Blog / Prospecting
Michael Clarke, Cherie Humel Clarke, Taking the leap of faith and reaping the rewards
I’ll be listing and selling until they put me in the grave.
Michael Clarke knows how to sell. When he was a child he sold lollies door to door, and he put himself through university selling encyclopaedias at a time when the CD ROM was king.
After working in advertising and finding it wasn’t for him, Michael finally found his calling in real estate and worked with a prestige brand for a number of years. He says, “I’ll be listing and selling until they put me in the grave.”
But administration and the back end of real estate was never his thing. The day his gorgeous wife, Cherie Humel Clarke stepped in for his assistant changed their lives. Cherie was an architect and project manager for a major construction firm and could instantly see how Michael’s business could be streamlined and improved. Michael and Cherie realised that if they combined forces, a great business would be created.
They ended up working together and Cherie says, “We were happy where we were. Yes, we wanted to grow within where we were, but the opportunities weren’t there. We’re very ambitious people and when you eat, sleep and breathe property – you want more.
There was just an inevitable path for us that we were going to do our own thing, and whether that was within the current brand or whether it was our own thing, it was always on the cards.”
They decided to take a leap of faith and, while it took a number of years of planning, Michael and Cherie eventually struck out on their own to form a boutique agency, Clarke and Humel in the beautiful seaside suburb of Manly on the Northern Beaches of Sydney.
Michael and Cherie have both always been passionate about real estate but they have found since they started their own brand, their passion has been taken to a whole new level. Cherie says, “I grew up in a family of property. We talked about property at the breakfast table and at dinner every day. Your passion can be channelled in so many different directions and if you harness your skill set and align it with your passion - mine was property and people, and Michael’s was sales and people - then you come up with a pretty good solution.”
Michael says, “It was exciting before but now it’s off-the-charts exciting. When it’s your own brand and it’s your signboard and your marketing and you’re representing who you are out there to the world, not only is it even more satisfying, but every result that we get reflects on us.”
They both have areas of expertise. Michael lists, sells, negotiates and keeps deals together while Cherie handles sales but also human resources, financial controls and marketing and administration.
Cherie believes that working together, rather than tearing them apart, “keeps the marriage together”. And Michael says, “We feel like we’re on the same little path together and it’s a fabulous journey. We’re really sharing the wins, the losses; we don’t feel like we’re on two different playing fields and we can throw all of our energy in the same direction and it’s brought us closer.”
We focus like blazes on them and get them sold.
They have made a conscious decision to keep their enterprise exquisite and tight and to only ever handle seven to ten listings at any one time. As Michael says, “We focus like blazes on them and get them sold.” He explains that with smaller numbers of listings, vendors receive, “higher levels of service, higher quality of service and we make sure that within four weeks of it going on the market, we’ve found the highest buyer. We focus on the settlement – how is our buyer and how is our vendor going to feel upon the settlement of the property – and that’s led to fabulous momentum very, very quickly.”
Michael explains that with a small office, “If somebody calls in and they say, ‘Hey, look, what do you have?’, the person that they’re speaking to will know of the property and be able to help them. We can give a much, much higher level of service.”
Their success has been founded on two cornerstones – outstanding customer service and hitting the phones. Michael says that, “We have stopped going out to dinner on a Saturday night. We’re exhausted; we’re flogged at the end of our open homes on a Saturday because we put our heart and our soul into it and make sure that everybody that comes through our open homes feels that they were paid attention.” He adds, “There’s no secret to lead generation. It’s funny – I don’t know how many CDs and books I’ve read – and in the first week in real estate that I was there I said, ‘Well, look, what do I do?’ and the response was, ‘Get on the phones’. And that’s what we do. We still to this day do cold calling. We still let people know about forthcoming auctions or if we’ve just listed a property.”
In the future, they may consider expanding, but as Cherie says, “We’ve got a model that works right now so we’re not going to throw it out the door, but we’re going to make minor improvements, and with the improvements will come growth. And it will just be continuously watched so we take the steps in the right direction.”
Michael adds, “We want to remain small and keep the standards really high. There are plenty of listings and sales out there for everyone. It’s like that old saying that I learnt on Hot Topics years ago, ‘We don’t want to be the biggest agency in the area, we just want to make sure that the listings that we have sell for the biggest price’.”
And it’s clearly working. In three days recently, Michael and Cherie sold three properties ranging in price from $465,000 to $3.010m. Nice work if you can get it and as Michael and Cherie prove, you can get it if you try.
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