September 2017 - iDashboard Blog

How Top Agents Manage Their Time

There are many top agents out there who are successful, and it all comes down to one simple factor – their ability to manage their time properly. Ric Serrao of Raine and Horne Double Bay came in at number 5 in the top 100 agents of the year last year, but he feels as though his time management still leaves a lot to be desired.

That said, he has a whole heap of tips to share that can help you to improve your own time management. The following simple guidelines can be put in place to help make the most of the day.

Know Your Work Style

Working in a busy profession such as real estate, you may find that you don’t have time for all the finer details. Ric Serrao talks about how he doesn’t have much time for the finer details unless they’re absolutely necessary.

This eliminates the time wasted by idle chit-chat at the office. If possible, you may want to steer clear of the office as it can provide many distractions. A good example is when people invite you out of the office for lunch, and then you end up staying out too long and not getting any work done in the end.

Ensure You Protect Your Time

Serrao concedes that some people will get more attention than others – namely the vendors who employ him. It’s not ideal to spend 10 minutes with someone talking about their weekend, but a seller who is paying a lot of money will want this kind of personal service.

Many successful agents will find themselves out of the house around 8am every day, not returning until mid-evening. When you have a busy routine as a real estate agent, you could consider taking breakfast at a café to save time. Similarly, you could travel by scooter to help avoid traffic and looking for a parking spot.

Make Time For You

Making time for you will benefit your business, which will reward you in the long run. Taking time for you personally will help to boost performance. It’s important that we take time to de-stress so that we can come back to work with a fresh attitude.

Helen Yan explains that she is constantly on the go in her busy real estate career – often not getting time to do anything for herself. Working from 7am to 10pm is poor time management, but she has to do this in order to accommodate her international clients.

Work To A Flexible Structure

Working out a structure for your day is always a good plan, but it needs to be flexible. If you have a paper diary for instance, you’ll have time to reflect on what you need to do – at the same time being able to alter at any time. Too rigid a structure means that you can become bogged down in daily tasks that might seem unnecessary.

You should never compromise on time when it comes to listing appraisals however, as you won’t want to skimp out on them.

Some successful agents find that time management boils down to setting a work time, and a family time. This distinction is important, as Serrao suggests that he has regrets about not spending enough time with his family.

The Five Essentials To A Good Open Home

Having done a lot of the leg work and bagged a client’s listing, your work is far from done. Simply putting it online, in your store window and sticking up a “for sale” sign isn’t enough.

The inspection is where the property will be made, or broken in sales terms. You’ll want to make sure that it’s presented successfully to potential buyers, or else you can kiss that sale goodbye.

Here are the top five tips for putting on a great open home event.

1) Bring In The Pros

Bringing in a professional home stylist can help to give objective advice to sellers on how to best dress their home for a sales campaign. It’s impossible for many homeowners to separate themselves from the emotion of selling a house – especially if it’s their own home.

A professional stylist gives you the inside knowledge on property presentation, especially when it comes to an open home event. They will often provide styling advice to vendors free of charge, prior to the first inspection.

They will offer advice on things such as using pillows, throws, rugs etc. in order to spruce up the look of the house. They also recommend that you should have your vendors take down family photos, as this will enable potential buyers to envisage the property as their own.

2) Get Your Sellers To Leave For A While

It’s wise to advise your vendors to make themselves scarce during the open house event. This includes any pets that they may have around the property. This is mainly due to the fact that there will be anywhere from 25 to 100 people at the event.

Sellers who stick around are likely to get some valuable feedback from the horse’s mouth so to speak, but this idea can be fraught with peril. Slightly prickly questions can lead to negative interactions between the sellers and potential buyers.

3) Get The Garden In Order

It’s a great idea to pay some attention to the outdoors surrounding the property. Make sure your vendors understand that cleaning up the garden and getting it in order is important – especially the front lawn (if they have one), as this will be the first thing your buyers will see.

Some things are obvious – mow the lawn, cut back the hedges and rake dead leaves. The top pro tip for the garden, is to wash any decking and stone-work, as this will help to add that shine to the properties yard.

Make sure they clean the windows, as this will help to frame the yard perfectly – no one wants to look out of a smeared window. This touching up of the outside of the property should also apply on the inside – so make sure the vendors clean up any dirty towels and empty bottles in the bathroom.

4) Involve Your Senses

Engaging the senses is one of the oldest tricks in the book. The aim will be to make the house feel as homely as possible. Scents and smells are key when it comes to drawing in potential buyers.

