Welcome to yet another Thursday morning power call. Thanks again for everybody. Taking the time to join a couple of things before we get into today’s topic.
So as anticipated, yesterday was a little bit hectic with the launch of Pop Deal 2.0. So just wanted to recap a few things. Number one, we’re aware of the bugs and that those are getting addressed.
And we’re also aware of some of the challenges that we have in kind of claiming leads in terms of mismatched service profiles which are taking up some people’s quota. So we’re aware of these things. Just want to make that clear that we’re addressing the issues.
The bugs will be fixed this week, by the end of this week and the other issues shortly thereafter. So just wanted to start off by thanking everybody for their patience and understanding. We’re trying to do something very innovative here.
So it’s going to take some time, as I said, to get it right. Just remember that the released reasons are there for these problems, right? So if you have a market mismatch, right, so the lead doesn’t match your region or service. So when we look at the released reasons, we know that’s the case.
If it’s a duplicate lead and it’s already with another agent, you’ve got a release reason for that and then you’ve got spam as well if it’s a test lead or a fake lead, which I see some people are getting. So just a quick reminder that we have those things in place and make sure that you are using them. Second point is one thing that I need to point out that’s actually really important is to keep in mind that some days there’s a ton of leads, right? And we’ll have to look at the data on this.
I’m sure Jamie can answer the question in terms of are Fridays the busiest day for leads and Mondays are the quietest, right? That might be the exact opposite. But one thing to keep in mind is that some days there’s going to be a ton of leads to claim and other days less. And that might vary from market to market.
The days might be Mondays might be crazy in Bangkok where Fridays might be crazy in Pattaya, right? So just keep in mind, just because you wake up in the morning and there’s nothing there to claim, that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to be every morning where there’s a huge amount of leads to claim. Some mornings, yes. Other times leads will come during the day.
So just keep that in mind. 1 second issue to bring up is just wanted to reiterate that if you have any questions about your tiers, please speak with Daryl, Boom, Christian or Chris directly. You all have your performance check ins this week with them and it’s a great opportunity to have a catch up and ask any questions directly with them.
So good. So today, I want to shift our focus back to working with owners. But rather than going into more theory and examples, I wanted to actually walk you through a real example that I dug up.
It’s a bit dated, so it goes back to 2014, which shows my age and some of the reference that will be a bit dated. But in principle, the example that I’m going to show you guys today pulls in all of the previous sessions of working with owners. So it ties it all together.
And I hope that there’s two or three takeaways that you can all take from what I’m going to show you today. So just a quick recap. We’ve already spoke about how we need to have an owner focus as agents and that we don’t treat owners as door openers.
We have to treat them as clients. And that means getting to know them and qualifying them and building rapport with them so that we can identify and target the right types of owners. And we introduced the framework for pricing a property, the comparative market analysis.
So today I want to show you actions that you can take using those principles today that is going to allow you to add more value and have impact to owners and help you hit your target. So today’s topic is focused around securing a price reduction. So I’m going to show you how I sold a property that had been listed for three years.
It was online for three years and it didn’t sell. And I’m going to show you the ingredients and the steps I took to be able to sell that property in actually less than two months. Well, two months from my initial pitch to the time that I took a deposit.
So it came down to five different ingredients. And as I said, you can follow and replicate this recipe. So number one, it started with the right owner.
So this was somebody that I had a relationship with and that was motivated to sell. Secondly, the second ingredient to the right recipe is making sure that it’s the right property. So what I mean by that, it’s a popular project and it’s an in demand unit type.
Third is that I had the right pitch. So how did my services and myself stand out at the time? It was the right pitch. You’ll see that it actually wasn’t very good and that you have a much better pitch now than I had.
Number four is the right price. So the fourth ingredient is to make sure that it’s the right price, what price this property will sell at, and I’ll show you how I came to that conclusion. And then last but not least, persistence.
Everyone you’re going to speak to will say no. And this is what this client said to me. I was persistent and I won the contract.
So let’s get into it. So a little bit of background. So the first part highlights the right owner and the right property.
So to give everybody a bit of background here, it was 2014. At the time, we weren’t called Fazraz, we were called Lip Phuket. And I was the agent and we had just signed an exclusive agreement with a newspaper.
So that shows how old I am and how outdated this is, that newspapers were still going around at that time and that winning an exclusive partnership with them we thought was important. But the focus is that we had very few buyers at the time, so I wasn’t busy with buyers. So rather than just kind of sitting around and doing nothing, I realized that working with sellers would generate the buyers.
