don’t work until the drift habits stop cancelling them out.
5. It’s not why, it’s who. After years of teaching agents to find their why, he sharpened it: “It’s not why, but it’s who we do it for.” His own answer was his father. He took him back to Chile after 32 years away, and didn’t say where they were going until they were on their way – “Dad, we’re going home.” The door opened on Christmas Eve on family he hadn’t seen in three decades: “She’s looking at him, he’s looking at her… and then they just hug. And it was the most beautiful thing.” His father has gone back every year since.
On the phone
6. Know your number. First, cross out the word “prospecting” – “it’s just such a harsh word”. In his diary as an agent it never appeared: “I didn’t have prospecting, I had zone of genius.” Then work out the number that drives your business. Bob Bohlen’s base, set for him in 1996: 50 connections a day, two hours of door knocking, 100 letterbox drops – “just keep it simple, those three things”. The modern version is that everyone’s number is different: “Some people need to speak to 15 people a day, some people need to speak to 50… but there is a number that if you have enough conversations with people, it will guarantee you success.” Most agents have never worked theirs out. Bohlen’s other gift, which Claudio still quotes: “If you don’t know what to say, you don’t deserve the business.”
7. Your calendar reveals who you really are. “I work with some seven-figure agents in the marketplace, and I’ll tell you one thing. Your calendar reveals who you really are… Treat it like it’s the most important thing in your life, and that will be the person that you actually become.”
8. Don’t sound like every other agent. The stock callback – “just seeing if you had any interest or feedback” – he calls “such a transactional question”. His version anchors the memory (“It was great meeting you on Saturday between ten and 10.30 at 23 Smith Street”) and then asks the only question that matters: “Just curious to know, what exactly attracted you to this property?” Then listen. And make the calls on Saturday afternoon – he found the answer rate “goes up by half”.
9. The angrier they are, the more they want to sell. His rule for expired listings, the niche he built his sales career on. Everyone else rings expireds claiming to have buyers; he came with research instead: there are four reasons a home doesn’t sell – price, process, promotion, presentation – “would it be okay if we just sat down and identified which one of those four reasons stopped your home from selling?”
10. If you’re not ringing them, someone else is. The anniversary-call system: look up how often people in your suburb actually move – “the average person in Bondi could move every seven years” – then call everyone who bought seven years ago this month and book their annual market assessment. Assume the appointment. “The name of the game is face to faces.” And in between the calls, the nine-word-style note to the database – “I’ve been asked recently, how’s the market?” – with a plain supply-and-demand answer and an offer to pop them on the appraisal list. One of his clients pulled two listings and four appraisals in three weeks off the back of it.
11. Master the mundane. The three killers in any agent’s business: “mediocrity… complacency, and resting on our laurels, thinking the phone’s gonna continually ring.” He watched a $1.5 million writer fall to $250,000 when a dominant market share made him stop doing the basics. “Obsessive consistency delivers massive results… we don’t chop and change, just master the mundane.”
On winning the listing
12. Without an X factor, you’re a commodity. The closest thing he has to a first principle: “Every agent in your marketplace offers a similar product and a similar service to you. And if you don’t have what I believe is called your X factor in a listing presentation, you’re just a goddamn commodity in the marketplace. And as a commodity, everyone would just choose you on price.”
13. Answer the four whys. Every seller is silently asking them: “Why you? Why your brand? Why should I do this now? And what are you proposing?” Most agents answer with the same words as the other 49 agents in the suburb – “we’re a boutique brand, I’m passionate… So is the other 49 agents. They’re all passionate.” The agents converting 80 per cent of their listing appointments can answer all four.
14. Conversion is where all the money’s made. Not leads – conversion. “If you’re not converting in your listing appointment into an actual listing, you’ve got leakage.” And measure it before you judge it: one principal thought his associate was struggling until Claudio ran her numbers – 90 conversations, six appraisals booked. “Every 15 connections, she books an appraisal… her conversion’s pretty good. And he was like, I never looked at it that way.”
15. Rehearse like there’s $10,000 on the table. Early in his career a principal told him: “You’d rather drop $10,000 on the table practising it rather than doing it in someone’s lounge room.” He role-played his listing presentation three times a week from that day on, and prescribes the same today. The Hollywood course left him with the benchmark: “In the world of theatre, these guys that are on stage, for every minute they’re on stage, they practise that line for two hours. Why? Because they’re moving people… with their emotions.”
16. Bring a pen, not a PDF. The polished brochure “looks too premeditated”. He draws the strategy in front of the client instead – “when you draw things, it becomes a blueprint and a framework for people”. It works on a video call too: write their answers on a notepad in view of the camera. Fifteen years in the home. Three kids. People connect with what they watch you build.
17. Impress upon, don’t impress. His proof-over-promises move: show the last ten sales, the first offer versus the final price. Then the line that turns up in almost every recording of him in the archive: “I don’t show you this to impress you, but more to impress upon you that we have a proven system.”
18. Drop value bombs, not follow-up calls. When a seller “needs to think about it”, most agents ring a day later with nothing – what he calls needy, “commission breath”. His sequence: a personal video message within three hours (“strike while the iron’s hot – they’ve just had a great experience with you”), a genuinely useful article within a day, a case-study video inside 72 hours – real clients, real situation, “way more powerful because they’re real” – and then, only then, the call, which you’ve now earned. “You don’t sound like a needy agent.”