Scented candles, reed diffusers, or freshly baked food to leave buyers in a wondrous daze. Think about putting on music for people to listen to whilst they inspect a house, as it helps to create mood – a home without sound will lack personality and ambience.

The little things will make all the difference to possible buyers.

5) Be Safe

Ensure that you tell your sellers to remove any loose, valuable items. You should also ensure that the house is free of hazards such as rogue cables and bottled chemicals. The last thing you’ll want is for someone to get hurt whilst they’re attending your open house.

These standards will have to be maintained for several weeks whilst the open house inspection event is ongoing – you’ll need to be flexible in terms of appointment times, meaning people could arrive at your house at a moment’s notice.

This can be difficult and it’s an intense period of time, but if it helps to pull off a solid sale, you’ll be more than happy to crack on with some minor health and safety checks.

Make sure you also check out our post 10 Quick Wins For Making The Most Of An Open House.

Improve Your Social Media Profiles in Under 1 Hour

Considering how much time each of us likely spend on social media each day, it’s strange that few of us can find the time to update our social media profiles.

We’re under the illusion that effective social media marketing takes hours, or even days to get into action. But some of the best tips can be actioned incredibly quickly.

We’ve compiled our top 5 in this article. Read on to find out more.

1) Image Sizes

First things first, make sure you’re using the right image sizes for your respective social profiles. This means ensuring your photos match the required image dimensions for each social network, and this can be achieved with a quick crop.

Social networks provide you with optimal image sizes and it’s wise to trust what they say. Even though a logo might look okay on your profile, when it’s expanded and used elsewhere across the network, you want it to look great too.

2) Keep Your Photos Consistent from Network to Network

From writing to marketing, consistency is the key to success. And if your logos are different from network to network, all you’re going to achieve is confusion.

When people are scrolling quickly through their social feeds, you want them to be able to easily recognize your brand. For this reason, you need to have the consistency of the same photo on each. The more people see your logo, the more your brand awareness will increase. The next time they’re in the market for your services, they’ll be that much more likely to buy from you.

3) Distance Yourself from Inappropriate Posts

You need to maintain a professional image on social media, so the first thing you’ll need to action is changing your tagging settings. Honestly, the less people who can tag you in posts automatically, the better. This means you’ll be able to review any requested tags before they happen, so your audience won’t instantly associate your brand with dodgy posts before you have the chance to remove them.

4) Make Sure Social Handles are Consistent

As with your logo, consistency is key when it comes to your social media handles. It’s about recognition, but it’s also about searchability. When a user wants to mention you on Facebook or Twitter, they’re going to hit the ‘@’ symbol and start typing your name. If your name isn’t what they think it’s going to be, they’re not going to spend loads of their time finding out what it actually is. They’re going to move on.

By making sure your handles are consistent, you’ll ensure that your audience are able to find you and effectively interact with you on social media.

5) Don’t Ignore SEO

It’s simple and it doesn’t take long. For the sake of SEO, add keywords that are relevant to your business to social media. If you operate in Melbourne, consider adding some keywords related to the suburbs and neighbourhoods you cover. If you only operate within a particular niche, reference it here.

Don’t just throw them in as a list, though. Integrate them with your bios so they flow naturally and don’t stand out to your audience.

New Gagliardi Scott Website

Long time iDashboard clients Gagliardi Scott was after a great new custom website for their multi office network, that fully integrates with their Real Estate Software & CRM.

They came to our team with a bundle of different design and functionality ideas and inspiration. The iDashboard design team worked with them to merge all these different ideas into a great looking, completely custom fully responsive website.

The new home page contains a great list of ‘must-have’ features, this includes:

Landing Page Section with Quick Links
Recent Listings
Featured Property of the week
Team Profile Gallery
Testimonials

The website itself also offers an array of styling and functionality features, including:

Pop-Out Forms
Financial Calculators
Custom Subdivision Information Pages

We wish the team at Gagliardi Scott all the best with their new website and look forward to our ongoing relationship.

If you are looking for a new website, wether you are starting from scratch or want to upgrade to a modern responsive design, contact the iDashboard team today.

Building Trust with Australian Home Sellers – What You Need to Know

In Australia, there are two ways to build trust with home sellers – the easy way and the hard way. This is much like with anything else in life, as the choices you make can bear a heavy impact on the results you see.

The hard way of building trust with home sellers is the old school way – going door-to-door, dropping leaflets through letterboxes and speaking with people face-to-face. And although it may be effective, it’s also time-consuming and expensive. In addition to this, a hefty chunk of the seller leads you generate are likely to be tyre-kickers, saying yes to get you off the doorstep. And if you want them to even trust what you have to say, you’ll have to pull the best tricks out of your sales handbook to build authority – fast.

