How To Get Onto A Real Estate Agent’s Hot List

It is a common perception that real estate agents are not trustworthy and will do anything to get a deal across the line. 

First of all this is not true but because of this per­cep­tion we are the most heav­ily legislated and most watched industry in Aus­tralia, with over five gov­ern­ment depart­ments keep­ing us in check.

Most real estate agent’s although they won’t admit it, just want to do their job to the best of their abil­ity and make money without get­ting sued or fined.

If any­one does break the rules, they are nor­mally caught imme­di­ately.

Problems can easily be picked up by a trust account audit.

The buyer hot list

Because it is a tough mar­ket for buy­ers we con­stantly have people miss­ing out on prop­er­ties.

They do their best to try and become friends with us and think that we will risk our sales license to give them an amaz­ing deal. 

When this doesn’t hap­pen buy­ers seem to think that we have an inside club that we only sell good deals to.

Don’t get me wrong we do have hot lists but they’re cer­tainly not made of friends and fam­ily.

They usu­ally con­sist of cashed up easy to deal with no non­sense prop­erty investors, developers/builders and renovators.

Buy­ers don’t real­ise that there is a catch if we sell prop­er­ties below mar­ket value.

If we do this sellers will start to think that we sell prop­er­ties too cheap, and there­fore don’t want to sell their house with us.

If we don’t have prop­er­ties to sell we lose our repu­ta­tion and the abil­ity to put food on the table.

We do our best to work with both parties but at the end of the day we have a fidu­ciary require­ment to work in the best interest of the seller.

If we don’t do this we can eas­ily be taken to court, fined and pos­sibly lose our sales license.

Believe me this does happen.

A day in the life of a real estate agent

Real estate agent’s spends most of our work­ing life look­ing for prop­er­ties to sell try­ing to meet our tar­gets to feed our mort­gage.

We spend many hours late into the night SMS, call­ing, email­ing, and even door knock­ing try­ing to find that next list­ing that is going to put them on the map and help them build their pro­file.

Basic­ally our lives involve pro­spect­ing, pro­spect­ing and some more prospecting.

Our lives revolve around meet­ing targets

Believe it or not the aver­age wage for a real estate agent is about $48,000.

We have to meet our tar­gets before we get paid our wage let alone make extra commission.

Every day is an emo­tional rollercoaster.

Funny enough we have a lot of people that actu­ally like to lie to us on a daily basis.

Some of us have grown large egos to handle the rejec­tion.

This helps us bounce back when people say they are going to give us their property to list for sale but then we wake up in the morn­ing, switch on our com­puter and see that it is lis­ted with one of our com­pet­it­ors. 

This is one of our pet peeves as we nor­mally hate our com­pet­i­tion, espe­cially if they have “bought the list­ing” (agent quot­ing a high price to get a prop­erty list­ing).

We go to sleep think­ing about where our next list­ing is going to come from.

We live and breathe real estate, there is no such thing as time off for us.

By under­stand­ing the psyche of a real estate agent it will help you communicate better with them.

How to get onto real estate agent’s hotlist

• Trust — do what you say
• Remem­ber their name
• Remem­ber what house you saw them at
• Ask them many ques­tions “they love to show off what they know”
• Ask for their opinion
• Don’t be a know it all — be humble
• Ask to be on their mail­ing list
• Call them up and talk about their sales
• Help them out –send them a selling lead
• Give them your real address, mobile and email (con­tact them if inform­a­tion is not com­ing through)
• Make an offer
• Sell a house with them
• Help them sell your prop­erty with paid marketing
• Send them a mem­or­able gift if they helped you
• Give them a testimonial

Biggest tip:

A real estate agent’s ego and sense of worth is attached to their com­mis­sion.

If you pay them stand­ard com­mis­sion with a bonus, not only will they love you and work like crazy, they will feel like you under­stand them and appre­ci­ate all the years they have put into them­selves.

Besides, if they found you a good deal with profit in it, why not reward them as an incent­ive to bring you more.

Sum­mary

There are a lot of advantages of hav­ing the best agent in your suburb on your side.

Hopefully I have given you enough insight to under­stand where we are com­ing from and change your per­cep­tion of us.

If you apply these tips it will help take the bumps out of your prop­erty journey.