Why are you making excuses for your agent?

That old familiar question I ponder to myself with so many clients – Why are you making excuses for your agent?

For anyone who knows me, it’s not very often I am left speechless, however on a few occasions recently, I am left perplexed with the situation in front of me.

With my position at NEXA Properties, I am very lucky that I am able to work around times that suit me and my clients, meaning I can be emailing clients at 11pm at night, but can also ensure I am taking my daughter to school the next morning.

Having the freedom to also work from home, enables me to spend time on the important aspects of my role that in my previous positions were always much further down the list of things to do. Simple tasks like building a rapport with my applicants, being able to find out exactly what their criteria is and spending time to find a property suitable for them, not just adding them to a mailing list and carrying on with my day. Ensuring feedback is obtained within 24 hours of a viewing and fed back to both the owner and viewer, it surprises me how many comments I have saying – “You’re on the ball” because I have asked for feedback so soon, in many cases calling my client as I am leaving their home.

So why have I been left speechless? I spend at least three hours of everyday touting for new business, this includes door knocking properties that have been on the market for some time. I have always been a big believer in this type of touting, because it shows how proactive I am as an agent.  To be at your front door, explaining how I am going to market your property different than the other agent, rather than hoping that a letter is opened and read by you. I have always had good feedback and many of the properties I have both let and sold over the past 10 years, have come from a simple knock at the door.

More recently, I have come to find many home owners, have become brainwashed – that there is something wrong with their property or that the property market is extremely slow in this area. I have found homeowners have been on the market for 18 months, when they have an extremely saleable house, that isn’t being marketed in the correct way. These homeowners seem to make excuses for their agent, ‘they called me last month with an update’, ‘Well they’ve had three viewings’, ‘I have only just let them have a For Sale board up!’, ‘ ‘it’s a quiet time of year’. It saddens me to hear these excuses, if a property is priced correctly and marketed in the best way possible, a house should sell. Surely at the very least, an agent can make one or two phone calls a week to a vendor/landlord giving feedback? I can stand at a front door with comparable evidence of properties that have sold in that area, brochures of properties we have sold in the next road and homeowners will still look at me blank, as if I have made the whole thing up.

Instead of making an excuse for your agent, why don’t you test them? Bring a new agent on board, if it’s a quiet market, they wont have any luck either, right?!

I recently was instructed by an owner who had seven properties to sell, he had them on with an agent, who had them marketed with one grey sky front shot, no internal photos, no floorplans and priced incorrectly!  When asking why these had not sold, his answer was: “I don’t know, I think it’s the price but my agent hasn’t told me!” These had been marketed for over 6 weeks at this time. Agent changed to Nexa, with four of the units sold within 3 weeks. All of this, because I took the time to have professional photography, floor plans, a 10 page brochure made up and a marketing strategy that worked, including social media, a huge FREE tool to us proactive agents in what is a quiet marketplace.

If any of the above refers to you, please contact me on amy@nexapropties.com.  What harm can I do if your property has stagnated?