Or there’s the easy way. It takes significantly less time, money and effort and will even continue to provide results long after you start. And the best bit? You won’t even have to leave the office. Here’s what you need to do:

1) Understand Your Seller Market

You’ll have a tough time selling anything if you don’t know who you’re selling to. Thinking about it, they’re likely to be a wide group of people, but from your own experience and real estate knowledge, you’ll be able to target sellers on an emotional level, based on the different stages they’re at in their lives.

Regardless of the group you end up talking to, you need to ensure they’re a group that are actually selling homes in your area. If your neighbourhood is stocked full of young families, you’re not likely to find success targeting empty nesters.

2) Create Helpful, Informative Content

What motivates your target audience to sell their properties? What challenges might they face along the way? If you can create content – either a blog post or a short video – to talk around their problems and present valid, actionable solutions, you’ll build a relationship with your potential client.

This relationship constitutes trust, and the next time they’re in the market for selling a property, they’ll be that much more likely to choose your services over your competition.

3) Make the Most of the Digital World

You don’t have to do everything yourself – there are a number of free digital tools you can get on board to help even the odds. Instead of investing hours thinking of content ideas, these tools can generate potential article titles for you, based around popular search engine queries.

If you don’t want to invest time or cash into setting up software, try running a search term – “renovating before selling”, for example. Now, scroll down to the bottom of the page. Below the page numbers, you’ll see a list of similar searches users have made. These can make great titles for your next blog post or video.

4) Get Your Strategy off the Ground

Once you’ve thought of some targeted content ideas, it’s time to create your content and get your strategy up and running. Put a new blog post up, with hyperlinks within it to ensure readers can easily follow on from the content to relevant sections of your website. If you’re unsure of how to optimise your article for SEO, there are a number of content agencies who’ll be happy to help you out.

After that’s done, make the most of your social and email accounts and share your content out to a wider audience. Before long, if your content is insightful and engaging, you’ll have a loyal following who look out for your posts and trust what you say.

Each member of your target audience is different, and will therefore take a different amount of time to convert from a cold prospect into a sale. As a result, you need to make sure you’ve got the infrastructure set up to capture their data and build on what you know about them. Consider investing more time and money into a longer, more detailed piece of content. Put it onto your website, then gate it, asking them for an email address and name before downloading it.

Facebook Live Video – Dos and Don’ts You Need to Know

The online world is in a constant state of flux. And, as a result, the methods you can use to promote your business are always changing. As a real estate agent, you should be jumping on these opportunities and utilising them as ways to reach new audiences.

If you’re savvy with digital marketing, you’ll know just how important maintaining a strong social media presence is. But there’s one element of Facebook that you more than likely haven’t tried out – live videos.

We get it – they’re spontaneous, unpredictable, and as a result, a little bit scary. But the key to a knock-out live video is embracing the imperfections and using them to show your audience that, behind the brand, you’re a human just like them.

While there may well be a list of dos for live videos, there are also a concrete list of don’ts. And knowing what they are can be the difference between an awesome live video and alienating your audience.

The Do’s and Don’ts of Live Video

Read on to find out exactly what you should be doing with live video – and what you should be steering clear of.

Do’s

1) Prepare before your shoot. Although this doesn’t necessarily mean you have to iron out a watertight script or develop a Hollywood set, you should go into your videos with an understanding of what you want to say and show.

2) Get to the point. Short and sweet is the key to live videos and maintaining your audience’s interest. Stick to the point and get it across quickly and effectively to maximise engagement.

3) Speak with passion. If your audience can’t hear energy in your voice, they’re going to assume you haven’t got anything interesting to say. Consider telling a story to get your audience really invested.

4) Invest in a tripod. Although live videos are meant to be a little raw, that doesn’t mean they should be impossible to watch. Hit the shops and pick up a cheap tripod for your camera or smartphone.

Don’ts

1) Overthink it. Although we understand you want your video to be polished and professional, that’s what official marketing video shoots are for. Don’t strive for perfection and have fun with it.

2) Have rubbish internet. This will reduce your video quality and people will turn off before you even get to introducing yourself.

3) Have it in a loud setting. Even if you’re selling a property in downtown Sydney, you want your viewers to be able to hear what you say. So, pick a quiet spot to shoot your video.

Play for the Long Game as Well as the Live One

Remember – your video isn’t going to disappear after you’ve shot it, and more people are likely to watch it once it’s over than they will tune in live. Put a bit of thought into your video, choose a great setting, speak with passion, and above everything else – have fun. If you can nail these points, you’ll have shot an awesome live video your audience will love.

