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How to Profit from Estate Agency Training

RAT 102 (Rawlings Agency Tips)

How to Profit from Estate Agency Training

(published in Propertydrum Magazine)

I am always disappointed and somewhat concerned when a director of an independent estate agency business asks me to spend a day or two training his or her staff, when he/she does not actually attend him/herself. Presumably this is because training is regarded by such people simply as a way of teaching people in “how to be an estate agent” and as the director already knows how to be an estate agent they don’t waste their time attending. This is a classic management error and can easily undermine staff morale and make it difficult to implement change. External agency training is all about creating change.

As an estate agency trainer I do not regard external training as a way of teaching the basics of estate agency. That should be a given, much of which can easily be trained in the field! Estate agency is not difficult and anyone running an estate agency business should be more than capable of providing their agents with the tools, resources, education and direction required to do the job or they themselves should not hold that position.

Back to Basics - don’t you believe it! We often hear the phrase “back to basics” which to my ear suggests that an agency has somehow become distracted or derailed from what it used to do well, or that the current market requires a stripping away of anything but foundation level agency. Either way these are probably management, rather than training, issues. Whilst there are of course good agency trainers out there who do indeed focus on the basics, I tend not to do so. I’m more interested in helping already good agents become great ones. After all presumably you’d rather see a 30% improvement in your top performing excellent staff (who don’t apparently need training) than you would in a 30% improvement in your worst performing staff. Do the maths!

It’s all about market share. People don’t hire an estate agent because the agent will deliver good agency services. They expect that! So don’t deliver good agency services! Deliver remarkable agency services, using the latest techniques and innovations. In truth, you probably do about the same stuff that the other agents do in terms of day to day activity. You’ll appraise a property, produce details including photos, floorplans and EPCs, advertise it, list it on your website and various portals, bring buyers round and eventually negotiate the deal. So what? Is this remarkable? Is it Tweetable? Hardly.

So training surely has to be about creating remarkability in agents, both internally and externally, which usually means introducing a number of new concepts which may be uncomfortable, alongside some which are blindingly obvious but seldom addressed. For example how often are agents trained to identify those aspects of their personality, and especially the personality of your brand, which could set you apart and which are highly attractive to your prospects? Once you can crack this is doesn’t matter if you start with a small market share. The key is to create desirable elements of distinction that make you the obvious agent of choice. Yet when I ask managers and directors what are those elements of desirable distinction I usually get a list of “attributes” that are almost identical to those of the last client with whom I spoke. 

Training commercialism alongside remarkable customer service. We all enjoy innovation in customer service and looking at the latest ways to deliver beyond expectation. Yet because most aspects of this cannot be measured objectively, some agents stop using them. Great customer service is just soft and fluffy feel good factor stuff, but a serious business tool that generates profit. When I facilitate workshops in customer service ideas and excellence I make it clear to delegates that the sole reason they are doing this is because it is profitable - not because of some altruistic desire to be “nice”. On the other hand there are agents who are so focused on the customer experience that they forget that their objective is to make a profit. Good customer service does not dramatically ramp up business - proactivity does that! Some agents can even afford to slim down their customer service and the well trained agent should be commercially minded enough to recognise the balance.

Of course, all staff members are ambassadors for the business and should all therefore be trained in the CS -v- profitability balance right down to those in the most menial positions. Only then will they take full accountability for their role in your business. Indeed, I regard every delegate on my seminars as if they own the business themselves.

Understanding human interaction - my 13 year old daughter Isabel thinks that my job as an estate agency trainer is simple - I just tell people how to say “this is the bathroom”! Ha! Yet it is remarkable how many agents still do this and it points to one area of anti-moronic agency training that is certainly required. We know this is wholly a people business and also that you can’t really “sell” someone a house. So don’t show it to them! Understand them and then explore the property with them and on their terms. It is of course quite likely that the property may work for them in unexpected ways, based on significant elements of compromise that your competitors’ staff are not trained to recognise.

Agency sales training is not necessarily about systems and processes, although there is a place for these things, but as much about understanding human interaction and how best these interactions might be harnessed profitably. Whilst agents do of course have an obligation to represent the best interests of their client, usually the vendor, this does not mean that they should do whatever it takes to create an advantageous sale for the vendor at the expense of the buyer. One of the clauses in the code of conduct for estate agents in South Africa for example states that “the agent should act in the best interests of his/her client with due regard to all parties involved”. “Due regard” is a useful expression. When buyers are treated with due regard they are more likely to be comfortable with their purchase and more open with the agent in their dealings. Surely our role is simply to help them make the right decision, which without our involvement they might have had difficulty making. So the well trained agent is able to use a knowledge of the psychology involved to create sales that might otherwise have been missed.

Old dogs can learn new tricks! I often have agents on my courses who have been in the business for many years and who might question why they are there at all. After all they must surely know about as much as there is to know about agency. But practice doesn’t make perfect - it makes permanent. Indeed, is that 30 years experience actually only one year’s experience which has been repeated 29 times?! I am always quietly chuffed when I see them on the edge of their seat writing reams of notes during a seminar, reassuring me that my material is new to them. Indeed, I often hear from such agents who tell me the training has given them a new lease of life. This is the icing on the cake in terms of job satisfaction for an estate agency trainer!

Championing the Cause. Of course, agency training is a waste of time if nothing positive actually happens after the course, so I always ensure that each delegate agrees to champion at least one initiative and be personally accountable for its implementation and development. So there should be regular meetings following any training with specific reports from each delegate about how their chosen idea has worked for them, with a view to others in the business then replicating the idea or modifying it further. This way personal commitment and accountability can be harnessed without huge management involvement and with ownership remaining at grass roots level. Speaking of which I always encourage the most junior of staff to attend as well as the most senior. On the basis that office juniors often have the greatest initial customer contact it seems ridiculous that they should be left to man the office during training sessions. Additionally such training is often the only time they actually get to understand what issues their colleagues face and how they can play a part in delivering relevant solutions.

Closing the office? I often have clients who postpone external training because they don’t want to take all the staff out of the office for a day. Please - just do it! The cost to your business of delaying profit-related career-changing training and business development is far more than any inconvenience suffered by having to return a client’s call a few hours later.

My greatest buzz? To hear that a client has doubled their profits since attending my training! Makes my day!

About the author. Richard Rawlings is the PropertyDrum Magazine Estate Agency Trainer of the Year 2012. He has numerous clients large and small across the UK, Ireland and Australia for whom he provides training and reputation management services.