Creating A One-of-A-Kind Buying & Selling Experience

On today’s episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent. We’re talking about creating a, one of a Kind Buying and Selling Experience For Your Clients. How you create a, one of a Kind Buying and Selling Experience when it might at first glance or first thought think, well, every agent does kind of the same thing. We all help people buy houses and help people sell houses. Don’t we all do the same thing. No, not at all. And this Creating A, One of a Kind Buying and Selling Experience For Your Clients is such a great opportunity to not only differentiate yourself from other agents, but also help you get referrals and repeat clients without you having to ask for business, I’m going to tell you how to create a one of a Kind Buying and Selling Experience in today’s episode. So listen up, welcome to this episode of Confessions of a Top Producing Real Estate Agent. I’m your host, Jennifer Myers, listen in, as I share exactly what I did to go from not being able to sell a house for years to becoming one of the top 1% of agents in the U S even opening my own brokerage full of agents helped me serve all the clients that were coming my way. I taught those agents the same strategies I use in date two became top producing agents. Now through this podcast and Agent grad school.com, I’m showing those same modern marketing and business strategies with you. Most of which I learned from looking outside the real estate industry, no fluff, no theory, no outdated sales techniques or paying for leads, just the exact steps to get to real estate business you’ve always wanted. And the life outside your business, you’ve always wanted to let’s make it happen and dive into today’s episode. Before we dive into today’s episode, I just want to say thank you for listening. It really does matter that you’re here, that you listened, that you tune in and that you leave your reviews. Thank you so much for those of you who have been leaving a review, it really does matter. And it really does help our show, which we continue to have unsponsored because we do not want to have sponsors. We want this to just be a free learning experience. And so the only way for our show to grow is to leave a review and to tell your other real estate agent friends about listening to the podcast. So if you have not yet left a review, please do so pause this really quick. Come back after you leave your review, wherever you’re listening, it really does help us. So thank you so much. And then tell one of your agent friends to listen in. So again, thanks to you who have been leaving reviews. I read every single one of them, and I’m so glad that what I’m sharing here on this podcast is helpful for you. Okay? So the last few weeks I have been diving into what I call the Pillars of A Successful Real Estate Business. A couple of weeks ago, I had just kind of done an overview of what those five pillars are. They are marketing you the initial consultation, the doing phase or during phase. I kind of use those terms, interchangeably, the under contract phase and the after phase. These are the five pillars. These are the five pieces, the five segments, the, the parts of your business, that whether you know it or not as a real estate agent, you have to pay attention to and create systems and processes around. So if you have, if you’re just starting to listen and you want to catch up on those episodes, you can go to the show notes for this particular show, which is Agent grad, school.com forward slash Doing phase. And there’ll be a link to each one of the five pillars episodes that I have been doing today. We’re focusing on the doing phase and how to create a one of a Kind Buying and Selling Experience For Your Clients and why it’s so important to do so. So first and foremost, the two biggest mistakes that I see real estate agents make when it comes to the Doing phases, number one, they jumped to it. They skipped to it way, way too soon. This is the third phase, the third piece of a real estate business, meaning you first need to create really good marketing that brings clients to you, the exact clients that you want to bring to you, having them want to work with you. That is phase one that is in the marketing. You marketing you before you can market anything or sell anything. You’ve got to sell people on the idea of using you as your agent. That is pillar number one, marketing you to other people. And I dive deep into how to do that. The next is when somebody raised their hand and says, Hey, you’re talking my language, whatever you’re saying is working. And I want you to help me do the thing that I’m looking to do, whether it’s buy or sell or both the next thing that happens, the next phase that you should walk them through in the next phase that you should be creating your own business is the initial consultation. So I’m not going to go through that here. You have a, I think almost an hour long podcast episode that I’ll link to in the show notes for this episode to how to do the marketing, how to do the initial consultation. And so one of the biggest mistakes is people miss the real estate agents are missing good marketing, pooling people to you like a magnet, and then having an initial consultation phase to get that clarity for both yourself and your client about what they’re looking to do when they’re looking to do it and how they’re looking to do it. So the biggest missed one of, one of the two biggest mistakes is people totally skip those two first two phases. And they just skip right into the doing phase. The doing phase by definition is the phase in your business. That like is the thing that your clients hired you to do. Whether it’s helping them buy a house or helping