Blog / Prospecting

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Melbourne is a tough training ground for real estate agents – because the market is so competitive it is sometimes likened to Underbelly.

The Melbourne Boys feature profiles three stellar real estate agents who each started their career in the industry young and have worked hard and smart to develop into agents others aspire to be like.

Whether real estate was their first job, or they came to it from other careers, each has drawn on their life skills and trained relentlessly to carve their own niche in Melbourne’s streets.

Billy Schroeder from Ray White, Sam Rigopoulos from hockingstuart and Andrew Keleher from Jellis Craig each have their own strategies for getting noticed – and they are at the top of the game as a result.

Lessons in Keeping Prospects on the Boil

With Billy Schroeder

With a background as a defence forces chef, real estate is not an obvious career step, but it has paid dividends for Billy Schroeder.

Mr Schroeder, 30, started in real estate four years ago with Ray White Ferntree Gully and has found his niche as a prospecting powerhouse who doesn’t work at weekends.

Structured System

Mr Schroeder credits his six years in the army, spending time in East Timor and Iraq, with teaching him the structure, discipline and uniformity that has helped him approach $1 million in commissions in a short time. Not even making the decision to stop working on Saturday and Sunday created a dip for him. “I listed 18 last month which was my best month ever. It hasn’t affected my business one iota,” Mr Schroeder said.

The secret to his success is systems and just doing whatever is needed – especially door-knocking. “I would just go out there and do what I had to do,” he said, explaining it was this attitude, which saw him spend up to six hours a day knocking doors, that led to 500 appraisals in his first year.

“I like to get up close and personal with people as opposed to over the phone. I think that it’s the first impression - that first second as soon as they see you - that they’ll judge you by and decide then if they like you. So being polished is a big part at the front door,” Mr Schroeder explained.

All this groundwork on his database, systems and building a good team set up a strong foundation; Mr Schroeder was named Ray White Group’s Rookie of the Year and saw his income jump. Success breeds success so he established prospecting, management and administration teams to deliver the level of service promised.

“I’m working now towards just doing appraisals, listing and working my database. Paul is more my management department and Joey’s been with me for a few months now - he manages a few but I like to call him the prospecting division - and Rhiannon’s the admin department,” he said.

Expanding on the reputation he built by door-knocking repeatedly in his farm area, Mr Schroeder sets himself apart from his competitors by delivering something extra by way of hand-delivered cards throughout the year.

Personal Touch

“I would hand deliver the Christmas card and also a little balloon or a table ornament - that was my point of difference. I also send a Valentine’s Day card. It’s that point of contact: ‘Billy’s gone the extra mile; he’s dropped this off at the door’. I’d spend from the 1st of December to the 15th just doing that and maybe one or two other appointments throughout the day, but it’s worked for me.”

And when it comes to keeping these prospects on the boil, Mr Schroeder sends quarterly suburb updates with statistics on Ferntree Gully, marketplace status – both good and bad - and median prices in the mail, an emailed market update once a month, a phone call and card on their birthday, plus occasional ‘You’ letters.

“My first ‘You letter’ was my Rookie of the Year letter. I sent it out to my database and, calling my database one, two years afterwards, they’re still turning around and going ‘Congratulations on your promotion’. They think I own the office. So it just goes to show how much they read of your letters,” Mr Schroeder said.

Energised Listing

If he knocks on a door and someone wants to know more, Mr Schroeder's energetic, high paced and enthusiastic listing presentation starts. This includes sitting down with the prospect, running through his iPad presentation and asking "If we can come to an agreement with some type of advertising and commission, would you be happy to move forward?" Not deterred by a "no", he keeps asking up to three times, and by then has the business.

 

While the iPad presentation includes the usual statistics, comparable sales, information about the office and Mr Schroeder's team, he also talks about his previous career so the prospect gets to know him. This is where his presentation clincher comes into play: a photo of him with ex-Prime Minister John Howard shaking hands in Baghdad. The photo instantly instills faith in his abilities.

"Would you be happy to move forward?" is Mr Schroeder's final question and he says, "As soon as they commit and I shake their hand, I just pull out the authority and start filling it out."

Strong Back up

The team splits the workload between them, ensuring all vendors receive a high level of service - which Mr Schroeder thinks borders on "over-service" at times.

