Blog / Leadership
Making a splash with Matthew Scafidi
With bags full of grit and determination, Matthew Scafidi has made a big splash in real estate in a very short period of time. Starting in the industry only five years ago, Matthew is now the director and auctioneer of the Noel Jones Mitcham office in Melbourne’s leafy outer eastern suburbs. He says, “It’s like a drug, real estate, and it’s fair to say I’m addicted to it.”
After many years in the packaging industry, Matthew knew that he had to learn fast to successfully transition. He was determined to make it and prepared to embrace change and do whatever was necessary to be successful. Taking on the mantra of one of his colleagues, ‘You stop learning and you stop earning’, Matthew committed to learning and implementing all that he could from the best. He read everything, listened to John McGrath’s CD’s for months, Hot Topics CD’s, the Mat Steinwede system - he even contacted Mat and then put into practice everything he had learnt. Within a short space of time, he was doing great numbers.
He says, “The great thing about this industry is that there’s so much free information around, so yes, you’ve got to invest in yourself and spend dollars, but if you don’t have those dollars available to you, there’re still ways of doing things. I’ve picked up the phone, I’ve spoken to a number of guns of the industry - if you do that, that’s great, but you’ve got to come out of that two hours later with something that you’re going to implement and put into place. I only ever put five things down on a piece of paper, and I’ll implement those five things when I get back to the office. And they’ve got to be done within 48 hours. If they’re not implemented in that time frame, and a plan is in place, and someone knows that that’s their project, I find it doesn’t happen.”
From the outset Matthew put money into marketing himself. He realised that, “You have to market yourself in this business; people aren’t going to do it for you. You can’t expect the Director, or someone else in the office to do things for you, you’ve got to do it yourself. It all comes back to you.”
He also learnt that he had to make certain adjustments if he was going to clinch the deal. He says, “If you’re in with a gen Y couple, it’s all got to be upbeat and enthusiastic and energetic. If you’re perhaps with a lady who’s getting divorced, or an older person, you need to be able to click into that mode. And I do have a loud voice – well, I say I project my voice, but some people will say that I’ve got a loud voice. I’ve learnt that I need to tone that down to not come across as either intimidating or aggressive. Not that I am, but some people do take it that way, so I’ve got to respect that - either lose business because of it, or adjust.”
Within his first year, Matthew took on a personal assistant. He says, “I was starting to get a little bit of traction at that time, but I thought, ‘If I’m going to do it absolutely properly, and put the systems in place, and have that working for me when I’m perhaps in a lounge room, or trying to do open for inspections etcetera, I need to have someone there to help me; I need to have a partner’. So I went out and hired Tess, and she’s been with me now for four years, and she’s changed her role a number of times in that time. She’s now our Sales Secretary in the office, absolute brilliant quality person, and someone that I could trust absolutely, implicitly.”
Matthew also took out leader advertising very early on, to establish himself and the brand. He explains, “Leader advertising is pretty big in our area. I had a commitment to do that, again spending money that I didn’t have, but started off on a quarter page ad, moved to a half page, and now we’ll always do a full-page ad. I remember Gillian McGrath, on Hot Topics saying a similar thing: that people get used to it if you do a fullpage; you need to do a full page each and every time. People will wonder why you’re not doing the same thing. So again you need to be consistent. So putting those systems into place, committing to it. Just ensuring that there was something in the paper at least once a quarter, was something that I put into place and got a lot of traction from.”
Matthew also examined his approach to auctions. He explains, “The auction process was never something that I was completely comfortable with when I first got into the business. Back in 2009, it was a really tough market, so clearance rates were at an all time low, and I used to revert more to a deadline private sale, or a sale by fixed date. I realised going in and writing $714,000 in the second year, that if I was to continue to keep up with this, I would need to do more auctions. Because you’ve got a 28 day, days on market generally, but you would need to make sure that you are going to get them sold, and that you had clients that were listening to you on the way. So, Mat Steinwede mentioned a number of times that he had a criteria that he’d check off before he actually took on a client. The longer that you’re in the industry, the more chance you’ve got of actually being able to tick those things off.”
“With the auction process, I realised very early that there needed to be more communication to the vendors. I wanted to be conservative in regards to my approach on price always. At the end of the day, I’d prefer to lose a couple of listings by being a little bit more conservative and not over optimistic. So if you’ve got a vendor on board on a conservative price, then I find they’re the ones who get the absolute best results at the end. But the communication throughout the process was vital; we began having a set to sell meeting at the beginning, something that I never did prior.”
Benjamin Franklin once said, ‘When you’re finished changing, you’re finished’. No-one will ever accuse Matthew Scafidi of being finished.
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