Blog / Prospecting
Tom White, CEO Pricefinder.com.au, Prospecting 2011 Style
In tight markets, your prospecting activities become increasingly important to your livelihood. In such markets, the prospecting activity of your competitors increase as well, so how do you stand out from the crowd?
Most of your prospecting will focus on finding new sellers, but buyers are just as important. There are great ways to approach these two types; let's start with finding and helping sellers.
Referrals:
Good performers in real estate will often have strong referral networks established that generate seller prospects. These agents use a persistent form of contact with this network to keep the interest going. Attending or running events and mailouts are most common forms of keeping in touch. If you are going to mail something to a prospect, make sure it is VERY INTERESTING or all your hard work will end up in the bin. At Pricefinder.com.au we make generating great looking reports a breeze and many clients use these in their mailouts. Reports such as upto- the-minute sales activity, complete with property pictures, your logo, and quality data, are the most popular and useful information to your prospect. Keep mailout activity consistent but not overly frequent.
Be the market data source: Nothing inspires a potential seller into action more than a moving market. Make it a ritual to study your local market activity every week. Pricefinder.com.au adds recent sales and listings every night that are available to you through looking over maps or by specifying suburbs or even streets. If you find a new sale, or you know that one has just happened in your patch, why not use PriceFinder to mail an indirect market report with that sale and others to all homes in the same street as the sale, and the adjoining streets as well. Become the source of this good news information for your local market and potential sellers will remember your hard work when they ask for an appraisal.
Better targeted prospecting:
Different markets turnover homes at different rates, but for many metro areas a typical ownership duration is 6 to 10 years.
Using PriceFinder, you can easily filter out these owners from the thousands in your selling patch and create a qualified prospecting list that is easier to manage. Targeting this list with your prospecting activities, rather than a blanket marketing campaign approach, may yield better results for you.
Find overpriced listings:
In falling markets, many listings remain unsold because the selling price is not matching the buyer’s market demands. PriceFinder has a powerful and easy to use tool called ‘Estimates’ providing accurate sales and rental estimates that reflects current market conditions. We advocate using the interactive estimates tool (on your iPad, Laptop or iPhone) with vendors of open listings, both at appraisal time and after some on market time has passed, to help vendors discover the real market conditions their property is in. One compelling reason for using estimates with vendors is that their involvement in the value setting process makes price setting discussions that much easier because they have ‘bought in’ to the value with unemotional data rather than their own opinions. Find open listings with long days on market, sit with the owners and use real data tools to take some emotion out of the price setting equation and get sold!
Using data tools such as Pricefinder. com.au to find and position sellers in the ways I have outlined above will bring you more listings, but what about prospecting for buyers?
Most of us would say that buyers approach us through listings marketing and they would be right, but there are more opportunities than waiting for the buyer to make the approach.
Approach investors: A recent online survey showed 76% of investors are intending to purchase a property in 2011. Investment properties are enjoying a healthy increase in average rental returns, and anecdotal observations point to a new interest in investment property purchases as a cash producer when capital gains are less assured. As with potential sellers, investment buyers are hungry for market information and the hint of a ‘good buy’, so why not become a point of reference for them? There are many investment online forums and local groups / investment clubs providing you with a great platform to be the provider of market information and investment opportunities. Providing these groups with timely market information will increase your chances of finding an investment buyer for your properties.
Pricefinder.com.au is a leading provider of online market information to Real Estate Agents in Australia. PriceFinder makes it easy to produce property research information and reports for listing presentations, prospecting, marketing and general market research. To find out more about PriceFinder please call 1300 665 177 or visit www.pricefinder.com.au.
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