Working out of the Nundah Place office in Brisbane, Tristan Rowland handles about 80 to 90 transactions a year. To work those numbers requires creating multiple flows of gold.
Tristan explains, “Everyone thinks I make 200 to 300 phone calls a day and it’s actually quite the opposite. These days I probably make about six to ten outbound prospecting calls and the rest sort of comes to us from those streams that we’ve set up.” The key is to have as many streams as possible. Listed below are some of Tristan’s rivers of gold.
Tristan says, “The big one for us right now would be just sold letters. They are absolutely critical.” Make sure the letters are not generic and tell the story of the house and the sale, such as ‘We had three offers’ or ‘It was on the market with another agent’.
Again, tell the story of the listings. Don’t do what everyone else does. Inject your personality into the letter.
Tristan says, “If you send a bad letter, don’t send it, my opinion. All you’re doing is educating people why not to go with you. Our letters look great.” Show the icons of the property. Use the power of images.
Tristan says, ‘I normally have about 900 people floating in my pipeline at any point in time. That’s past sellers, past buyers. I’ve got one client who I class as platinum. Never sold a house through me. Has referred me 26 properties, so it’s just a case of really looking after her and everyone we’ve serviced who she has referred has just been knocked out of the park from a satisfaction point of view.”
Building advocates is everything in your real estate career. The more advocates you’ve got, the more streams you’ve got. Tristan says, “At the end of the year, we give out gingerbread houses at Christmas time. We gave out 100 last year.” And not just to clients – to advocates as well. He says, “I think we worked out we got 16 listings within four weeks because of those gingerbread houses.”
Tristan says, “With onsite managers, they’re your friend not your enemy, most of the time.”
Tristan says make the most of Australia Post’s unaddressed mail service. He says, “It is the best thing we ever discovered. The postie will deliver your brochures, your newsletters, whatever it is, on your behalf. I can tell you now, it works, and the thing that really horrified me was the first run we did through this service, I think we got something like 13 or 14 listings out of it.”
Don’t send too many. They must be handwritten. Tristan says, “Call me cards are a very direct, to the point way of getting an immediate result out of someone, or at least to get contact.”
Tristan says, “The big thing that separates my newsletter from a lot of agents is I write all the content personally. It’s normally six to eight pages. It’s all original content.”
Send out a text to your past clients in particular that says, “Hey, sold your property last year or the year before. Did you need me to do a retrospective appraisal on that property or did you need me to do an appraisal for any of your other properties for end of fin year purposes?”
Tristan says, “You need to have a calendar for your marketing and that’s just a no brainer, but so many people don’t do it.”
Tristan says, “Get your database, chop it into little pieces of paper and put everyone’s name in a hat. Pull one out and do something nice for someone. Send them something like a Gold Class ticket. One of my clients referred me a listing without even realising it, just sort of passively mentioning my name. It ended up being an $850,000 sale. I dropped them a $1,000 Wotif.com voucher and they had just had twins. They were just so in desperate need of a holiday. I got this lovely text, ‘Thank you so much. That was the best thing that ever happened to us’,” Those people referred me three more listings.”
You never know where listings will come from. Tristan says befriend, “Banks, the post office - the main services in your area. Our post office guy loves us, mainly because of the amount of mail we’re doing through him too, mind you. But the reality is there’s lots of different businesses you can make friends with just in your immediate area. And we’re lucky; we’re in the village. We’re in the main sort of commercial sort of café hub of our area.”
He says, “When we were up at Kelvin Grove and we were really sort of isolated where we were - there was a little kebab shop. That was a great spot. I got so many listings out of those people there ‘cause I just made friends with them and told them what I do. For the love of God, tell people what you do. People that sneak around like secret agents in between things, you know? Or they strut around like John Travolta, one of the two. But tell people what you do.”
For real estate agents every day is a prospecting day. As Tristan says, “Every minute of your life you are prospecting up and down.” Get to it.