We’ve got a really good topic today. And I know I keep saying that, but this one is really, really important and I think is going to be a big realization for a lot of agents on this call. And again, that’s the goal of these power calls is to share experiences, to share knowledge so that we can all become better agents.
So last week was largely focused on the new tier structure and we’re going to revisit that on Friday one more time to go through kind of a few housekeeping issues. But this week I want to bring the attention and the focus back to training and specifically best practices when working with owners. So again, just to recap, the word owners means when I say sellers, when I say landlords, when I say owners, it’s all interchangeable, right? So speaking to many agents across the business, I had a few spirited conversations on Friday night in Bangkok when I stayed there for a couple drinks after work and talking to people about the importance of speaking to owners and working with owners.
We seem to be, as a business, we seem to be treating owners as people who merely open doors for us when we have clients versus treating them as customers themselves, that we should be actively engaging to build relationships and qualify because at the end of the day, these are the people who pay us our commission, right? And there seems to be just this pure focus on buyers in the business. So in my experience as an agent, understanding and embracing the process of working with owners triggered a huge shift in my ability to close business because having that realization actually positioned me to better understand sorry, better understand my owners so they could make better recommendations to my clients. And understanding owners was the single most important thing that helped me become a better negotiator.
So I stopped treating owners as door openers and I started treating them as the other 50% of the transaction, which is again really important. So today I’m going to introduce you to a seven step process that I use that helped me to identify what owners to spend my time on and help me identify properties that I could sell. The process was simple and it will work for you as well.
So if I jump down here, this is what we’re going to cover over the week. And again, it’s a seven step process, relatively simple, and we’ll go through all of these in a level of detail and we’ll come back and revisit some of the more complicated topics such as comparative market analysis and handling objections. But by the end of this week, early next week, I want to give you a clear overview on this seven step process so that we can get started.
So it’s actually quite simple. It’s a simple, proven approach and this was my approach when I engaged owners. I was looking for sellers who needed my help.
That was the first thing because every seller has a different profile, they have different backgrounds, they have different goals. But I’ve worked out a way to categorize five different types of sellers that will, if you’re able to identify them, it will help you understand sellers that you should spend more time on because you can actually help them, versus sellers that if you identify that they’re this type of profile that they probably don’t need your help. So we’ll cover that today.
But the first aspect was simple, find people who need your help. The second aspect is find sellers who are motivated to transact. So with the right seller profile then it’s about working with that owner to understand what their motivation is, right? Because spending time with people who actually want to sell their property versus people who are just testing the market, I think we’ve all come across those ones will help you better spend your time on the right people.
And last but not least, it was finding sellers with properties that I believe that I could sell. So looking for properties in the right location at the right price point and people that I’ve largely been working with before. So very simple formula, find sellers who need your help, find sellers who are motivated and find sellers that own properties that you believe that you can sell.
So we’re going to go through this of course in more detail over the next couple of days. But finding these types of sellers and properties, if you find these types of sellers and properties, the buyers will actually come to you. And just to be clear that this is for non exclusive properties and for exclusive properties, it doesn’t matter the agency agreement you’re signing, at the end of the day, this process works in order to identify owners that you should be spending your time on.
So step one, we’re going to look at step one today and this is about engaging owners. So I have this kind of cheesy saying that I’ve said to many of you agents over the years is I say do real estate activities every day. And for me what that means is that when you’re not active with buyers, it’s our job to engage owners, to call the list of owners in our system and get to know them right and start to build a relationship with them.
So by doing those real estate activities when you don’t necessarily have clients for those properties, it’s going to pay off for you in the future and you’ll understand why by the end of these next couple of webinars. So it’s really simple. If the first step is to start engaging owners, then the question is, who do you know? You should be identifying owners that you have a relationship with.
And these are the people that you’ve constantly been showing their properties. I’m sure everybody on this call can relate that they know owners that they’ve been trying to sell or rent their property for and they’re constantly doing viewings. They like showing it.
The feedback is relatively good, but for some reason it never sells or rents. So focus on these people and focus on owners that you have relationships with in popular projects. Now, if you don’t know anybody, then this is what I’m talking about.
