Do you like me?

I had a conversation last week about doing business with people we like and whilst it seems a bit of an obvious one, we all prefer to do business with people we like which means we need to also be liked ourselves.

I’ve always had the view that potential clients/partnerships need to tick a number of boxes in order to be worth doing business with and the ‘likability factor’ is one of those boxes. If you don’t like the people selling a product or service, the deal has to be extremely compelling for it to be worth doing and there are very few of these cases.

Most of us decide if we like someone pretty quickly and first impressions last and make a very deep impression. We have the process we refer to as ‘ice breaking’ where we might talk about the weather or other mundane subjects and there is also an element of storytelling that goes on – we ALL love to hear stories. This ice breaking process is effectively us trying to build some rapport one another and seeing if we like one another.

So how can we use our online marketing to facilitate the ice breaking, first impression building through letting people have a glimpse of our personalities before we meet?

I was with a friend of mine last week who when he first meets clients, is often told that they feel as if they already know him. This is because he films product videos which include him demonstrating and talking through the product and they are posted on his web site and viewed by potential clients. By watching these short videos people ‘get to know him’ and this definitely helps him in the sales process because they build trust in him too.

Prior to meeting people I can now find out much more about them as a person and vice versa, so we need to think about how we can give clients an insight into our business and our personality before we meet them.

If people like you they are more likely to ask you out to value their home, more likely to list with you, more likely to buy additional services from you.

How are you using video, social media and other tools to create ways of giving potential customers an insight into your business and accelerate the relationship and trust building?

Tesco (Spicer Haart) are back with £999 Agency Offering

Apologies for once again writing about a challenger to the traditional estate agency service, but they're coming out thick and fast at the moment and I think there are important lessons for us all to learn from these new approaches.

After months of speculation as to how they would do it, Spicer Haart have sort of unveiled their new estate agency service using the Tesco brand. iSold.com offers a fixed price estate agency service for £999 and is being launched in Bristol this weekend. A curious decision to launch it under a new brand name with the Tesco name merely being used in association, but probably more to do with branding rights than marketing strategy. However, unlike when Tesco launched Tesco Property Market, I think it is probably the right call to launch it in one area where marketing and PR efforts can be focused and delivery can be managed rather than nationally where they end up with a couple of instructions here and there. The Foxtons approach to new offices was always to divide and conquer one town at a time and I would expect iSold to adopt a similar strategy. The price is a likely to be a crowd puller and their tech is also going to be quite slick by the looks of things. I registered on the site this morning for updates and within moments, I received my fully personalised update...

EA Today had comments from some this morning mocking Spicer Haart for undermining their own business model. I don't think any of their brands operate in Bristol itself anyway, but on the basis that iSold will go national at some point, is there any merit in this criticism? Who better to set up an Estate Agency business that can operate more efficiently at lower margins than the established players in the industry than one of it's biggest players?

If you are able to run a very tight ship on the estate agency front; low office costs and massive discounts from suppliers; newspaper advertising, fleet vehicles not to mention portal listings, then you can operate on much tighter margins than the good, local agent with higher relative overheads. What's more, SpicerHaart have profitable operations in many areas relating to the core business; Mortgages, Conveyancing, Surveyors and can make plenty of money on referral services without worrying too much about the profitability of the estate agency operation on its own.

Under the Haart brand, they opened a 'super office' last year in Milton Keynes which very much adopted the Tesco model of an out of town location with plenty of parking serving a large catchment area. Open longer hours, it's more convenient for the consumer and cheaper than running several high street locations that nobody visits through fear of being ticketed or towed. iSold appears at first glance to be further refinement of this concept; eliminating unnecessary cost without compromising the customer experience.

They also seem to be taking another leaf out of the Tesco business manual by launching with "Essential", "Premium" and "Premium Plus" levels of service. Echoes of Tesco's own structure of offering a Value range, Normal (this one is just called Tesco I think) and Finest. 