Getting to the Bottom of Buyer Behaviours

It’s one of the founding aspects of successful real estate sales, but understanding buyer behaviour is still an area that many agents struggle to master. Whether they fail to pick up on cues that could affect the direction of a sale, or miss signals that buyers simply aren’t interested, buyer behaviours could solve many of the problems they face in their day-to-day, which is why it should become one of your main areas of development if you feel you’re falling short.

Your marketing efforts should also reflect the behaviours of your individual customers, otherwise you might fall short of the mark when trying to target them with content.

Each demographic needs to be approached in its own way

This might seem obvious, but so many agents fail to target their approach to the right audience. To nail this, you need to research the ways in which individuals within each of your target markets like to be approached, as well as the sort of language they engage with.

If you can tailor your approach and make it unique to them, your chances of winning their interest and driving buyer/seller leads will vastly increase.

Find the right balance between emotional and practical requirements

Gaining the interest and attention of your audience doesn’t come immediately – it requires a two-pronged approach. You both need to appeal to the emotional needs of your customer, as well as their practical requirements.

When you meet your buyers for the first time, you should pay attention and attempt to assess both, to see whether they’re emotionally or practically motivated. You should also try to work out if it’s a mix between the two in the instance of dealing with a couple.

The property purchase process deals with both emotion and practicality, so you should be prepared to deal with both anyway. After meeting them, make a list of your clients’ emotional needs, alongside any practical requirements they have from a property. This will help you to target them with only the most relevant listings in the future, as well as avoid any potential conflicts before they arise.

You shouldn’t ignore the internet

94% of us now start our property search online. As a result, ignoring the power the internet holds over the property purchase process could cost you dearly. Regardless of this, so many Australian agencies do no more than simply list a property online. When there’s a wealth of other areas to build a digital presence, and sell properties at a faster rate at the same time, not sharing your listings to social media accounts is a huge mistake.

4 Psychology Tips For Social Media Marketers

The key to social media success, is being able to understand your audience. Without this key ability, you’ll find it hard to get inside the minds of consumers – tapping into what they really want.

Here are 4 basic psychology tips that can help you to improve the effectiveness of social media marketing:

1) Why People Share Content Online

Have you ever wondered why you share content online? According to a study by the New York Times, there are several reasons why we do this across social media platforms.

The first reason, is that we want to improve the lives of others. 94% of people who participated in the study, said that they share content because they feel it will improve the lives of their friends, family and colleagues.

When you work in marketing. It’s important to create content that will help to improve the lives of your audience, as this will enable you to build a bond with them – strengthening your brand.

People share content in order to define themselves. 68% of participants identified that they share content in order to show off their personality, their individuality, and to create an identity – their online persona. Think about whether your content would be shared by your audience, as part of their online image.

The study found that people share content in order to grow relationships – to help them to stay connected across social media. Think about how you can generate content that facilitates this social exchange between people online, as it will enable them to talk about you and your service.

2) Colour Psychology

The psychology of colour has long been debated by academics, but its importance in social media marketing strategy is paramount.

A study known as “Impact of Color On Marketing” showed that people make up their minds within 90 seconds of their initial interaction with a product. 62% to 90% of the assessment is based on colour, as the sole factor.

The main idea behind the assessment, is whether the colour itself suits your service or brand. Nearly all academic studies on colour and branding, suggest that it’s more important for your brand’s colour to be in support of the personality you wish to convey. Avoiding stereotypical colour association is paramount.

3) Building Trust With An Audience

Would you buy a TV from a shady dude on the corner of the street? Probably not. We don’t buy from people we don’t trust, so why would your audience buy from you if you gave off the wrong vibe?

According to some economists, oxytocin is a chemical in the human body that has come to be known as “the trust hormone”. It’s a feel-good chemical that is released from the brain when someone feels accepted, for example.

People are more likely to change their behaviours when the results will make them feel good about themselves, so it’s important that you make your audience feel like you value them, and that you can be trusted with their custom.

4) Emotions Are Infectious

According to the journal of The Association For Psychological Science, evoking some emotions can help to increase the chance that a message will be shared. This study explained that sharing of stories and information online, may be driven partly by arousal.

Psychological arousal will cause the autonomic (subconscious) nervous system to become more active – boosting social transmission. The study also found that the more positive the content on social media, the more it was shared by users.

As humans, we experience emotional contagion – the practice of mimicking the emotions we find ourselves surrounded by. This concept is rooted in social psychology theory, which suggests that we want to mimic behaviours to feel belonging to a group identity.

