Are you being served? Looking at how we can better take care of buyers needs: Peter Chittenden

Drive along almost any street in Sydney and you cannot help but notice the number of ‘sold’ stickers on real estate boards across the city. And we’re reading about great auction results and big numbers of buyers turning up for the release of new apartment projects. Right now the real estate market looks active and very healthy with vendors, agents and buyers all in what seems a very positive place.

In some areas marketing budgets are being cut and the time on market can be down to weeks if not days and so the market is clearly in an upward cycle. All of this activity has me thinking about the buyer experience and how well buyers are being serviced by the real estate services professionals. My timing might be a little odd, after all everything is going so well, but I can’t really see a better time to think about how we manage the buyer experience. Across any marketing plan it’s an area that usually comes in for a lot of attention and right now could possibly be a good time for some soul-searching.

Industry role call

It’s been a while since the ABS last looked at the industry in detail and there is both limited and some anecdotal evidence that the number of real estate agents and offices has until recently declined or at least numbers have seesawed.

Keeping in mind that employment in this sector usually lags activity a reasonable estimate is that the number of individual agents currently sits around 60-80,000 people, employed mainly by franchisee offices and independent operators in equal numbers with about 10% working outside an agency structure.

Most agencies are small businesses employing around nine people and together they manage some 1.2 million residential properties for investors and so we are clearly dealing with a large and I would assume very diverse group of professionals. I think that given this diversity it is easy to see why franchise operations are so popular because of the support they can offer, including the important marketing role.

Taking care of business

Right now in today’s market if you’re a buyer, potential vendor or tenant, what sort of experience do you think you might have in looking to buy, sell or rent a property? I think this is a reasonable question to ask before we invest time looking at some of the structural tools we constantly rely upon to improve and add value to the buyer experience in both the short and long term.

Let’s start with vendors. At any time this is a popular group in both the private treaty market and for a major project it is the vendor who after all provides the stock, the basic product we need to sell or lease. For the private treaty vendor, things look very competitive in today’s market with a number of major franchise groups currently running extensive ‘list with us campaigns’ and in one case, win a million frequent flyer points. So this might just indicate vendors are shopping around to find their preferred selling agent. But can the same be said for buyers or tenants?

In any market, good or bad, it is the buyers who must eventually come to the party with the money to complete a purchase. With major projects there is a great deal of planning, research and just plain old hard work that goes into keeping this group happy and informed.

One on one contact is still vital

Later in this topic I will devote some effort and detail looking at the tools committed to engaging the buyer experience for major projects, but first some further observations.

In the private treaty market the competition for a single property can be intense and even the basic groundwork and research can be an arduous task for the buyer. True the major real estate portals do today provide lots of online services to help potential buyers contact an agent, or schedule inspection times and view property details, but sooner or later contact needs to be made and most potential buyers still want to have the face to face conversation with the sales agent, which in a very active market is not always as easy as it sounds.

If you are a ready to buy prospect, waiting for a dozen or more telephone calls and possibly emails or text messages to be returned can be a demoralising experience and some recent feedback I hear tells me it’s a bit of an up-hill battle for marketing agents to manage. But that should not be the case and it does explain why many very successful agents in this area work closely with sales assistants.

Also where major projects are concerned there can be times when a ‘churn’ mentality emerges and some buyers can be left wondering about the level of services they might receive. Even if there is strong demand for a project with many eager buyers lined up, each person is still making a major commitment investing a large amount of money, which they may well have had to borrow. And so I do find myself having to question at times the ‘take-a-number’ approach that can be seen in marketing some projects.

How we manage the buyer experience

There are some well tested tools that we can and do all use to help manage and hopefully improve the buyer experience. These include varied aspects of how a sale is managed on behalf of our clients but this important area also extends to structural and long-term areas such as recruitment of sales staff and the value of internal mentoring.

However before we start to look at some of the individual resources and how we use them, I wanted to re-visit the following quote I came across some years ago:

“Listen to the market, listen to the voice of the market. That’s the fundamental essence of successful marketing” (Yoshio Ishizaka – EVP Toyota).

In our market, the property market, and even with increasingly sophisticated advertising, marketing and now social media tools and with today’s buoyant outlook we need to keep in mind that we are always engaged in real relationships with people. If the buyer experience helps to build quality relationships between people who then discover a common connection with us and the projects we market, then we will thrive in a healthy way.

The buyer’s experience will always involve a degree of emotion, sometimes a lot of emotion but that can lead to action, and while other aspects of the sales path will be built around reason and good communications, helping buyers make the right conclusion about this or that property is the core of what we do.