So I didn’t want to work with random sellers. So I reached out to people that I had spoke with on two or three occasions and I had taken an active interest in helping them sell their property. They knew who I was, didn’t really have a personal relationship with them, but I had inspected the property a couple of times.
So the owner of this property, their names were Edith and Steve, and they were based in the UK. And they had the property listed with multiple agents and they had been trying to sell it, but they weren’t successful. So, again, this is the right owner relationship with them.
They know who I am, they’re struggling to sell. They’ve been trying to sell for a while. I’m their knight in shining armor, potentially.
The property. My logic behind it was that if I sell a 2 million Baht condo or if I sell a 20 million Baht villa, it’s essentially the same amount of work. So my mindset was to go after mass market units that were in high demand, so that there’s a lot of buyers looking for these types of properties.
But it wasn’t high end, so I didn’t go super luxury because, again, that limits the market for it. And it wasn’t low end as well because I wanted it to pay a decent commission. So that’s the right property.
So here’s the property here. It didn’t have these nice photos before, so it was kind of this neglected property that had sat on our website that had you can probably find tons of them on FazWaz now that have been listed for a long time. The photos are crap.
Everyone’s probably forgotten about it for those reasons, and it’s kind of gone to the bottom of the pile. So this was one that I decided to focus on. So, as I said, 15 million bought listed on the market for three years.
So, below are a series of emails that I exchanged between the owner and myself. So I’m not going to read all of these. I’m going to show you my approach and the takeaways and the challenges that I came across and how I overcame them.
So it started off with the right pitch. Now, this is actually a terrible pitch. So don’t use this pitch.
And keep in mind this is 2014 when emails worked and newspapers did as well. That is not the case now. So don’t look at this and say, hey, I’m going to copy Brennan’s pitch and his approach, but it’s more the philosophy of what I’m trying to accomplish here.
So really, you can see I reached out to Edith, the owner, by email, and I started with highlighting a market update, right, and talking about the challenges and the conditions of the market at the moment, but fear not, right? I can help. So I highlighted how my partnership with the newspaper opened up channels that other agents don’t have that would allow me to provide really good exposure for their property. I went into saying, here’s how I can do it super high level, and talking about the opportunity to try and get a level of interest.
And then you can see that I closed by attempting to book a phone call. That’s a lot of information to consume, voice to voice, voice, get on the phone with them, overcome objections. So that’s what I tried to do.
You can see here, I was much younger, had a better head of hair, less wrinkles. I think the picture was Photoshopped as well. So nice picture of myself there.
So her response, right? So after that nice pitch, at the time, I thought it was a good pitch. Here’s the owner’s response saying, hey, listen, thanks for thinking of us. Sounds exciting, but no.
Right. And I want to make this clear is that everybody is going to say no to you, right. Is that owners are not used to giving their properties exclusively to an agent.
So the first answer is always going to be no. But what’s important is persistence, right? And I call this polite persistence. As a Canadian and as a real estate agent, this is what I’m actually paid for, right? This is my job.
It’s my job to be persistent. So I followed up and said, hey, listen, I understand your concerns, but you’re not giving your listing to one agent. You’re giving the accountability of selling your property to one person who’s going to be accountable.
Now, if I can speak directly, your property has been listed on the market for three years with multiple agents who are all going to continue to do the same thing. That hasn’t been working. Right? I’m the only person who’s reaching out to you that has showed an active interest and telling you that I’m dedicated and committed to helping you accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish.
Right. So in other words, what you’re doing is not working. It’s insane if you want to keep doing it because you’re going to get the same results, right? And followed it up by just saying, hey, listen, hope I’m not coming across as too aggressive and I’m simply confident that I can help you.
So my persistence paid off. Edith and Steve came back with a number of questions, right? So you can see here that the questions are always going to be the same. How is the commission work? How long is the contract? What about the other agents? Right? These are all pretty standard things that are easy to overcome, but what will come up in terms of price? Okay, so my property has been listed for three years, but what price do you think that this property will sell for? But where you can see I won them over is here, right? We do agree that in phuket there’s an agent’s attitude of let’s sit back and just collect money as it flows in.
Part of the reasons many buyers have rooted this market out is there are limited professional agents to work with. So we do think a proactive approach like yours is a good one. Good.