With this in mind, it’s extremely important to understand the behaviour of your audience, so that you can be more effective at creating social media posts that stand the test of time.

Delivering Bad News To Clients – Pro Tips

An unfortunate facet of being a real estate agent, is the fact that you’ll likely have to deliver bad news to clients at some point. This may come in the form of a withdrawn offer, or a last-minute fail to sell at auction. Whatever the case, delivering bad news is always tough and not a task that most of us enjoy.

No one likes giving or receiving bad news, and it can often cause a considerable amount of apprehension. There’s certainly an art to communicating negative information, especially when it’s something that nobody wants to hear. Let’s cover some pro agent tips on how you can be better at delivering bad news to clients.

Taking The Good With The Bad

One of the best ways of communicating successfully with clients, is to mix the bad with the good. The bottom line is if you just try to give bad news, your clients will feel like you’re trying to condition them. This will never go down well, as no one wants to feel like a chump. Communicating well with clients will involve incorporating good news and bad news.

As the agent who will mediate all your client’s real estate activities, you’re going to be a messenger of sorts. You will want to be the messenger of both good and bad – it can never be one-way traffic, because there will always be positives and negatives. Unfortunately, this is just the way that the market works.

Regular Communication And Making Mistakes

Regular communication with sellers and landlord clients is essential. Coupled with this, is the idea that you will always operate from a position of honesty with your clients. An example of this, is that it’s important to admit when you’re wrong – for example if you’ve given a pricing estimate that was off the mark.

It’s important to be able to admit fault when you’ve made a mistake – transparency is key in real estate, because otherwise your clients won’t trust you. A shady agent will always have less clients, because people need to trust the person in charge of sorting out their most valuable financial asset – their home.

Recognising that you’ve made an error – such as an over appraisal, will hopefully show your clients that you’re an agent to be respected, because you want the best for them. Showing that you can take it on the chin and make it right, is a good skill to have – even if it means telling your client something they don’t want to hear.

When The Time Is Right

When markets are challenging, it’s super important that agents are able to deliver information in a transparent way. Timing is also imperative – with clients understanding the outcome of the conversation because of when the information was presented.

Giving bad news to a client can be viewed as an opportunity to gain their trust and foster the relationship. Being consistent is the key here, showing a constructive outlook when giving and receiving bad news.

It’s always better to deliver bad news to a client sooner rather than later. Delaying bad news can only make matters worse, especially when acting quickly in real estate can often be the difference between a purchase or sale.

Agents who allow bad news to linger, often find that the situation will snowball out of control, so don’t be that kind of agent. Make sure that you are honest and transparent with clients – not wasting time in the process.

View.com.au – The Rebranding Of realestateVIEW.com.au

Over at realestateVIEW.com.au, a kind of rebranding has occurred. The exciting news that they’re eager to spread, is that they’ve rebranded to “view.com.au” – dropping off the “realestate” prefix. This is part of extensive research into what the online property community wanted.

Part of their research also suggested that consumers want more information about neighbourhoods, more accurate property pricing figures, and greater control over how you can browse and access insights into property making decisions.

The bottom line is that the consumers asked, so they listened.

According to the new view.com.au, the changes are much deeper than just a logo, slogan and visual revamp. They claim to have aligned the entire business around the customer. This means that the 1.7 million people who use their services online, will be aware of and feel the changes.

Many of the customers who will notice the effects of the change immediately, will be those who use the app, auctions alerts and property price estimate tool kit.

Use view.com.au – For Property Insights

View.com.au is the property sight that is full of insights which will help you to buy, sell and rent more effectively. The revamped property price estimate tool (Property 360), is at the core of these changes.

If you want an accurate price estimate of your home, your future home or your dream home, you can do it all with Property 360. The tool also allows its users to customise their estimate, so you can find out what adding elements to your home might do to the price.

Now’s the time to find out how much extra a new bathroom might add to your property value. Property 360 even allows the user to edit comparable properties to generate property price estimates.

Look At The Bigger Picture

The changes at view.com.au are largely credited to the company’s CEO – Enzo Raimondo. Raimondo was the driving force behind the changes, stating that the aim was to connect with, and empower people in the property-hunting market. The ability to give them data and analytic tools at their fingertips, is a huge step forwards.

This new position allows them to differentiate from competitors – providing customer with data and transparency in the property market. The changes aren’t simply a new name and logo, but they encapsulate a bigger picture for their audience – including property hunters, agents, advertisers and shareholders.

As one of Australia’s biggest online property portals, the new approach will allow consumers to choose their “hood before you choose the home” – which will enable users to look at the bigger picture with ease.

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