After listing the property he introduces the management agent and runs through the campaign preparation. His team does all call backs, writes up vendor and feedback reports and keeps in contact daily while Mr Schroeder negotiates price and meets with the vendor every week to go over the campaign.

"The feedback I've received so far is that they are extremely happy with the service from myself, Rhiannon and whoever's managing the property. So I think, if anything, they feel over-services, rather than underserviced, and that phone call from me in between certainly helps," he explained.

To complete his strategy, Mr Schroeder helped set up a business networking group comprising 24 professionals, including an accountant, plumber, electrician and an IT person, who meet weekly. They have built strong friendships and networks over the past three years and help each other out whenever possible.

When looking to his future, Mr Schroeder plans to systemise the business to almost run itself with a database manager, listing manager and support staff. He will spend one or two days a week working in the business and hopes to expand into public speaking and training.

 

Shoot for the stars

With Sam Rigopoulous

Selling door-to-door was in his blood before Sam Rigopoulos started with hockingstuart six years ago, paving the way for him to become a company director within four years.

Training in the field

As an eager 22 year old, fresh from selling carpet and Kirby vacuum cleaners, Mr Rigopoulos had the right start to jump into sales head first. “I was given a $4500 machine and told to knock on somebody’s door and convince them to allow me the time for a demonstration and in return they'd get a free steam cleaner. Looking back, it was probably a baptism of fire into sales but a great breeding ground for what I was about to embark on,” he explained. Kirby’s structured presentation taught Mr Rigopoulos to follow a plan and ask the right questions – something he constantly draws on even as a hockingstuart director.

Mr Rigopoulos was instrumental in setting up an EBU (Effective Business Unit) in the group’s Carlton office and then started the process again with a completely new office in Northcote. “I've since learnt that if you can run an EBU, you’re halfway to running an office,” he said.

Starting from scratch, Mr Rigopoulos and his team had no stock to sell and nothing to share other than their experience, so they went back to basics. They attended auctions and ran open for inspections off the little stock they had, then put the results into a weekly report with commentary on the marketplace and started a letterbox drop campaign.

The value of a database

“We got as many buyers and prospects from appraisals as we could onto [the campaign] and we quickly found that we were getting emails from people requesting that we add their friends who were thinking of selling, and their father who was thinking of downsizing and it’s just steamrolled into this enormous program that we run,” he said, adding it grew to almost 1000 contacts within six months.

“It’s been probably the backbone of our traction. It's now to the point where, if there's a glitch in the system and it doesn't go out or somebody doesn't receive it, we are receiving emails or phone calls asking ‘What's happened? Why haven't I got it? Am I off? Get me on,’ and that speaks volumes,” Mr Rigopoulos said.

Moving his focus from making his own sales to running an EBU and then an office has made Mr Rigopoulos realise his role is bigger than just him. “I learnt that I am responsible for more than myself now, which is probably the biggest lesson. I've learnt that every decision that you make as a business owner impacts the lives of the people below you.”

On top of his role as a director and in training other hockingstuart staff, Mr Rigopoulos is still keeping up with the same level of sales - from prospecting and listing presentations to database contact - making organisation a key factor to his success. He now focuses heavily on buyer management to make his mark.

Don't forget the buyer

“Very little of [buyer management] is done in our service area and it just seems ludicrous that the people who are screaming out for your attention and your help are not being serviced; yet they’re the people who you are going to try and convince to use your services in five years time when they’re thinking of a move,” he said, emphasising how important nurturing buyers was in building a real estate business.

Other strategies Mr Rigopoulos uses in his prospecting are price drive letters where he will concentrate on a street a week with the letters and then cold call that street. “Hot spotting is very effective in our service area; if another agent has a board up, you know that within three or six months’ time another property will come up in that street or a neighbouring street, so we'll do letterbox drops systematically every week around our own zone.” But one of his best methods harks back to his days as a vacuum cleaner salesman. “I'll always look out for opportunities: is there a painter at the front of the house, is there a removalist, a gardener, cleaner? I just can't help myself – I get out of the car and knock on the door, business card in hand, and just try to find out what's going on,” Mr Rigopoulos

said, adding if nobody is home he will write down the details and communicate with the owner until he knows what is happening at the property.

“That creates a lot of off-market opportunities that if you’re servicing buyers well, you can mix and match. If you’re not managing buyers, you can't make that side of prospecting as effective as it could be, so everything is interlinked.”

