Blog / Prospecting
Steve Grimbas, For the love of the sale
When people tell Brisbane agent, Steve Grimbas that he should be working on real estate, not in it - he laughs.
In the industry for more than 20 years, Steve is the owner of the very successful Place Property in Nundah in inner city Brisbane. He loves selling and he couldn’t imagine doing anything else. “I just don’t think people have a better opportunity to make a living than doing what we do. It’s just a privilege to be able to walk into people’s homes and get handed the keys and, let’s face it, nine out of ten people we deal with are lovely people and they pay us big bucks to help them move at the same time. So I just don’t think I could get rewarded to do anything and get as much enjoyment in doing anything else than what I currently do.”
One of the things that attracted him to the Place brand was that the founders of the brand still sell. He says, “The people that founded Place, to this day, as we speak right now, they are still actively selling. I like the fact that the people that started the brand have that much interest in it that they’re concerned that their brand is still doing well by actively being a part of it.”
As the owner of the business, Steve understands his role in the organisation. He wants to keep his hand in selling but he is also a leader and he believes that he has a responsibility to nurture and grow his staff and his business. He ensures that the love is shared around and every member of his staff has the opportunity to do well. All his leads come from his own database and he says, “I don’t want to write massive figures. I want to sit around that $500-$600K mark - that’s enough for me.”
When he started with Place, four and a half years ago, he stripped the business back to a skeleton staff. There was just himself and his long time colleague and stake holder in the business, Narelle. Together with a small property management team they started to build the business, brickby- brick. Steve recalls, “I knew the hard road that we had to slog but we were prepared to do it again with the knowledge that we were going to do it better this time through.”
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He now has six staff in sales who are doing 4 to 5 sales a month that adds up to 20 to 30 sales a month. Steve says, “We’re working towards 30 deals a month.
Our philosophy' is quality rather than quantity. We want to have good quality salespeople who all have a good income. I don’t want a superstar that’s feeding half the side of town and the other guys in poverty at the other end. I want everyone to be earning a good living and enjoying coming to work with one another. And that generally means if they’re doing good numbers, Doctor Sale is a wonderful thing. So if they’re selling, they stay happy.”
Owner as lead generator
Another key part of Steve’s strategy is that he sees himself as being responsible for keeping lead generation moving. He says, “You’ve got to continually be doing something, whether that is building your database, having your quarterly reports, your newsletter to your community, doing something inside the community, be it school or a sporting organisation. You’ve just got to get out and get amongst it, on a regular basis.”
Part of his approach to lead generation has been to get serious about the agency’s visual systems. The Place brand is stunning, but Steve has also made his mark with quality listing presentations, selling plans, prospecting marketing materials and suburb reports. Realising that speed to market in real estate is everything, he employed aninhouse designer with astonishing results.
Steve says, “It actually came from frustration. For so many years, I’ve seen so many good things and wanted our materials to look like that. Quite often you have to outsource to get that done, which can be a frustrating experience. We realised that we had regular campaigns for many different things and if we had an in house person, we could rely upon, we could get things completed quickly. Our designer understands what we’re trying to portray and what we’re trying to put out there in the marketplace.”
One size does not fit all
Steve has some of the best agents in Brisbane working for him. He thinks it is because he and Narelle are leaders that allow flexibility and autonomy. He explains, “We add to their careers. I think that sometimes there’s too much emphasis on agents having to go down one road. I think if you’ve got a good salesperson that knows their game, understands the way that the whole industry works, you can let them decide how they want to work. Some will want a PA - and you have others that will want to move down the road of the EBU. Regardless of which direction they go, if that’s what they want to do, that’s right for them.”
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