Don’t swim against the current
Bought to you by Owen Burns, Managing Director of the Academy
One of the biggest threats we have to our industry, our businesses and our lives at the moment is not the market place, it is the inertia that has been created because of it.
The easiest thing we can do right now is to throw our hands in the air and hide under a blanket and hope that this will all go away. This is dangerous as it will set the wheels in motion for not only zero productivity, but it will effect those around you; your team, your customers and your family and friends.
So what do we do about it? Well the best example I can think of, I learned when I was just a little nipper on the beach back in Australia. Let me share the analogy with you.
A rip, otherwise known as an undertow or side current, is a volume of fast moving water that flows away from the shoreline. It does this because of the laws of physics; what goes up must come down. Water coming to the shore as waves and tide must escape via any means possible. This escape is called a rip.
At a very early age I was taught to never swim against the rip because I would get tired and frustrated and burn out quickly with the result being a drowned little boy. I was also taught not to just float and let the rip take me, because it would deposit me out to sea and leave me exposed to sharks, string rays and New Zealanders. The perfect way to escape a rip was to swim calmly, but deliberately across the rip leaving me in calm deep water, yes a little out to sea, but nothing that I couldn’t manage to get back from.
Well then, how is escaping a rip similar to the estate agency market? Firstly the market is following the same laws of fluid dynamics that a rip does. The past years have seen waves of business hit the shore; now they are just escaping to restore order.
So what do we do about it? Do we swim hard against it and try and buck the trend? You could do, but I suspect the market is so strong in the negative direction that you will burn out leaving yourself open to de-motivation and a lot of soul searching. Do I do nothing and let the market take me? Absolutely not because you will be left so far away that it will be almost impossible to fight back. I have had first hand experience of agents doing just this. They are so paralysed that they have not bothered to call back a highly motivated vendor of a £3 million property. A sure fire way of going out of business.
This leaves us with swimming calmly with but also across the current. To do this we have to stick to what we know and do it well. We have had some great letters to The Academy from agents over the past months who are putting some of our “good old fashion” estate agency practices into play with outstanding results. There is the agent who kept his cool and worked diligently with a full-length chain to create business. He sat down face to face with all buyers and sellers to pull an almost dead sale into line to create £16,000 in commission. Another of our clients used the PR pieces we supplied to them to generate a listing that resulted in £18,000 of commission. Not the standards we were at over the past few years, but enough to get them into calm water from where they can get back.
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