them, helping them sell a house, or oftentimes doing both buying and selling at the same time. Don’t skip. I see agents so often and I keep telling my students inside Agent grad school, don’t skip to the houses. Don’t skip to the houses so quickly. Your value proposition, yes is inch in creating a system and a framework for successfully helping your clients do the thing they hired you to do, but you cannot skip steps. So don’t get to the doing phase too soon. The other mistake that I see real estate agents making when it comes to the doing phase is they think, or they think, or they think that it should be that everybody’s doing Phase, meaning the process by which we all buy and sell, help our clients buy and sell properties is the same among every single real estate agent. That is one of the biggest mistakes you can be making because the doing phase and how you create one of a kind customer experience when it comes to helping them buy and sell a home is one of the biggest ways that you can differentiate yourself and have clients coming to you in the form of past clients, wanting to work with you again. And it’s a really great way to get referrals. So we’re going to talk about how to get referrals in the after phase in about two weeks, but you don’t get referrals because the transaction is over. You get referrals because of what you’ve created and what you’ve done in the framework and how you are different than other real estate agents in the process, in the doing phase, in the process of helping your clients accomplish their goals. And the doing phase is such a huge opportunity for that. So how we approach buying and selling should not all be the same. If it was the case, then we would be unrecognizable, meaning like undifferentiatable who, who people choose, what matter then why would we all become real estate agents? It also makes us very replaceable with things like technology, with things like, you know, automated lock boxes, where people can help themselves to get into the property, things like that. So it’s crucially important that you create an experience and be able to communicate that experience to your buyer and seller clients. Now, what I mean by experience is really twofold. Number one is yeah, creating Experience, little gifts, little kind of surprises and delights throughout that stressful period of finding a home or selling a home super important, but even more important is creating calmness out of the chaos that our clients are feeling when it comes to searching for a home or selling a home and creating system, a process and or a framework for organizing what feels chaotic and feels stressful to our clients and creating a framework for them to work within. Now, for example, when it comes to selling a home, I have, and I created a formula. I talk about it in two different ways. I call it my six mice, my formula for a successful sale. And I outline what that is to my clients. Very clearly. This is what happens when it happens, how it happens, who does what very clearly outlines and I’ve called it something. The other kind of framework that I use often, it depends on the client. It depends where I’m talking about it, my marketing, but I have the four steps to selling a home. And I really make sure that my clients understand how crucial it is. Cause they always want to focus on pricing. They always want to focus on getting it on the market, but there’s, there’s four phases to selling a home successfully or in my selling a home successful formula. And those four phases are prepping the home, marketing the home, meaning like all the things that go into making the home look good before it goes on the market. And while it’s on the market, then we have the on the market Phase and then we have our under, under contract to settlement Phase. So, so I see how I’m creating a framework so that when my clients come to me for a seller, I have a very like formulaic framework to say, here’s the four phases that I use to sell a home. And here’s what we have to do in each phase. And then when we are going into the phase, when they’ve signed the listing agreement and we’re moving forward, they understand like in their mind, there’s clarity around where we are in the process, what gets to what needs to get done. And when the next part of the Phase process happens and what happens then it just creates a sense of calmness and a sense of structure for our clients. When it comes to helping my clients buy a home, I explained a very specific process that I use for helping my clients find their home. And I explain this process multiple times in multiple ways. One of the times that I explained this process in my approach is during the initial consultation at the end. And I end my initial consultation by always saying, now let’s talk about what it’s going to be like to look for houses together. I have a very specific approach, a structure for how we’re going to approach this so that it’s not chaotic. And it’s really as stress-free as possible. Then I go on to say that I only need two hours of your time. Every single week to look at houses, I will narrow down the number of houses though. All I need from you is two hours of your time to look at houses. And typically my clients pick a certain like time slot every single week, that’s their time slot. And again, it creates, it creates calmness and they really feel like they can kind of, I don’t know what the right word is, like fit this in to their life, fit in buying a home into their life. Cause sometimes it feels all consuming. I explain how our market works, meaning there’s a flow to our market and what typically how certain days our homes typically come on the market. And in the beginning, we’re going to cast a wide net like rings