with Grant Harrod CEO LJ Hooker
"Nothing disrupts an industry more than if your customer thinks or believes that they are no longer important"
Grant Harrod, the CEO of LJ Hooker, is ready to face the challenge of digital disruption. Grant says, “We talk about technology being disruptive. We talk about social media. Let me tell you nothing disrupts an industry more than if your customer thinks or believes that they are no longer as important to you as you are to yourself. I think we all live in the same glasshouse. This is not just something that’s specific to our brand ultimately - if we as an industry don’t change, it’s going to be very hard for anyone to stand out.”
To survive the brave new world, Grant believes that the customer should be placed right at the centre. He explains that the company has consulted with consumers and there has been a consistent message. He says, “When consumers are asked the question, ‘what do you see or think about real estate agents?’, the consistent reply is that they’re in it for themselves. That’s a danger.”
Grant believes that to counter this dangerous impression, it is necessary for agents to become experts in their local communities. He says, “Increasingly what is becoming more relevant is that our offices and the people within those offices are experts in the local community, because let’s be up front, people don’t buy property anymore - they predominately are buying a lifestyle. When they sit down with an agent, they want to know what that lifestyle is about. They want to know what things they can enjoy, not just within the property that they might be looking to purchase, but within that community they’re going to live in.”
He continues, “It is imperative that we have that ability to be hyper-localised but then hyper-efficient as well. The efficiency will come through better workflow management. We used to manage the trust account for all of our individual offices going back probably 20 odd years ago. That’s been moved back to our individual offices. These are things we’ve got to look at that ultimately enable our agents to be better real estate agents because that’s really where the revenue income opportunity will come from. That’s how they can be dollar productive.”
A brand like LJ Hooker, Grant believes, can carry the load and really help agents to focus on building great customer relationships and, with its vast assets, invest millions of dollars in technology that facilitate greater customer engagement and greater efficiency for the running of a business. Further, a company like LJ Hooker can protect agents. It can look out to the horizon and anticipate where the next play will come from, where the next opportunity will arise and prepare for the next threat. For agents, being part of the LJ Hooker family, Grant believes, creates critical leverage.
Grant says, “We have to invest in opportunities, in service and in capabilities that as an individual, you probably wouldn’t be able to do, whether it was through money, whether it was just through time and so on, and create that unique experience so that people will want to be a part of a network.”
What LJ Hooker offers is a path forward. Grant says, “Next-gen for us is not just about an IT system, but an IT ecosystem of the future. What an office is required to do today is not just the trust account; it’s not just accounting systems, payroll systems and so on. It is about interfacing with your customers’ systems. What if you have a big property management portfolio? We need to be able to interface with our landlords. A lot of them have not just one property but multiple properties. They’re looking for a much more sophisticated relationship around reporting and so on, because they have to obviously manage their taxation requirements. These are the things that come out of a large portfolio of assets.”
Further, Grant adds, “Then you move onto uploading data into portals and uploading data into all sorts of other third party platforms. The world is changing dramatically; we need to shift with that as well. I’d suggest the days of an ‘all you can eat’ kind of real estate technology system are probably gone. The other thing about our network is we’ve got an immensely diverse network. We go from offices that are doing the biggest property transactions in Australia, from say Bill Malouf from Double Bay, to offices that are doing the most number of properties sold in terms of volume. Their requirements are quite different. Clearly with technology now, CRM is very important so what we’ve seen is a shift from technology being very back office focused to now becoming more front office.”
Grant wants to see the company build tools and applications to improve customer engagement. He says, “That’s the front office component but you need to have that eco-system in place that can support and allow you to move forward and scale quickly to support all these new requirements. Our focus very much is about wanting to create a working relationship for our offices where we can do some of that heavy lifting.”
A recent report from the Committee for Economic Development, Australia’s future workforce?, claimed that the wave of the industrial revolution we are currently in the midst of will fundamentally reshape business activity. Grant Harrod knows what’s coming and how to ride the waves and stay afloat.
Appointed to his position in May 2014, Grant Harrod, was the former chief executive at direct mail company Salmat. Grant says, “At one point in time, Salmat was very well known for being the biggest direct mail company in Australia. In fact, it lodged 60% of all commercial mail for Australia Post.”Before Salmat, Harrod spent 13 years with business supplier Corporate Express Australia.
LJ Hooker is a franchise network of more than 640 offices across the Asia- Pacific. Grant says, in terms of brand awareness, “Unprompted awareness of LJ Hooker is incredibly high. It’s so high, it would rival any brand in Australia, even outside of real estate. Currently over 50% of people, when asked the question ‘Name a real estate agent’, would name LJ Hooker. The challenge now is to match consideration with awareness.”