Many other industries adopt similar models: Airlines have Economy, Business Class and First Class. Car manufacturers have S, SE, GTi and various other iterations on the same theme. Depending on what you are buying and the importance that you place on it, you choose a level of service, but most importantly, your choice is between different levels of service from the same company. Traditionally, to choose between estate agency services has meant choosing between agents. The trick is to ensure that the most popular tier (usually the middle one) is also the most profitable. Does the difference in service and legroom for Business Class travel really justify the extra expense?

I also wonder if those that enquire to sell through iSold would be offered an upgraded service provided by Haart or Spicer McColl at some point in the process once they go national? Maybe after they've been on the market a few weeks? Maybe straight away? Different levels of service can just as easily be offered by one company using different core brands instead of sub-brands. This is the tactic which has brought success to the Fine & Country brand in the last few years, giving middle market operators access to those plum instructions at the top end that their core brand never had any presence with.

I am sure that if you can afford it, there is only one way to fly; First Class, but not all of us can and in these times of enforced austerity we may choose to compromise. There is a world of difference between Value and Cheap though and I cannot see Tesco allowing their name to be associated with anything that provides poor customer service. I would expect they have planned this carefully to ensure they can provide a very decent basic service for £999. In Bristol at least, continuing to be a reassuringly expensive agent just got a little bit trickier.

Innovation rather than Regulation

Why the likes of Zoopla are better instigators of change for the industry

So the OFT have decided that the industry doesn't need further regulation. Some may feel that is a bad thing, but you only need to look across the road to the financial services industry to see how toothless and ineffective regulators can be at keeping an industry in check.

The process of buying and selling a property in the UK has much potential for change and improvement, but surely it is better for that change to be embraced and developed by the industry, rather than imposed on it?

To provide an effective prescription, you need to have a good diagnosis. And the anatomy of the property industry is very poorly understood by those outside of it. That is why we have endured years of 'consultation' with Government, only for them to fudge it with HIPs.

While committees have been debating the nuances of first day marketing and formulating pages of tick boxes for purposes only known to them, others with a better understanding of property have been thinking long and hard about ways to do things better. Change for the better is usually achieved much more easily through innovation than regulation anyway.

One such innovation came good last week. 57 properties were sold last Sunday having been on the market for just 4 days... 4 days? 57 properties? Sunday??

This was the result of Zoopla's first online property auction. The first time property has been auctioned online in the UK and with 1,000 registered buyers, a robust proof of concept for them that has spurred the announcement of more auctions starting next week.

At this stage, Zoopla's auctions are focused on repossessed properties, but having spoken to them about their plans for the service, they told me that they will be enabling member agents to put any property into an auction for free up to 30 days prior whilst continuing to market it conventionally. What's more, Zoopla will actually pay agents whose properties successfully sell at auction an additional 0.25% commission on top of what they get from the vendor!

The objectives for most vendors will always be to sell a property for the best price in the least possible time and it strikes me that by making it accessible and lucrative to agents, Zoopla may have a very viable mainstream alternative to treaty sale to help achieve that ubiquitous vendor objective.

From a buyer perspective, I think it also ticks a lot of boxes. As Omid Djalili points out in the current Moneysupermarket.com adverts, we don't like to haggle as a nation. As an agent, you might love it, but your average buyer will approach negotiation over price with fear and trepidation. They would probably feel the same about raising their hand in an auction hall, but when they are sat at a computer in the comfort of their own home, they are much more at ease and quite happy with the idea of bidding online. We are, after all, a nation of eBayers.

So Zoopla seem to have come up with something new that works for buyer, seller and agent. Finding new ways to keep that trinity happy should be the job of every agent too. Continuing to do it the way you do it, just because that's how you've always done it is a dangerous mentality to adopt.

Darwinian theory applies as much to business as it does to nature. Even big companies fail when they are too slow to adapt to changing marketplaces. You only need to look at the speed at which change has affected other agent industries like travel and insurance to see how quickly the game can change radically. Those who are aware of change, who embrace it, influence it and ultimately, exploit it are the winners of tomorrow. The legislators will catch up eventually and if you still need to smarten up your act by the time they get around to sorting out theirs, then you will probably find yourself part of property paleontology sooner rather than later.