That’s my hook. I caught them, right? I caught their attention. They bought into me.
They bought into the fact that I’m the only one that’s reaching out to them that’s saying, hey, listen, give me the accountability, I will help you. So I went on from that to arrange a phone call with them to answer their questions and overcome any objections and get an exclusive agreement signed. So for that phone call, I prepared myself.
So now I’ve got the right property, I’ve got the right owners, right? I’ve got them locked into the idea of how I can add value to them. Now it’s about getting the right price, because at the end of the day, this is the most important thing, and any property will sell at the right price. So in preparation for the call, I prepared a comparative market analysis, which we covered on a power call the other day.
I looked at historical sales and I looked at on market listings and I looked at the property had been listed for three years at 15 million bought. And that was my main consideration. So one of my favorite lines to say to owners in having price discussion was that, hey, listen, Edith, there’s two reasons why a property can’t sell.
Number one, there’s a physical flaw in the property in that it’s overlooked. It’s on a busy road, the layout is terrible, right? The property itself has a physical flaw, which obviously your property doesn’t. It’s fantastic, it’s beautiful.
Or it’s a function of price. So we can see in this case, it’s been listed for three years at 15 million bought. So the reason why it’s not selling is that it’s not a competitive price.
Here are some examples of other properties that we’ve sold. And again, we’ll walk through this probably next week. The dashboards are completely done.
So here’s the rental dashboard that gives you access to full information. So you can see here’s Bangkok Rental dashboard. The average rental price this year in Bangkok for rented properties, one bedrooms over 50 m² is 30,000 baht.
The average list price is 32 the discount is here, right? A lot of good information. Same thing on sales. Average price for sold one bedroom condos in Bangkok, over 50 meters is 9.6
million. So you’ve got a lot of really good information there that I didn’t have that’s going to help you secure that price reduction. So you can see with that approach, I secured roughly a 15% price reduction and maintained my full commission.
And I signed an exclusive contract for six months at a price of 12.8 million bot. So to recap, that’s pretty much all of the areas, the ingredients.
So you can see that the timeline. So the first email, the pitch was December 21 was when I first reached out by email. The first call was December 26, where I answered their questions, overcome their objectives to close.
And on the fifth, I signed an exclusive contract for six months. So after that, I updated them weekly. So every week in the newspaper, I’d get a couple of phone calls or I’d work with Cobrokes and push it out to make sure that we’re getting viewings for the property and keep the owners updated.
Not just when I had viewings, but the interest that I had. Because my other favorite line to say the owners was, it starts with getting enough interest, interest leads to viewings, viewings leads to offers, and offers leads to you selling your property. So we followed that philosophy and we got a reservation for the property on February 20, eigth and I sold the property for 11.9
million bought. So the takeaways, I hope you can see some value in this and that maybe there’s two or three things that you can take away from this, but you can do this with any property today, right? It’s the right owner. So it’s an owner that I had a relationship with that was motivated to sell.
And that’s what I spoke about in terms of identifying the right types of properties. Number two sorry, the right types of owners. Number two, it’s finding the right property.
So again, a popular unit, popular location, popular project, popular unit, price not too expensive, not too cheap, the right pitch, and we’ll go through this. So next week we’re in the process of finalizing our presentation that you guys can use for pitching owners to show them how we have the biggest online presence and we have the biggest network of agents internally that we work with and the success we have in selling properties. So we’ll walk you guys through that probably next week or the week after.
Once that’s done, the right price, right? So making sure the property is listed at the right price that you can sell. Again, this will be launched with you guys. Next week we’ll roll out and show you how you have access to this and the use cases that you can use it to apply it to price reduction.
But last but not least is persistence, right? They will say no, everyone will say no. It’s a non exclusive market. Owners are not used to giving properties to agents exclusively.
You have way more better tools and a much better pitch than a newspaper that I had. So I hope that you can take two or three things away from today’s session and that use these things. When you have your performance, check in with the market manager.
You’ll see a new metric this quarter that’s focused on transacted exclusive listings and they’ll talk to you a little bit more about what that means. But that’s an opportunity for you to focus on quality of listings versus quantity. So use these principles to sell an exclusive listing this month sorry.
This quarter and the upcoming Power calls, we’ll talk a little bit more about the process in doing that, the marketing that we’ll do for the exclusive properties and how we get the best exposure. So that’s it. Thanks again for your time and attention and we will see you tomorrow.