Allison Mifsud is one of those rare people in real estate who has spent her entire career with one agency. For the last eleven years, Allison has been with First National. She said, “It’s a safe brand. It’s all I’ve ever known and to me it’s like a family.”
Working at Epping, in Sydney’s North West in a sharp and tight team, in a highly competitive market, Allison has found success by changing the way she approaches listings. “I realised,” she said, “it wasn’t about me – it was about the customer.”
For example, Allison has made her prelisting kits more about how she can help her clients rather than a treatise on how wonderful she is. She said, “What the client wants to know is how I can help them. It has become a point of difference. And when they know you’re helping them, they know that you’re putting them first at all times.”
As she continued, “The pre-list kit is now all about the owner; what they need to know about getting onto the market; how they need to prepare their home. At the back is information about myself, the office and recent sales and testimonials.”
Listening presentations last more than an hour and a half and are very much about working with the client and creating an inclusive relationship, rather than a dictatorial one.
Allison divides the presentation into chapters. She said, “I go through them one by one. We go through each topic and I don’t close it until I’m comfortable that we both agree.” So in the chapter on price, rather than saying, “This is what I think” Allison asks them what they think. As she explained, “I then talk about what I feel the property is worth and back it up with comparable sales but I work with them on that, rather than me telling them what I think its worth.”
Allison goes into extensive detail about buyers - who the buyer may be, where they’re going to come from and how her agency is going to find them. “I give them a list of the buyers for the last six months, a photo of the property, the address, the surname of the buyer and the suburb they came from because it shows we know where our buyers come from, and we know how to target them,” she said. With large numbers of buyers coming from out of area, Allison has found this to be a particularly effective approach.