Real Estate Managers Can Boost Sales Easily

What if there were three little things every real estate manager could do to change the “slow” market? Rather than accept that housing sales are down because of “the economy” or “stingy lenders” or Martians, maybe a few simple steps might make a world of difference – or at least a neighborhood of difference.

The first thing Managers could do is start wiretapping their office phones. You don’t need a government warrant to pick up the extension in the other room and listen in to the kinds of conversations going on between your company and consumers. More sophisticated offices may even have a phone system that records call traffic – which would make this idea even better, because you could play the calls back to your staff and agents. What do you think you’d find if you started listening in on the calls to your office? If you’re honest, here’s what you’ve just answered:
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• <!–[if !supportLists]–>My agents aren’t asking consumers for their names, phone numbers and email addresses.
• <!–[if !supportLists]–>My staff speak too fast and sound too disinterested in the call when they answer the phone.
• <!–[if !supportLists]–>Nobody knows how to transfer a caller to an agent’s cell phone or conference the two lines together.

We find these three issues every day when we “test” the services of different brokerages worldwide. You can deny it all you want, but agents are their own worst enemy. They “answer” consumer calls with “information” but they don’t really do anything to qualify the consumer, engage in conversation or build rapport with them on the phone. If a caller wants to know if “45 Osgood Street” is available, the answer is “Yes” and only half the time it’s followed up by “When would you like to see it?” If the caller says they don’t really want to see the property, most agents (three out of four times) just pull the rip cord and abandon the call with a “Ok, call us back if you’d like to see it,” rather than moving into the qualify-the-consumer-get-to-know-them-build-rapport stage. Agents are still sitting around waiting for the “perfect” call, not the “work hard and turn me into a customer” call.

As for the two other phone issues, managers must really not care about these issues because they have persisted for – oh, let’s say – twenty years that we’ve been testing phone responses. Want to decrease the chances you’ll get customers excited about working with you? Keep answering the phone like you are – and keep losing calls by transferring consumers to voice mail rather than directly to an agent’s cell phone.

The second thing Managers could do to step up the sales volume is to stop putting the wrong products on the shelf. That means, stop accepting the overpriced, under-motivated listing agreements your agents keep bringing back to the office. Look, you created this problem, Managers, by saying, “Don’t come back to the office without the listing!” so you’re the only person who can solve it. Most agents don’t think for themselves and simply do whatever they are told, by whoever tells them to do it. (Proof: they keep running useless newspaper ads because the seller tells them to do it). Simply change what you’re telling agents and you can fix a lot of the market problems. Does your market already have 12 months of residential single-family housing unit inventory? Then start telling agents to bring in some optional units – condos or land (since building costs are low these days). Are your listings priced 20% above the absorption rate of the last ten sales of similar property type? Then cancel the listing agreements and tell your agents to focus on bringing the buyer instead. Getting 50% co-broke fee on someone else’s overpriced listing is a better net profit if you’re not carrying the advertising costs for months. In fact, if you really want to improve the market, forget about listings entirely and just focus on getting your buyers making as many offers as possible until the sellers in the area get the message: the buyer sets the price. So, change the agent’s marching orders, stop accepting overpriced listings, stop carrying the advertising load or just stop listing altogether. There’s always another sucker broker who will take the overpriced listing: and you can pick off the buyer side co-brokes at a better bottom line on the same units. Duh!

The third thing real estate Managers could do today – and probably all day – to jump start the market is start firing poorly performing agents. Why is it that every other industry in the known universe fires incompetent workers? Think like Darth Vader and start getting rid of every Admiral who can’t find Chewbacca. Apology accepted, Admiral Incompetent. Somebody remove the body. It’s about time the real estate management community start acting like managers. You hired sales people, didn’t you? So when they don’t make sales, or do the activities necessary to make a sale, take them to lunch, Donald Trump style. So what if they’ll take their listings with them – let another broker carry that ridiculously unmarketable inventory for a while. Stop coddling the incompetent. Either they don’t fit your company culture (i.e., we follow up on leads around here) or they don’t belong in real estate at all. Either way, keeping underperformers around only discourages higher performing agents. Why should they try harder when you don’t care if someone hangs around the office and goof off? And heaven help your customers who get stuck with one of them. Why is it that we bend over backwards to recruit these guys, then we tie ourselves up in knots when it’s obvious we need to take them out back and have a little conversation, Soprano-style?

Each of these three simple steps requires virtually no training for a Manager to perform. Even partial performance in these areas would be a step in the right direction. It’s absurd that an industry with ample product supply and affordable finance (45 year lows on mortgages) can’t make more sales. The only acceptable reason is that nobody is selling. We’re sitting around waiting – staff answering phones uninterestedly, agents waiting for the perfect deal to call, managers waiting for a miracle to motivate their agents – when what we really need to do is manage the business. Literally.