Thank you our Week 6Â sponsor:
Vitrine Media Australia. As well as being top of mind for the residents in your BDA, your agency shopfront also helps you stand out. With Vitrine Media LED technology, you can be on the cutting edge of window communications, connecting people to the store 24/7 by capturing their attention, attracting new customers and outpacing the competition to sell more.
Coaches:
Claudio Encina and Steve Carroll, Realestate.com.au.
Coaching Links:
- Check out Steve’s Transform Coach Spotlight, including what realestate.com.au will be up to at AREC 2016, Â click here
- To update your agent profile and get amongst 250,000 potential seller leads per year, click here.
Video Notes/Transcript
00:00 Introduction and Session Overview: Samantha McLean
01:25 Digital Growth and Disruption
How has digital impacted the way we live? Well, just to break the ice a little bit, who’s a regular user of Uber taxis? Yeah, a few of you. So here’s a fact about Uber, there are more Uber taxi drivers in Sydney than there are ordinary taxi drivers today. A year ago, normal taxi drivers would’ve been here, the number of Uber drivers would’ve been down there. Uber as an organization has completely disrupted the taxi business.
What about Airbnb? Anybody booked holiday on Airbnb? Yeah, you have? So you have. I did yesterday, I booked a 5 day holiday in the Sunshine Coast and as I did it I thought, “You know what? Two years ago, I’d of been giving my $2,000 to a hotel, but now I’m giving it to a private person through Airbnb.” There are more people who will sleep in an Airbnb bed tonight than in a hotel or registered guest house, fact.
What about Facebook? You’re all on Facebook. You know the average person in Australia spends the equivalent of one working day every single week on Facebook, right? One working day, every single week on Facebook. Now that’s the power of Facebook.
What about Tinder? Anybody found the perfect partner on Tinder, yeah? So every single second there are 30,000 swipes on Tinder, every second. There are 300 matches every single second.
We live in a world where technology and the internet is just changing the way we do things whether or not it’s work, rest, or play. There’s no doubt about it, the way that people buy, and sell, and browse, and look at property has changed massively over the last 3-5 years especially. I’m just going to share with you the consumer behaviors and probably just give you some tips and advice on how you can respond to that. Sound all right?
03:55 The Digital Interview
This is a trend that is becoming more prevalent according to the Digital Interview. Now just before I talk about how the Digital Interview works, we know from research at realestate.com.au that when someone decides they’re going to sell their house, 70% of them still don’t know which agent they’re going to use. Users of realestate.com.au have told us 70%- when they wake up and say to their husband or their wife, “We’re going to sell our house.” At that point in time, 70% of them have no idea which agent to use. So the opportunity is absolutely massive.
What we’ve noticed is, and let’s just make up a fictitious couple called Mr. and Mrs. Bond, right? As in James Bond. Imagine Mr. and Mrs. Bond in Chapel Hill have decided to sell their house. Now a behavioral change that we’ve seen, is that they’ll grab a device like an iPad, and they’ll do a search on realestate.com.au for properties for sale in Chapel Hill. The reason they’re doing that is because selling a house is a really big decision. It’s not something that they do every single week or every month, or even every year. I mean Claudio will probably agree with me it’s probably about every 7 years you might sell a property.
So you’ve made a decision, and what’s going through your mind as a seller is this is a really big decision we’re making. We’ve got to make sure that we get it right. If we choose the wrong agent, then it could cost us $20- $30,000. If we choose the right agent, we could make an extra $20,000. There’s a level of nervousness that goes on in the minds of the seller.
They go onto realestate.com.au and they’re having a look at what’s for sale in Chapel Hill. In some ways they’re looking at properties that their property is going to be competing with, makes sense? In the subconscious mind as they go through, they start to notice the brands and the agents that really stand out, in the subconscious mind. It might be Michelle McCloud, Michelle seems to have a lot of properties for sale. She’s got the banner, that’s the stage one of the digital interview. The second stage of the digital interview is they’re going to the Sold section on realestate.com.au, and they have a look at the properties that have sold in Chapel Hill.
As they go through all the properties and look at all the properties that have sold, they actually start feeling a little bit better and more confident about the fact they’re going to sell their house. They see all these properties and they go, “Oh, well our house is better than that and look at the price that that sold for.” This is the key, in their subconscious mind they notice that the agents and the brands that are really dominant in the Sold section. In conclusion, Mr. and Mrs. Bond put two-and-two together and conclude that, “Well, these are the agents that are obviously the top agents in Chapel Hill.” Because they’ve got a lot to sell and they’re selling a lot, so they go on to the short list.
When that Digital Interview happens you’re really, really going to struggle to get in the subconscious mind of Mr. and Mrs. Bond, and thousands and thousands and thousands of sellers that do this every single day. This is a fact from a piece of research done by the Harvard Business Review, and what this says is 57% of decisions and opinions are formed before physical contact is actually made.
07:50 Agent Profiles
Now I want to touch on something, which is really taking on from where Claudio went. I want to move on to something with which I call, “Social Profile”. There’s lots of social platforms that you really need to get your head around. I just want to talk a little bit about a social platform that you need to really be world class at, and that’s the Agent Profile.