19. Offer the good faith guarantee. His answer to the fee war, and the most audacious script in his kit: write both fees on the agency agreement. “If you’ve been offered 1.5 and I’m at 2.2… why don’t we just put it there – 1.5, 2.2 – and I’ll write on here next to it, for the principal to agree, at the exchange of contracts… you can make the decision based on my service, based on my professionalism, and based on the result that I get for you.” He calls it the good faith guarantee: “I don’t want to let fee get in the way of us working together… most of my clients see the value in me right at the end of the sale.” It only works, of course, if you’re planning to be worth it.
On buyers
20. Watch the first seven. His own tracked pattern: about 80 per cent of the time, the buyer of a property was among the first seven people through it. “They’re like buyer warriors. They’re in their car, they’ve got their cup of coffee, the open’s at ten and they’re out there at quarter to… they’ve got the finance approval.” Build the alert, and tell your seller about it.
21. Close the gap. What he says he specialises in – the space between the price a home sells for and the price the buyer would have paid. His cautionary tale: a home asking $800,000, sold at $749,000, and at exchange the buyers mentioned “we would have gone to $800,000. You should have seen that vendor’s face. That’s the gap that I want to ensure that we close.” The method is coaching the buyers: seven steps before the first open, ten touchpoints with the serious ones, one-on-one appointments where the real motivation comes out. “By the time I get to the auction day, I start to coach the buyers on how to buy your home… so when I want to extract a higher offer from them, they feel totally comfortable with me in doing so.”
22. Sell the lifestyle, not just the house. His destination report gives a buyer everything the brochure won’t: ten years of price history, the infrastructure story, the schools – and the three best coffee shops. “They’re not just buying your house, we’re also selling a lifestyle.” A buyer moving toward your suburb is comparing three others; make yours the one they can already see themselves living in.
23. Bring the human first. As an agent he kept a clipboard note on everyone through an open – the kid in the Brisbane Broncos jersey – and opened the next conversation there: “So is your son a big avid Broncos fan?” Not the price, not the interest level. “I’m not going into that, putting the real estate person first. I want to bring the human first.” And when you do talk property, ask for a score: “On a scale of one to ten… oh, a seven. Okay. What would it look like to be more like an eight or a nine for you?”
24. Trust beats rapport. He learned this one by losing. “I thought people bought rapport until I started losing them” – the beers, the shared footy team, the kumbaya moment, and next morning: “We’ve gone with the other agent.” Rapport makes people like you. Only trust makes them appoint you.
On any market
25. Be the hero. “In any market that I’ve been in over my 27 years, there’s always someone who wants to sell. And right now, in this marketplace, sellers are looking for heroes.” When there’s noise and uncertainty, “people need to borrow some certainty from you” – because “sales is a transfer of energy”, and the wrong kind is unmistakable: “When people don’t have the right energy, it’s like sales BO. It just smells really bad.” Living above the noise is a choice available in every market: “You can live in the mess, or you can live above the problem.”
26. Teach people how to think. His answer to the vendor who wants to wait three months isn’t a counter-argument, it’s a seesaw drawn on paper – reward on one side, risk on the other, their real intentions in the middle. “It’s about making a decision based on what we know rather than what we don’t know… It’s about teaching them how to think rather than trying to tell someone what to do.” Because “a confused mind equals no sale. A connected mind equals sale” – and in the end, “there’s two things they’ll buy from you, clarity and confidence.”
27. Serve the community first. “If you want the community to serve you, you need to serve the community first.” His favourite proof is a client writing a million dollars a year who volunteered at the Matthew Talbot hostel soup kitchen every second Tuesday for years, wanting nothing. Then a caller with an investment unit to sell introduced herself: Lady Fairfax. “He was never looking to get a lead. All he wanted to do was give back to the community.” Claudio’s own version, as a young Eastern Suburbs agent, was sponsoring White City Tennis Club and playing Wednesday afternoons with the doctors and lawyers.
28. Expand while everyone shrinks. His read on a slow market is the opposite of most agents’: “Most of your competitors in this market will pretty much shrink. Guys, this is your chance to expand… some of the best agents made more money in down markets than in good markets.” The reason is simple: “As the market changes, they want experts.”
On lasting
29. Work in sprints, not a marathon. “I feel like I’m on a marathon fifty-two weeks of the year. I would say to you: work six-week sprints, two weeks down” – three to five projects per sprint, then stop and look behind you, “because sometimes we’re so busy going that way, we forget to see what’s happened behind us.” His day has the same shape: amplify (for him, the ocean, a coffee and the sunrise – “not the TV show”), generate, convert, rejuvenate – three wins written down every night.
30. Stay coachable. The lesson underneath all the others, from a man who has paid for coaching in every decade of his career and still takes that Saturday call: the moment you think you’ve finished learning this business is the moment it starts leaving you behind. “You may have heard it, but if you ain’t doing it, you don’t know it.”
There’s plenty more where these came from – including what John McGrath said to talk a young agent with a mortgage into a commission-only deal in 2002, and the three-scenario question that rewired how Claudio thinks about risk to this day.
But I’m saving those ones for the book.