29 May Systems and structures

You might think you have systems but do they really help or do they hinder your development.

Topic – 5 things I learnt from Mark Bouris

Mentor – Stephanie Wimpenny

• Managing sellers
• Follow up appraisals and buyers
• Marketing plan

Property Management Matters with Tara Bradbury – How to maximize the impact of your email sigmnature.

Transcript:

Kevin: Back once again this morning with our guest mentor this week, Stephanie Wimpenny, from Moreton Bay Realty. After her experience of being on the Mentor, the very first episode of the Mentor with Mark Bouris, and we’ve asked Stephanie to detail for us the five things that she learned, the top things she learned from working with Mark Bouris. And yesterday we talked about doing research, testing names and logos. Today, Stephanie, I’d like to talk to you about systems and the structures in your business. Did you have any in place when you were talking to Mark Bouris?

Stephanie: We did have a few systems and structures in place, but I think as well as systems and structures, consistency is so important. It’s all well and good to say we’ve got a procedure, but if you don’t follow it every time, that’s not a procedure. Yeah, those things I think go hand in hand. It was definitely something that throughout the process of the Mentor with Mark Bouris, we realised that we really needed to get that sort of stuff down pat and working.

Kevin: Well there were four main areas that you’ve highlighted here for me. And they are how are vendors managed, how are appraisals followed up, how are buyers managed, and how is your marketing done. Were they the four key areas that he focused on?

Stephanie: Matt Lancashire certainly helped us with those four key areas and that comes out a lot when we train with him-

Kevin: Yes.

Stephanie: at Ray White on a Monday.

Kevin: Just to cut in on you, Matt Lancashire of course is from Ray White. He’s been a guest on our show many, many times. And really good to see that he’s actually helping you with this process as well Stephanie.

Stephanie: We’re truly blessed to have someone as amazing as Matt helping us out and just doing it because he cares about our family, he wants to see us succeed. It’s just wonderful really.

Kevin: Yeah. So what systems have you put in place and what were the big learning experiences out of doing this for you?

Stephanie: With still working on building our systems and I think that ties back to what we were talking about yesterday, it’s finding out what is that our clients want from us. So with how are our vendors managed, we go to our clients always and we ask them “How frequently do you want us to stay in contact with you? Do you want us to call you or message you? Do you want us to call you every day or every second day or only when there’s news?” So things like that, that we’re now going to our clients and asking them “How do you want to be managed throughout this entire process? What do you think is too much and what do you think is too little? Where would you be comfortable?”

Kevin: And what sort of reaction are you getting from them when you do that?

Stephanie: They certainly appreciate it because everyone communicates in different ways. Everyone has a different life that they’re living and different things going on in their world, so you can’t manage everyone the same way. But I think as long as you have a structure and a system, at least for approaching your vendors, and asking them “How would it best work for you?”, then you’re hitting the nail on the head.

Kevin: So with appraisals, how do you follow those up?

Stephanie: That’s a system that we’re still creating and still trying to get right. I would think that most real estate agencies are still sort of honing the fine of art of following up an appraisal because I think there’s this level of, you can be too full up-

Kevin: Yes, yes.

Stephanie: … and start freaking vendors out or you can be a little bit too relaxed and then you end up losing other things. So it’s a fine line with how you follow up an appraisal. But we always, after we’ve done an appraisal, we always send them a thank you card. In a couple days time, we’ll just ring them and say “Hey, has anything popped up since we last spoke?” And then we like to send them, if they’re not a vendor who wants to sell immediately, which as I heard in one your podcasts, someone was saying it’s 70% or higher of vendors-

Kevin: Yeah.

Stephanie: … it’s like nine months later-

Kevin: Yeah.

Stephanie: … that they decide they want to sell their house.

Kevin: Yeah, I think that was Aaron Shiner. Yeah.

Stephanie: Yeah, yeah. So that was amazing. So what we do is, every three months we’ll just send them an area report just on what is moving and shaking in the area-

Kevin: Yeah.

Stephanie: … just so that you’re the area expert. And the one thing that I’m trying to get in place at the moment is just sending our vendors what they need to know. So if a neighbor across the road or down the street comes up for sale, I would like us to be the first person to tell them aside the fact that there’s a signboard there, if we can. So but that is an interesting challenge to try and implement.

Kevin: Yeah. I want to talk about marketing before we leave today. Have you become more aggressive at getting vendor paid advertising? Is that big in your business?

Stephanie: Vendor paid advertising is always important because if you don’t get it, then you end up in a financial position of your own-

Kevin: Good point.

Stephanie: … that’s not so great. So yeah, it is very important for us to make sure that we do do that otherwise we’re doing a lot of things for free and it just ends up killing us.

Kevin: Have you always had that understanding or is that something that Mark Bouris grilled you on?

Stephanie: No, we’ve always had that understanding-

Kevin: Yeah, yeah.

Stephanie: … just by looking at our own bank book.

Kevin: I guess in fairness too, it’d be something you’d be picking up from Matt Lancashire Ray White New Farm, who is really, really strong on that, isn’t he?

Stephanie: Oh, massive, fanatical. I don’t even think they would list a property unless they had VPA. I just don’t even think that exists for them.

Kevin: Yeah. Tomorrow, when Stephanie comes back, Stephanie Wimpenny is my guest. She is from Moreton Bay Realty and was the star on the very first episode of the Mentor with Mark Bouris. Tomorrow we’re gonna talk about something that I don’t think a lot of agents do well. They certainly never learn the lesson, and as a result, it can cost them a lot of money. That’s tomorrow morning. Stephanie, we’ll talk to you then.

Stephanie: Thanks Kevin.