On realestate.com.au, we have 55,000 Agent Profiles. An Agent Profile is a bit like your own personal LinkedIn on realestate.com.au. The average agent in Australia has a completed profile of what percentage do you think? So if 100% is their profile is absolutely completed, and no % is they haven’t even started, what do you think the average agent in Australia is? When I spoke at Eric 12 months ago it was at 33, it’s about 41 now. Now just to give you an idea, over the last 12 months, a quarter of a million, so 250,000 emails were sent to agents on the back of Agent Profiles. 250,000, right? What I’m talking about here is, “Dear Claudio, I’ve just seen your Agent Profile on realestate.com.au. I’m thinking about selling my house. Will you come and give me an evaluation?” 250,000 of them every 12 months, and yet the average real estate agent in Australia has got 39% of their profile completed.
Another way of spinning that is to have a 100% completed profile. There are 13 fields, and a lot of those fields are something that Claudio touched on. Contribution to the Community is one of 13 fields. Your Local Knowledge- did you grow up in these suburbs, did you go to school in these suburbs, is a second field. The third field, it is What’s Unique About You? Do you do something that is just different to every other agent, not necessarily talking about as a real estate agent, and I’ll give you an example. I had a lady up in Darwin who put on her profile that she did a lot of work with the RSPCA, and she took a lot of dogs in that had been ill-treated. She made the dogs better, and then she found a home for them. She put that on her profile, and she won 2 listings on the back of that.
Guess what? Now we’re talking about 250,000 emails. People like Rick are getting an unfair amount of emails out of that 250 because they’ve got a profile that is, if not 100% completed, about 90% completed. The great thing about the Agent Profile is they’re free.
I often compare realestate.com.au and agents to a gymnasium and people who go to a gym. So if I’m a member of Fitness First and I only go once every 4 weeks, then when I do go I only use 20% of the machinery, then I’m not really getting great value out of my membership to Fitness First. If I go to the gym every single day and I use every single piece of equipment, I go to all the free classes, I use the sauna, the Jacuzzi, I’m getting great value out of my membership.
12:03 The Agent Marketing Centre
You being having a relationship with Luke McPhee would be a really cool thing to do. What Luke can walk you through is Luke can walk you through something called the Agent Marketing Centre. For you as agents you should be looking at the Agent Marketing Center every single day, because there’s a number of tools that you could use. I’ll just run through some of the tools.
One of the tools is Fast Fax. Give me a suburb that you might list in then. Balmain. So if you go to Fast Fax and click a few buttons, you can find out so much about Balmain that when you go to see Mr. and Mrs. Bond you will look as though you’re a complete local expert because you’ll be able to tell them about Balmain so much. Where have you gotten that information from? Well you got it from Luke from the Agent Marketing Centre. Now you don’t need Luke to get to the Agent Marketing Centre, you can directly go there. What I’m saying is if you used Luke to give you a bit of a show around, it would make sense.
The second thing the Agent Marketing Centre will do is it’ll give you some free videos to use. I just want to quickly show you this video, it’s a two-minute video. The reason what this video is used for is if you’re saying to Claudio, “Now Claudio, I recommend that you need to buy a Premier Property on realestate.com.au.” Claudio says, “Now that sounds bloody expensive, can’t I just go down a few levels and maybe have a Feature Property because it’ll be cheaper for me.” Rather than you try and overcome that objection, you could say, “Well look Claudio, let me show you this video that’s been produced.”
To give your property the attention it deserves, you need to showcase it in the best possible way. 86% of property seekers use the internet to find their dream home. So to help the people dreaming of a new home fall in love with yours, you need your home to hold a premier position.
We’ve got a plethora of videos on the Agent Marketing Centre that you can use.
The last thing the Agent Marketing Centre has is all the pricing. If you’re selling a house in Balmain, or you’re selling a Mum and Dad in Balmain, and the next day you’re selling a Mum and Dad in a different suburb, there’s a possibility the price might be different. The prices are driven by supply-and-demand by traffic and so on. So again, in front of Mum and Dad you could say, “Well look, we’re in Balmain. Click, that’ll be the price of a Premier, or that’ll be the price of a Highlight.”
In summary, I’ve explained to you about the Digital Interview and how that works, and the importance of standing out when that happens. I’ve talked about social, and one of the big social platforms is Agent Profiles that sits on realestate.com.au and if you want to share to about 250,000 email leads. I haven’t even talked about phone calls, phone calls is another stat. 250,000 leads, you need to get your Agent Profile in good order and get to know who your Account Manager is, take him out for coffee and say, “Spend half an hour helping me understand make the most of the tools on realestate.com.au.” It’ll be the best $4 coffee you ever buy, and you probably won’t even need to do that. If you say to your reps, “Steve Carroll told me that you’d pay for my coffee,” then it’ll be free advice.
Questions?
If you have questions for the coaches or for the Super Six tweet us @eliteagentmag #transform
