#PropTech won’t save your Estate Agency

January 11, 2019

The Valuer’s Presenter has done nothing to improve the Valuer who use them when they go on the Free Val or Market Appraisal. Like the Agency’s ‘Why Use Us’ booklet, it may have improved listings, but it did nothing to make the Valuer more effective. Rightmove has done nothing to make Valuers better at their craft. It eradicated the need for newspapers and sending out loads of brochures via Royal Mail as an obstacle to getting the property in the hands of potential buyers. CRM systems haven’t improved any Neg/Valuer salesmanship or saleswomanship. In fact, many would maintain the removal of manual hotboxes to bulk email outs via the CRM system has been harmful as bulk impersonal emails dont make better Negs/Valuers .. just ‘match and send’ merchants

If you believe estate and lettings agency is a people business .. then communication is the key. Communication to building relationships. Yes, in the 21st Century, we communicate instantly with email, apps and software systems, yet if it is a people business, if we don’t improve the skill and mindset sets of our Negs, Valuers and even ourselves to communicate better to build relationship and trust .. because no PropTech or App can ever help us build trust .. can it?

Sales (the selling of anything in this world – not just houses) is going from transactional focus to consultative and hyper-relational focus. Less me-me-me and more – you-you-you. Read the books and reports of the successful companies and people and its less selling product or service to creating strategic outcomes, instead of simple implementation to responsibility and culpability for those intentional outcomes, and from reacting to opportunities to producing and fashioning opportunities.

To make this conversion, a Neg/Valuer/Lister .. hell even you, needs business shrewdness, insight and real-world knowledge that would make them a winner on Dragons Den, instead of a wage slave zombie that most are in the industry

Harsh … yet true

We as an industry could learn so much from our American and Ozzie cousins in ‘real’ estate. The best agents in those countries realised years ago they needed to know how to be hyper-consultative, which necessitates that they be able to offer the advice that their clients need to produce better results FOR THEIR CLIENTS (not their month-end sales targets)

If the PropTech were capable of creating these outcomes, it would truly be the awesome phenomenon that many believe it to be. Yet, alas, the vast majority of Proptech, no matter the magnitude, reach or efficiency, doesn’t improve the effectiveness of the front line Neg, Valuer or Branch Manager one jot.

There are embryonic signs of transformation in UK Estate Agency, but it’s far more PeopleTech than PropTech. People (Agents) that understand the meanings of what I suggest.

Agree or Disagree?

Christopher

Christopher Watkin

Estate/Letting Agency Industry Vlogger

07950147572

500+ Vlogs on the Estate/Letting Agency Industry https://goo.gl/kqVovH

Christopher Watkin

I teach, guide, support, mentor, consult, counsel, partner many hundreds of UK Estate and Letting Agents in their quest to grow their estate and lettings agencies business. Old school techniques of touting, landlords wanted leaflets, ring us for a free valuation, we have sold this in your street leaflets don't work anymore. There are too many competitor agents .. meaning cheap fees are epidemic, overvaluing is almost a norm to get the stock and don’t even mention about the online/hybrid threat. So a few years ago, I set about looking around the UK and spotted that certain agents (not many mind you) in certain towns were still seen as the ‘go to person on property’, the person the newspaper editor rang up every week for a comment and I looked at what they did and they were doing some thing quite remarkable…. Only one thing but they were doing it so well .. and reaping the reward in terms of decent listings and decent fees, happy staff, decent sales pipeline and exchange income, managed lettings portfolios in the many hundreds .. but more importantly, they really enjoyed the job… they enjoyed getting up in the morning and people looked up to them Over 400 agents around the UK are on a mission to change the way our Estate and Lettings agency profession is perceived and looked upon, doing it town by town, city by city. I guide these 400 agents, teach them, mentor them and support them to be seen in a different light, to be seen as the ‘go to person for property’, actually be the ‘local property expert’ and prove it. Christopher Watkin 07950 147 572 christopher@christopherwatkin.co.uk

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