Blog / Prospecting
Phil Harris, The Power of Face to Face Meetings
When managing vendors, there is nothing more powerful than face to face meetings. From a time management perspective, these meetings are often hard to schedule if agents are running from house to house; however Phil Harris from Harris Partners in South Australia, co-host of the Real Estate Hot Topics Program, believes weekly meetings with every vendor are possible if they are planned in advance, have a clear agenda and take place in the agent’s office.
“I have heard every excuse under the sun - that my clients won’t come to office and this that and the other,” says Phil. “But if you platform this at the set to sell meeting agenda and say ‘These are the rules of the relationship in moving forward; that I would expect you to be at my office at 1 o’clock every Tuesday’ then you won’t have a problem.”
1. Phil has a clear agenda with his meetings. As he explains, “The first thing we have got is confirmation of activities taken so far - so that is purely the weekly market place report, the number of people through the property, how many people have had second inspections, how many internet inspections, how many offers have been made, those sorts of things – a real scoreboard of what’s happening in the marketplace.”
2. Second on the agenda are the buyers’ general comments. This is where Phil gets out the call back sheets from the back of the file and he goes through each individual buyer trying to get some price feedback.
3. Number three is specific price feedback. As Phil explains, this is a sequence to actually lead to a price adjustment. Things that may be awkward to talk about like specific price feedback are not awkward if it is included on the agenda.
4. Number four on the agenda is competing properties and recent sales. “We want to look at every surrounding property that has sold within the last 7 days and talk about that,” says Phil.
5. Number Five is revision of the current marketing and strategy. This is where Phil will talk to the owner and say ‘We are now 14 days into the campaign - how do you think things are travelling? Is there any part of the strategy that you feel we could move around right now?’
6. Number 6 is any aspect of the presentation that needs to be changed to overcome buyer expectations. “I don’t want to be getting to week 5 of the campaign and the vendor says, ‘Well if we put some new laminate on the kitchen bench tops then maybe we will get our 1.1 million,’”explains Phil.
7. Number 7 includes general questions and number eight is simply confirming next date and times.
Depending on the circumstances, Phil may or may not give the vendor a copy of the agenda. “I actually like to give them a copy of that agenda in advance and generally, I will send them an email and say something like, ‘Dear Lee, I’m looking forward to our catch up tomorrow at 1pm. Feel free to add anything to the list that you would like to discuss’,” says Phil.
The vendor report is essentially a scoreboard; it is a accumulative number report that is very important, very visual, but also very factual for the owner.
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