of a tree. And we’re going to look at more homes. And as every single time we have an outing, our goal of that outing is to bring that ring of trees in closer and closer to the One, the house that we’re going to find for them. So that’s how every outing should feel. It should feel like we’re weeding things out that there’s less and less to see. And that’s a good thing because they start to panic when that happens, when there’s less and less to see because they’re becoming more discerning. So I warn them that that’s going to happen. I also explained that as we begin in the process, we’re going to pretty much fit this, like use the schedule, but when they start getting closer and closer, really understand what they’re looking for. Then we may need to change our format a little bit. That’s when we’ll start to look at off-market properties because I can really understand what I’m looking for. And that’s when I’ll dive deep into off-market properties for them. And it’s also when we might have to go outside of our scheduled time for the week and we might have to pop into houses right away, because we might be at the point where we’re looking for the One, or if we’re looking for something off market, it just really doesn’t follow that normal flow. Now I’m in a very competitive market where like three different states, everybody operates differently, DC, Maryland, and Virginia. It’s a whole thing. So it’s not to say that my market has served me up to this opportunity to create calmness for my clients. Not at all. I am in a very fast moving, very competitive, very type, a very chaotic market. But it’s that I saw that as an opportunity to create structure around it for my clients and create a format and an approach for them. So I could tell them what to expect and how this was going to go and how the looking process was going to change as we get closer and closer to their house. Another perfect example is when it gets to be around the holidays, which is the time we’re entering. I warned them, Hey, listen, it’s the holidays. The market, really, the inventory really slows down. So do not get panicky. Don’t worry when there’s nothing on the market, there might be a few weeks when we don’t even have anything to see and that’s perfectly normal. So expect it so that when that actually comes, because I’ve said it more than once. And oftentimes it takes me saying it over and over and over again, when it actually happens, they remember that I’ve said it. And like, I’ll say, remember, we talked about this. We’re here now in this moment where we we’ve been planning for it, we’ve been expecting this. So really understanding that there is a way to do this. Now, the other thing I do when I show houses at the end of every single showing when I’m in the house. So like there’s kind of two pieces to ending a showing. One is that one particular house. And then another ending is like for the day, if you’ve seen more than one house. So the, at the house, let’s say, when we’re wrapping up the showing, I always ask them on a scale of one to 10 or one to five, how would you rate this home for your based on your criteria? How ideal is this home based on what you’re hoping will actually happen? That really helps me gauge not only what their expectations are, but also if there’s a couple, two people or more making a decision, how they might be differing. And I get them talking about every single house and really nail it down of why this doesn’t fit their criteria, or maybe it fits for one and not the other. We hone that in, before we go on to the next house. Now be careful when you have these conversations, because nowadays everybody has a ring camera or a nest camera and they can hear you recording. So oftentimes I will kind of walk down the street or kind of in the Cabo, in the car or that kind of thing before we move on, but certainly do not have it in the house or even right outside the house where most likely the seller can hear everything you’re saying. So be careful about that. And then at the very end of the showing, I asked them a list of questions. And one of those questions is what is it that you want to see? That’s see differently next week. How are we going to change the criteria? So we see a different set of houses because obviously if you’re not buying a house this week, what criteria do we need to change? And of course I talk then about my three bucket strategy that I’ve shared on this podcast. We can either change our budget. We can change the location, or we can change what we’re looking for in house. So again, creating a framework and saying, these are the only three levers that we can pool. The more frameworks, the more namings that you have that you create for your clients. And the more you use them in the process of showing houses or selling houses for your clients, the more your clients are going to understand that this is like a formula and an a process for which you’ve made up. And that actually works. And I teach all this inside Agent grad school. So right now it may seem really confusing. But the takeaway that I want you to understand is it’s really important to create a client experience. And one way to create that experience is yes, with little pieces of delight, which is very easy. For example, on the first outing, I always bring my clients a little gift bag that has tools and like little things that they would need for their house search. So it has a very small little gift bag and it’s all in my colors. And it has like two small water bottles that are branded a measuring tape. That’s branded a piece of paper, you know, a notebook and a pen that says thoughts to dwell on because my company was called dwell residential before I sold it. And it just made sense, right? Like all