Blog / Leadership
Dane Atherton, Welcome to the era of a modern agent
Dane Atherton is a man of the moment for the new paradigm that we all find ourselves in. He’s been a leading agent, one of Australia’s leading auctioneers and a highly sought after trainer. Just over two years ago, Dane took a punt and became the owner and Managing Director of Harcourts Coastal on the Gold Coast.
In that short space of time, the business has grown exponentially and it has become one of the top agencies in Queensland and Australia with a team of over 50 staff, 32 of whom are sales staff. Freed from the burden of selling, Dane has been able to focus on creating the environment and providing the resources that will allow others to succeed, should they choose to.
Dane knows what it takes to succeed in this new paradigm and market of savvier consumers and constant and collaborative connectivity. He explains some of the features of the modern agent.
Catching ‘up pond’
Rather than waiting for the business to come in through the front door, Dane believes that the modern agent understands the method and sweat that is required to grab a buyer before they are ready to buy. He thinks it is passé and late, to wait for someone on the street to walk in to you, call you, or maybe come to your open. He says, “The modern agent has already caught a potential buyer ‘up the pond’ so to speak; they’ve captured them; they’ve communicated with them; they’ve won their business before they’re even ready to list. Agents of our time think, ‘We know there’s going to be X amount of transactions out of that market place every year. I’ve got to become their agent before they need one’. And they methodically go about making that happen.”
Changing the marketing conversation
Dane believes that at some point it was written that the marketing conversation occurred in a particular sequence that ensured it would be very difficult to get a potential vendor across the line. He says, “The old way was to have a marketing conversation, sometimes a scary marketing conversation, with thousands of dollars being talked about, before you’ve actually got the business secured.” He continues, “We got into this habit of saying, ‘I’m your agent, here’s my commission structure; here’s my point of difference; here’s the price I think you’re going to get for your home. And by the way, it’s going to cost you this amount of money. How does that sound? Can you give me ten grand now to get you a really average result?’. That’s how it came across.”
Dane’s changed that. He explains that modern agents flip the marketing conversation around and establish the relationship first before asking for money. He says, “It’s much easier to have a conversation with someone about marketing when they’re already married to you, rather than ‘Geez, I’ll make the decision on how cheap your ads are, or how glossy your brochures look’. We don’t want to make the conversation about that. We want to get the business first.”
Flexible and agile
And he’s not talking about yoga positions. Dane says, “Flexibility and agility are two magnificent words”, and he believes that those customer-centric words characterise agents who can succeed in this new environment. He believes that all of us are sick of being told, ‘We don’t do it that way’ or ‘We can’t help you, that’s not our policy’. He thinks that those responses are not customer focused and modern agents understand that.
Rewriting the script
Just because things have been done in a particular way since the real estate industry began doesn’t cut it with Dane. He believes that modern agents are focused on being helpful and giving the customer what they need and what they want. For example, his agency has bucked a long held real estate tradition and has started putting addresses on signboards. For whatever reason, this has rarely been done but it is enormously helpful for customers. Dane says, “You’ve had the phone call on the hop where someone says, ‘I’m calling about that property with the picket fence out the front’.” Of course, the agent has no idea which property the caller is referring to.
Dane continues, ”You end up getting frustrated with the client; that they don’t know where they are. And how many calls like that do we have to have, before we actually change? If something we’re doing is causing a bad experience, it’s no good for us to say, ‘Well, they should know where they are’.”
Dane believes that real estate agencies should say, ‘Well, if we know this is a problem, people are driving around – we should do something to fix it’. He adds, ”What about people who have never been to the area? New people, interstate people, people on holidays, people staying at a friend’s house? They might not know where they are. So it really just tidies up that customer experience. Again, we’d been told, ‘Don’t do that, how stupid’. It’s made a big difference to our business, it just streamlines it.” And if it makes the customer happy – what’s wrong with that?
Dane illustrates his point with a famous story about Disneyland. “One of the big problems Disneyland had,” Dane says, “was when a family would finish their beautiful day at Disney and they’d spend their life savings getting them there, and they’d come back to the car yard, or the car park, and the car park’s just absolutely chockers; at the end of the day, the kids are tired, they’ve had enough, and they just want to go home. They look out at the car park, and they’ve got a white car rental. And they go to the park attendant, and say, ‘Where’s my car? I’ve lost it’. And the car park attendant would say, ‘What colour is it?’. And they would say, ‘It’s a white rental’. And of course for years, the car parking attendant said, ‘Oh well, that’s not our problem, how can they be so stupid? They should know this’. And the message was: it’s not whether or not you’re the cause of the problem – the problem is still yours, because the experience is bad.”
The times have changed. Our mail is only going to be delivered every two days. Only the agents who heed the new environment, will survive – Dane Atherton is testament to that.
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