Blog / Prospecting
Julie Ormston, Doing it her way
Only in the real estate game for ten years, Julie Ormston knows what it takes to be successful. Julie is repeatedly ranked amongst the top real estate agents in Western Australia and between the years of 2007 – 09, she won three Masters awards which are awarded by the Real Estate Institute of WA to agents who sell more than $35 million worth of property, or more than 70 properties, in a year.
Julie recently set up the first ONEAgency in Western Australia and she specialises in the northern corridor of Woodvale and surrounding areas in Perth.
Very early on, Julie understood that providing outstanding customer care was the key to enduring success. She says, “When I went into real estate, I could see very quickly that if you delivered great service it was going to reap dividends. I’ve got clients – I’m only in my tenth year – and I’m just about to settle a property which is the fourth house that I’ve sold for these clients. I worked out a lifetime value of clients the other day and it was $650,000.” Julie’s exacting standards and her particularly unique approach to caring for her clients has ensured that her business continues to grow and prosper. The majority of her business is generated from referrals. But even with referrals, Julie has a distinct way of handling them. Julie explains, “Three quarters of our business is from the referrals. We have a referral program as part of our lead generation. We reward for referrals. So someone who gives us a referral will get a $250 cheque if the referral sells with us and the property settles. We get two to six a month.” At every stage of the sale process, Julie and her team anticipate and demonstrate outstanding care for their clients and an innovative approach to marketing. For example, Julie explains:
When a property is under contract
“We put the sold sticker up. We encourage clients to take a photo of themselves and the family with the photo board and the sold sticker. We make a big fuss of them. We let them know what’s going to happen before settlement and that we’re going to have final inspections to do. We send them a final inspection checklist so they can walk through the property like the buyer and be prepared for that.”
At settlement
“If the clients are in my business development area, they receive, if they’re sellers, pizzas from a fantastic gourmet pizza place that I use on the night before they leave, and if they’re buyers, pizzas the night that they arrive in the home. And they’re really, really well received. So they get beautiful gourmet pizzas; if they’ve got, you know, 20 mates helping them shift there’s enough pizzas for 20 mates. And when someone asks, ‘Oh, who’s done this?’ my client will say, ‘My agent’. That’s what you want them saying, ‘My agent, my agent, my agent’. “They also get a beautiful three-tiered boxed gift that just looks amazing, and I have a sensational local company that does those for me. And we try and deliver those, wherever possible, to their workplace because we want their friends and colleagues at work to see how amazing their agent is too.”
After Settlement
“It’s very important that clients get contact, you know, a month to six weeks after settlement. It gives you an opportunity to resolve and remedy rather than have them fester and stop thinking well of you. It’s also a great opportunity to ask for a testimonial, if you haven’t already secured one from them. We take them verbally. You’ll find that people are just too busy to put pen on paper but if you say to them, ‘When your friends ask what we were like to deal with, what will you say about us?’ and they’ll put it in words and you can zhush it up a little bit and read it back to them and say, ‘Is it okay if I use that in my marketing?’ and they’ll always say yes.
“It’s also a good time to ask for referrals because, once they’ve moved on and they’ve moved on to a new area, people are asking them, ‘Oh, who did you use? What were they like to deal with?’ and they might have some good leads for you.”
Anniversary Letters
“We send out anniversary letters that go out to everybody that moves into our core suburb - the ‘Welcome to Woodvale’ letter, and for every year after. The letter includes a voucher for one free pizza when you buy one at a local gourmet pizza bar. After a while, the purchaser thinks that you actually sold them the property.”
Support Local Schools
“We support the local schools quite heavily so sponsorship is actually a very big part of our lead generation as well. I really love to support the schools because my kids went there and I think it’s great to give back to the community that’s giving back to you. We do a quarterly newsletter, so that goes to just over 3,000 homes, and we’ve just signed up with iRealty so we’re going to be doing a lot more electronic marketing. That will give us the capacity to put out a really high quality newsletter, possibly fortnightly.”
Survey 250 established clients
Julie recently conducted a comprehensive survey of her clients. “I asked them things like, ‘How did they first find out about us when they used us?’; ‘Why did they decide to use us?’; ‘What did we do well?’; ‘What could we have done better?’; and ‘When their friends ask about us, what do they say about us?’. So it was very short, sharp. We had an excellent response.
“And it was just amazing, the people that responded. You know, people who you thought were happy with us but they weren’t that ecstatic, they’re kind of reserved people. And the responses were just fabulous. It was really encouraging for the whole team. It really lifted the whole team because they could see how important it is for everybody in our EBU to be delivering this fantastic service.
“We’re all very focused on commission and price, and when we lose a listing opportunity we always think, ‘Oh, well, it’s ‘cause they undercut us; they were cheaper than us.’ But price just didn’t come into it at all. The two key things were referrals and testimonials from friends, family, that made them use us - and area knowledge. So they were looking for that area expert.”
One of the reasons Julie started her own business was because she wanted the freedom to do things her way. And Julie’s way certainly seems to be working!
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