You need to get active and do real estate activities. So get on the phone. Every office should be full of agents that are on the phone and speaking to owners.
Target the owners that are in the popular project. You have access to all of the owners in our system and you can get on the phone and start calling these people to start building your relationship with them. Or if you’re in a project you wrote on viewings and you want more owners in that project, then get active in terms of dropping your business card in mailboxes, creating leaflets, right, and calling and introducing yourself to owners.
And listen, you know, my name is Brennan, I’m calling from Fazlaz. I have a client that is potentially interested in your property. They’ve been viewing units in your project.
Can I talk to you about your property and get some more information and confirm a few details? So it’s just being active, it’s getting on the phone with these owners, it’s getting in front of them. And the first step to do that is just by being active in reaching out. So again, the goal here is to treat them as clients, right? Not as people who open a door when you have a buyer.
So the goal is to, again, introduce yourself, as I said, say that you have a potential buyer or say that you’ve had interest in the property and you want to confirm some of the details. But also this is an opportunity to position yourself as the expert and put yourself in a position where you’re actually in front of the person or speaking to them to go through the needs analysis, which is what we’re going to cover in detail tomorrow. So goal number one is getting in front of owners and great projects to connect with them and identify those people that you can help.
Again, build relationships. It’s all about relationships. We spoke about this on the buyer side, but it’s equally as well on the seller side because if your goal is to get an exclusive property from an owner, people don’t give their properties exclusively to strangers, right? And that I’ll share some of my experiences and show you some of the emails that I sent when I was an agent to win exclusive properties and that they were all relationships that I had.
They weren’t strangers that I was reaching out to. So that’s why I’m saying we have to get active, we have to get on the phones, we have to speak to owners and we have to understand that they’re the other 50% of the transaction. So the next question then becomes how do I identify who needs my help, right? These different types of sellers, how do I identify the different categories and different types of people that may or may not need my help.
So I’ve grouped these into five different categories and I’ll share these with you guys as well. And I think that as agents, many of us on this call have probably come across all these different profiles. And what I’ve done is I’ve scored them based on a low medium high metric to help us understand what type of profiles have the highest potential to win exclusivity and what type of profiles have the highest potential for us to sell.
Because it’s not just about winning properties exclusively, it’s about winning properties exclusively that are priced right by motivated sellers that we believe we can sell. And again, we’ll cover all of these things. So I’ve grouped this into five different categories and we’ll run through these relatively quickly in the last five minutes that we have because identifying these clients will help you identify which ones you should be spending your time on.
So number one is the inexperienced seller. So I’ve defined this as a first time seller that is probably a little bit hesitant, maybe a little bit uneducated and they want to better understand the process. So how do you identify this type of person that they want to meet, they want to talk, they have lots of questions and they don’t list online.
They’re going to send us an email or they’re going to walk in the office and they want to have a chat with you about the process because at the end of the day, you’re the person that’s going to help guide them through that. So the stage of these owners generally they’re not listed yet, or maybe they are listed with one or two agents. And the mindset of this owner is seeking to work with the right agent to feel safe and secure in the transaction.
So we’ll revisit the potential to win exclusively and the potential to sell. But these are both high because you can actually guide that owner through the process. You’re getting them relatively early.
They’re coming out looking for help and the opportunity to win this. If you have the right pitch and the right tools which we’re going to provide to you and the opportunity to sell as well guided you do comparative market analysis and help them price it that you can have control over this owner and help engineer the outcome that you want. So an inexperienced seller, high and high, passive seller number two, this is defined as somebody that doesn’t want much to do with the process and wants to be relatively hands off.
So how do you identify? This is often somebody who lives overseas, that they own multiple properties and they’ve left the property in the hands of a property management company. So they’ve been relatively hands off on the property over the last few years. And I can see this, I’m speaking from my experience in Phuket.
I can see this in Phuket samui and Hua hin. Some of the more holiday markets where owners bought these properties five, six years ago have left them with a property management company and no one has taken an active interest to help them sell their property or rent their property. So these are extremely high potential to win exclusively and extremely high potential to sell.
