Sanders Property Agents’ Jed Wood credits his long apprenticeship in real estate with developing the service area expertise that allows him to aim for more than $600,000 in commission this financial year.
The confident 29-year-old from the dominant Jannali agency in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire spent seven years watching from the sidelines before he moved into sales in 2005, but his figures show he was watching every step his mentors took in that time. Averaging seven listings and six sales a month, with sale prices sitting around $600,000, Mr Wood wrote $400,000 in the year ending 2008 and then backed it up last year with $405,000 after just nine months of work (enjoying an extended honeymoon with his new wife in the other three months). Based on this, his goal of $660,000 this year is well within reach.
Inspired to make real estate his career when he was 12, Mr Wood finished his Higher School Certificate exams one Friday and started his first day with Sanders the following Monday. "I went around with my parents when they were looking to buy real estate and came across a man who I liked, who looked like he was living a good lifestyle,” Mr Wood explained. Upon further examination, he discovered the agent had four or five cars, a 42ft boat and a waterfront property. This was the lifestyle he wanted.
As an eager beginner, Mr Wood started by putting up sale signs and meeting pest inspectors and then moved into property management for a few years. “In 2003 I got an opportunity to put my foot into the door of the sales department. I learnt from the principal Ray Nelson,” he explained about the man who has been with Sanders for nearly 40 years of its 50-year history. “He always emphasises that you’ve got to look after people and do the right thing by them. And be in this for the long term,” he said.
Using those words as his guide, Mr Wood was spurred on to develop his own service area and became the local expert. “I was allowed to get out into full-time selling in 2005. Leading up to that I had to do a lot of prospecting in my patch. I’ve built up a database to 1000 potential sellers looking to sell in the next 5-10 years,” he explained.
These figures didn’t come from thin air, but instead Mr Wood pounded the streets to build his contact list. “I started with one street at a time. Ray told me to start there and come back when I’d finished. It took me two days to finish it properly,” he said, and by properly he means doorknocking every property, chatting to the owners or leaving a card behind and following up with anyone who didn’t call him back.
“I was finding five people a day who didn’t want an appraisal straight away, but were thinking of selling in the future. If you speak to enough people you start building the numbers,” Mr Wood explained.
Mr Wood started off with a 3x5 card system and Sanders started using Complete Data in 2006. He now utilises the Service Area and Contact Data components to build his impressive database. “There are 800 dwellings in my service area. I’ve made contact with 480 of those and gone outside of my suburb to find my other 520 potential sellers.”
After starting with doorknocking to learn his area inside out, Mr Wood used blanket letterbox drops asking owners if they would be interested in the sales prices for their suburb. “I got some inbound enquiry from that. Once you’ve got properties on the market then you can start building momentum, following up with people after open for inspections and different buyer enquiry that you can convert into potential sellers,” he said.
“I love the buyer enquiry because I’ve got an opportunity to form a relationship with people to help them find their next destination,” Mr Wood explained, and said he aimed to get ahead of his competition by putting buyers into an automated trail, where they receive regular SMS’s or emails from him to gather information on their needs.
Constantly pushing himself to be better, Mr Wood said he was motivated by hearing World Champion Salesperson Robert Matheson from LJ Hooker Tuggeranong speak about his daily routine and vowed to spend more time prospecting and developing himself. “If I want to get to that next level I’m going to have to block out even more time.”
“Be open to the coaching, spend some money on yourself for education and then start spending some of your own money on marketing,” he advised agents wanting to improve their figures, adding agents must be willing to put in the hard yards before the dividends would pay. “[If agents are not succeeding] they’re probably not being true to themselves and not giving it a good crack - not making the telephone calls, not taking the action, not being committed with clean data and forgetting about the outside world and concentrating on the next sale.”
With a prospecting program set up a year in advance and a commitment of $5000 last year, Mr Wood knows the value of his service area knowledge. One of his most successful prospecting programs was conducted after his wedding last year. “I sent a postcard with a photo of my wife and I saying, ‘We had a great day and now we’re going on a three-month honeymoon. If you have any enquiries or need some help, the office is there to assist’. We sent another one after six weeks with a photograph from Santorini saying, ‘We’re having a great time and looking forward to our return, the office is there – give them a call if you need to’.” This program cost $1200 and led to $60,000 in business.
His best campaigns to date though are the most simple, where Mr Wood sends a letter to his entire service area offering a free market report, which he follows up with a phone call. “I can never overemphasise how important the follow up phone call is,” he said. “There are plenty of examples where marketing is in your face the whole time, but it’s not until you’re contacted by someone who’s trying to engage you that you take action.”