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Winning the Business, Lee Woodward
A listing presentation is a bit like a job interview for real estate agents, with the chance to use their full repertoire - and sign the contract at the end.
Real Estate Institute owner and founder Lee Woodward said most listing presentations were “pretty good”, with strong foundations and clarity in the agent’s intention and meaning. However, many needed modification to the wording and order of the phrases used to ensure the features and benefits were explained at the right time and the closing seals the presentation.
“When we win business, it’s a crescendo of information that leads to this point at the climax, trying to get a ‘yes’. Many people say I lost the listing over this, or that, and this company offered cheap rates, but there’s only one reason we ever lose a listing – our inability to sell the feeling,” Mr Woodward explained.
If a vendor signs with a cheaper company, that agent has sold the benefits and feeling of the cheap rate. To sell their feeling, an agent needs to ask the right questions, Mr Woodward said. “There’s 24 winning questions and the 25th is the closer.”
Opening Comments
Knowing how to deliver opening comments, is knowing how to deliver pricing. “Pricing isn’t a figure, it’s a strategy,” Mr Woodward said, when explaining there were two prices for each home - a mathematical figure and an emotional figure.
“The mathematical is based on surrounding values, room sizes and the features and benefits of the home. The emotional is the premium price that I can get someone to pay from the marketplace by selling the transference of the feelings of the home to them being in their new property.”
A professional agent’s role is to showcase a property so buyers see exceptional value, otherwise any agent can make the sale for “market value”, which means the vendor just takes what is on offer. “My role is to extract the maximum amount of profit,” Mr Woodward said.
An owner must see it is beneficial and profitable to be with an agent, by feeling the agent’s consultative manner, expertise and knowledge will get them a greater price. Without these points, an agent is just one of many who can simply sell. “Anyone can sell a house, but a brilliant agent or the professional, will maximise price,” he said.
Winning Listing Presentations
All the essential information within a listing presentation should be contained within a couple of phrases, not hours worth of material. “You’ve got to know how to cut to the chase and learn to work in what we call tracks or chapters. We’re transferring the feelings into a story so that the owner buys into your strategy,” Mr Woodward said.
A good performance can always be honed to what Mr Woodward calls an agent’s “greatest hits”. The greatest hits performance will include “power hooks”, or phrases where an agent speaks and people think, “Wow, nobody else has mentioned that to me”.
“You know that’s track three of your greatest hits. A great presenter has a skill of breaking the complex into simplicity, where people think ‘I get it’,” he added.
Winning listing presentations take confidence and enthusiasm in the system. An agent must believe in the presentation, otherwise there is no point using it. “The key to a brilliant presenter in a lounge room is when you make it a chat,” Mr Woodward said. But this isn’t a casual chat – it is premeditated because there are a number of facts an agent must know by the end.
One such question is, “Before we get started and I show you what we do, can I ask what would you like to achieve out of this meeting?”
There are four answers to this question:
- What is my property worth?
- How long is it going to take to sell?
- What are the changeover costs?
- How will an agent market the home if we decide to move?
Instead of offering the same tired and stilted presentation to every vendor, focus on being natural. “People want to know you, but as soon as you lose that essence you become the impostor and that’s a problem,” he said. Use the tools of successful agents to reinvent as a professional.
“When you use the right close, at the right time, with the right graphic, and the right question, what’s the difference between an amateur and a professional? John McGrath gave the answer when he said, ‘five minutes of courage’,” Mr Woodward explained. This is the point where the close is crucial. “What you say in this next five minutes makes you a professional,” he said.
Closing the Presentation
Closing is a personal thing, and the one aspect of the listing presentation many agents dread. Mr Woodward has worked with agents who shied away from closing strongly because they didn’t want to seem pushy. His solution is these two statements:
- “Mr and Mrs Williams I really feel uncomfortable. I’m here to get you to sign documents and ask you to list with us, but I always feel like you feel I am pushing you.”
- “Mr and Mrs Williams, you’re my client. You are the person who employs me to sell your home and you’re the one person I feel funny getting to say yes, because you’re engaging me, but you put me in front of a buyer and I have no hesitation in extracting that yes from anyone who is capable of buying a property, because that’s what I do. I get those people to say yes. But I need your authority to represent you. Do you feel comfortable with me going ahead?”
Learning to Dance
Phrases like those above are part of a professional agent’s language system, and this system allows them to move on to features and benefits of their company, something Mr Woodward refers to as “platform dialogue”, where an agent is platforming something to go somewhere else.
The key to listing is “knowing how to dance”, because every listing appointment will not go the same way. An example of this is when an agent is walking into a property and passes another agent walking out. Mr Woodward recommends always looking surprised and saying, “Do you mind if I ask, is there any reason you didn’t appoint that company?”
The answer to that question will be crucial to the presentation. If the response is, “That idiot wanted me to pay for the marketing!” an agent can say, “Did he, can you show me around?” knowing marketing has been the pain point. The vendor might say, “I just don’t like men”, which is difficult with a male agent, but shows where the meeting could head. “That’s what I mean - you’ve got to learn how to dance,” Mr Woodward said.
Having a list of polished phrases and essential questions will point to the difference between any real estate agent who works for market price sales, and the professional who strives for the maximum profit.
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