Tepilo and the curious case of 5,619 missing valuation appointments

A few months ago, I questioned whether Tepilo; the self-sale portal being fronted by Channel 4 Property presenter; Sarah Beeny could have any impact on the UK property market. Having already seen a fair bit of anecdotal evidence that they were doing okay, I was still surprised to learn that Tepilo has listed 5,619 properties to date (they launched last summer) with apparently 50 to 100 new listings per week now coming on to the site. A small percentage of the total marketplace, but that's still a lot of unneeded valuation packs by anyone's standards. I remain unsure about how self sale can be profitable regardless of the number of listings, but for the purposes of this article, I would like to park all that. My interest today in them is more in their success in gaining instructions than their delivery of sales. If you must sate your appetite for FSBO bashing, look no further than Peter Rollings from Marsh and Parsons who made the case against the self sale route very eloquently in a recent blog post.

What Tepilo does very well is to advise and inform, they provide a lot of help and advice on the site and their PR machine is churning out all manner of interesting articles on their behalf regularly. If you are a potential vendor with questions about moving, then you will feel much more informed and confident after a bit of reading on Tepilo. I know of very few estate agency websites that are kept as up to date or so comprehensive when it comes to providing consumer advice. An agent will traditionally depend on the valuation appointment as the opportunity to advise and demonstrate their expertise, but I think there is a strong argument to say that saving your gems of insight until you are face to face with vendors is no longer particularly sensible. A decision on whether or not you are worthwhile calling, never mind inviting round is being made off the back of what people can see about you online. Yes, having lots of listings on Rightmove will serve that purpose nicely in the same way board count always has, but if your website is dated, devoid of insight and focussed on talking about you rather than your customers, then you may find that others are influencing customers more effectively than you.

It's not just what's on the website either. The press plays an important role in influencing consumer behaviour and Tepilo's aforementioned PR machine is doing a pretty good job on this front too. The Telegraph, in particular, has mentioned them repeatedly (and objectively) in recent months. Each mention has no doubt resulted in a fair few more listings for them and less for agents. Beeny's involvement has probably opened doors that others would find firmly shut, but this is also a well considered aspect of their marketing. Their usage of Twitter to engage with their target audience and influencers of their target audience and build relationships in advance of custom is also commendable.

This leads me to one of the interesting dynamics of using social media in property marketing. Many people have told me that they think Twitter is a waste of time for selling property and I would simply counter that with; don't blame the medium without first examining the message. You will actually find it very easy to connect with prominent property journalists on Twitter, but they, like the rest of us, aren't going to pay attention to you unless you have something interesting and you pitch it in the right way. That doesn't necessarily have to be something you're listing either. Go back to that core objective of getting instructions and consider how providing insight and advice can serve that purpose just as effectively as showing off your most newsworthy listing. We can't all get published in The Sunday Times, but every week there are PR's (for agents as well as Tepilo's) tweeting, blogging and doing some of the good old fashioned PR stuff with this objective in mind.

If you can't bring yourself to look at Tepilo, then an example of an estate agency getting it right on this front would have to be Chesterton Humberts' House Historian; Melanie Backe-Hansen who was recently commended in Primelocation's blog awards. An engaging and interesting read that is absolutely on brand and relevant to their target audience.

Social media and blogging (they are not the same thing btw) have given rise to legions of citizen journalists and the amount of 'insight' being churned out is frightening, but it is not too late to join the party. Fortunately, those producing a load of obvious sales propaganda or bad advice are easily filtered out. You can label Tepilo's PR as propaganda too if you like, but whilst you were busy getting all indignant about it, they probably robbed you of some more listing opportunities by their focus on helping prospective customers. In the age of fickle consumerism and media fragmentation, influence is a valuable, but very free flowing commodity and the best rates on it are available to those who can tell a good story and provide great advice, not just ply their wares through any given channel.

Live Webinar

Watch out for The Academy's first ever live webinar tomorrow. Peter Knight will be presenting "The 7 Priniciples of Persuasive Marketing" from 5:30pm (GMT). We're doing it late in the day so that our friends from the US can join in. So it will be 12:30pm (EST) or 9:30am (PST) if you're across the pond from us.

You can register and find out more here.