Moving on to number three is the unrealistic price seller. And I think a lot of people have come across this person. This is defined as a property that is priced too high and the owner is often aware of it.
We identify owners like this, such as because they’re saying things like they’re waiting for the right buyer or I’m not in a rush to sell. I think we’ve all heard that before. They’ve listed it with a bunch of different agents and it’s probably been on the market for years.
It could be a new listing. But a lot of these markets properties, because they’re overpriced, sit on the markets for years. So this is a type of property that you can win it exclusively.
We’ve won properties like this exclusively before, but these owners are not willing to entertain price discussions and really look at the comparable market analysis to understand the real value of their property. So the potential to sell is low. You identify somebody like this, you thank them for their time, you get the listing online.
But we do not want this exclusively and you shouldn’t spend your time on somebody like this. Moving on to number four, an experienced seller. So this is a big chunk in the market.
And these are defined as people who’ve bought and sold lots of properties in Thailand. Maybe they actually know the market better than you, depending on your level of experience. So you can identify these owners because they’re knowledgeable, they list online, they provide you with all the information that they need because they’re very experienced.
Their properties are generally listed with multiple agents. And that their mindset is that they work with a network of agents that they already work with, they already have relationships with, and that they’re going to continue to work with that network because they’ve done it before. So these ones are low potential to win, exclusively, medium potential to sell.
They probably have good properties, they’re probably well priced, but they’re out with five or six different agents. So you’re going to be competing with those agents to sell those properties. So again, not somebody that we shouldn’t work with, but just somebody in terms of spending your time, energy and effort would be low on that list.
And last but not least is the unique property seller. So this is defined as a property that is one of a kind and has little to no comparable units and that its uniqueness could actually be considered a flaw. So how do you identify this? You’ll know it when you see it essentially it could be the location, it could be the design, it could be the layout, the stage, it could be listed with agents or not listed with agents.
But really the mindset of this owners, they’re very content focused, very marketing focused because they know that it’s a very small selection of consumers that will actually buy this property. So they have to spread the awareness out as far as possible. So that identifies five different profiles and that you can really see that the focus as us, as agents in terms of having discussions with and pitching them on exclusivity should be in these three categories the inexperienced seller, the passive seller and your standard seller.
Oh, where’s the standard seller? So the last but not least is the standard Seller which is the most important one and for some reason it’s not here and I’ll figure out where it is. But the standard seller is like it says here, no specific characteristics or unique circumstances that differentiate them from these categories up here. So the other categories up there are relatively outliners but at the end of the day the majority of the owners that we come across will fit into the standard seller category and they don’t really have any unique features.
They might have their property listed with a couple of agents but a lot of the owners that I’ve met over the years, the majority of owners I should say are actually frustrated with the experience. So the standard seller is a great opportunity to come in and pitch our ability as a business to help that seller accomplish their goals. So in order to understand what that is, we have to do a thorough qualification of the seller which is what I’m going to talk about tomorrow.
So a quick recap because I’m just conscious of time here. The key takeaways for today is really to be active and again, as I said, do real estate activities. And that our owners aren’t just door openers, they’re clients, the other 50% of the transaction and that they pay our commission.
So when you’re not busy with buyers and even when you are busy with buyers, you should allocate a big percentage of your day to starting to build relationship with owners and treat them like clients and build rapport with them. Focus on owners that you’ve spoken to on multiple occasions as they’ll see that you have a vested interest to help them actually accomplish their goals and identify profiles of sellers that actually need your help. So this is just scratching the tip of the iceberg in terms of working with owners.
But as I said, the first step is to identify profiles that are willing to work with us and we should be spending time on and that we can add value to. So tomorrow we’ll focus on actually speaking to them, how we question them, and how the information they provide us will help us better understand the last two points in terms I put up here. Find sellers who need my help, find sellers who are motivated to transact, and find sellers with properties I believe I can sell.
So that’s it for today, guys. Thanks very much again for your time, energy and attention and we will see you tomorrow. Enjoy your day.
Bye.