Reality Bites

Another lesson Mr Rigopoulos has learnt is that sometimes it’s better to just be “real” with a prospect, rather than stick to an agenda or script. This way you get to the heart of their reason for selling, whether it is money issues, a divorce or needing to move. If an agent understands the reasons, they are more likely to connect with the vendor.

“Sometimes it's not all about money and all about how good you are. Real life is more important than a lot of the things that we think are important as sales agents. If people like you, can connect and you can maintain rapport, you will always win the business over market share or clearance rates or whatever is perceived to be a good selling tool.”

Never stop learning

With Andrew Keleher

After 22 years with one real estate organisation, Andrew Keleher decided it was time for a new challenge and went it alone with Jellis Craig at the beginning of this year, staying close to his Melbourne patch.

Mr Keleher started as a junior salesperson at 19 with Philip Webb. He met Mr Webb at a careers evening when he was 15 and backed that up with work experience at 16 and 17. “I’d do anything just to get in the office - work with rentals, work with whoever - and was just determined that it was for me. I really enjoy it,” he explained. After a shaky start where he sold nothing in his first two months and then five properties within a few weeks, Mr Keleher knew he was in the right career and set about learning from the best.

 

“I decided at a pretty early age to get to know a lot of the top performers around Melbourne - around Australia - and just become friends with them. Most of my best mates are probably the best performers in Melbourne. We’d get together and just share ideas,” he said.

Reaching new heights

In 1997 he and a friend combined a three-month trip to Europe and the US with attending the Anthony Robbins Life Mastery Course. “It was a real awakening to say, ‘well if I’m going to do this job I want to be the best at it. I want to be the number one agent', so I just went out and learnt everything I could.”

This mission to be the best meant for the next three years Mr Keleher bought people lunch, attended breakfast groups, worked on his database and joined every training session he could. “I took my business from $250,000 back in 1997 to well over $1 million within a couple of years.” He also recognised he was not helping anyone by working himself into the ground without taking a break, so took a week or two off every three months and the odd long weekend. “It meant I was always organised and ringing everybody making sure they weren’t ready to list when I was away, and as soon as I got back I’d ring them again. So they’d probably receive two calls that they wouldn’t have got if I hadn’t have taken off that weekend or that week,” Mr Keleher said.

Standing out

Working in the competitive suburbs of Melbourne meant Mr Keleher had to perfect his technique, not just rely on business coming to him. “The top-end guys, they know their stuff. The other guys are the ones who are going to really have to lift their game,” he laughed.

Making phone calls was an important part of Mr Keleher’s prospecting method, with ongoing communication his key strategy. He made sure he met vendors at their home for final inspections, kept them in the loop during the selling process, called them between the sale and settlement and sent information that was relevant.

“It’s not about spring has sprung, it’s time to sell; it’s about what’s gone on in the marketplace and what’s about to happen, this is our belief in the market, this is the trend and interest rates and some articles of interest you might have pulled out of the paper. If I give them information that’s useful, they’re going to come back to me,” he said.

One of Mr Keleher’s most successful letters was sending an article called 101 Ways to Tell Your Child You Love Them to his database saying, “I received this from a friend and thought you might enjoy it. Regards, Andrew Keleher.”

“There was no phone number, there was no, ‘Do you want to list your house with me?’ There was nothing. It was just something for them, and I’ll still go to houses now and it’s on the fridge. It’s about giving something to people that you’d love to receive. If someone sent me that I’d keep it on the fridge forever,” he said.

Ultimately it comes down to adapting to the vendor’s circumstances and being willing to ask for the sale. Mr Keleher cites his proven closer as, “Is there any real reason why we just can’t get started tonight?”.

Each one of the Melbourne Boys has his own recipe for success. Sam Rigolopoulos is always on the lookout for opportunities, noticing the little changes that might mean something big down the track; and Billy Schroeder knows the importance of systems when it comes to maximising prospecting.

Andrew Keleher was determined to be the best agent he could and surrounded himself with successful people, following Anthony Robbins’ advice: “If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you'll achieve the same results”.

It took time for each of these real estate agents to achieve their goals, but they never wavered from their aims. The key is to find your strength, map out your success plan and then be single-minded about making it happen, just like the Melbourne Boys did.

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