those little stickers and what else was in there. I think that was pretty much it. And I said, here’s just some little goodies for you to help your search be better, you know? And it just broke the ice a little cause our clients are really nervous for that when they get to that showing, you know, that first showing we’re strangers, they don’t know who we are and it’s just a great way to break the ice. So that’s an example of the delight or the little gifts you can put in really make your clients feel cared for. But in addition to those types of things, you also have to create this structure, this process, the system that truly is yours and really understanding like your approach and being able to communicate to your clients similar to what I’m talking about, about my four phases of selling a house, my three bucket strategy for finding a house and then every single week having that consistency so that they know like by the cup, by a couple of weeks in, when my buyers are, are looking at a house, they go, I can give this a three. Like I don’t even have to ask the question. And then I’m like the couple’s able to talk because I’ve kind of, I don’t know, train them is not the right word, but like instilled in them that this is how we’re going to approach looking for a house. Right? Other little things like, I’ll always say like if the market was talking, it would say blank, Mike and I would give my 2 cents about what the market would be saying. For example, if the market was talking, it would say based on the, your price range and your location, these are the types of houses that we’re going to continue to see. So if you’re not happy with these houses, if they’re all too small, then we either need to change the budget. We need to change the location. Okay. So there’s just little things that you can create inside your business to really create a one of a kind experience for your clients and doing that really makes it an experience for them, helps them understand and, and create and kind of operate within a framework. It relieves stress helps them feel like there’s this calmness to this strategy that you’re implying in that they’re at in fact is a strategy that you’re not just kind of winging it and waiting for them to show, to tell you what houses they want to see, and then opening the doors. That’s not what you should be doing that doesn’t provide any value to our clients. So creating a framework, creating a strategy, creating approach, and approach, and then being able to communicate that to your clients is so crucial. And what that does is it shows them that you kind of have this like one of a kind way, it looking at how to buy and sell houses. Even if it’s simply communicating it in a way that feels one of a kind to them. Right. And what that does is then kind of like when they’re ready to buy or sell again, or when they’re having a conversation with their friends, then they’re going to want to use you again, because you have this kind of a unique way of helping them reach their goals. You know, like if they’re in a conversation with, with their friends and their friends are complaining about, you know, how tough the market is there, they might say something like, oh, you have to talk to my agent, Jennifer, here’s her information. She has this whole three bucket strategy and she kind of shows you how to everything you need. You, you can even think of to buy a house. Isn’t it goes within these three buckets and she showed you how to turn each lever. And you know, they go into why your approach is so different and ult, and, and what that does is then shows people why you’re different because you actually are not just saying I’m different. I actually am different. I’m creating an approach, an approach, a system, a formula, a framework that then they have something to talk about. So they’re not just saying, oh, you should use my Agent. That’s what everybody says, use my agent. She’s great. Well, give them something more than she’s great. Give them that framework so that when they’re telling their friends, or when they’re thinking about using you again, they have something to kind of latch onto or think about, oh gosh, you know, she really made it easy with that four phases thing. It really just made me understand I’m very like process oriented approach to something that feels chaotic or that people complain about that maybe they hear their friends complaining about the process of selling your home and how stressful it is. Well, if I have a system, a framework, a four step approach, then it really makes it feel more enjoyable for the client and enjoyable for me, frankly, because I keep reminding my clients, here’s where we are. This is what we need to focus on. We’ll get to that when we get to the next phase, but we’re not there yet. So it’s really important that you first give them the overview, the big picture. And then as you go through the phases, you, you know, you show them what the big picture looks like. What’s in each one. And then you have to remind them over and over again when you’re in each one of the phases. Okay. So my hope is that your takeaway is, do not skip to the doing phase. You’ve got to bring clients to use very specific type of client to you that you want to work with. And you’re best suited to work with in your, you then have to have an initial consultation with them to understand what are they looking to do? How are they looking to do it and how can you help them? And if you can help them, then you’ve turned on that Doing phase. And you create an approach, a strategy, a specific framework that you communicate to them to create calmness and a structure for them to operate. And it really does make the process of buying and, or selling a house so much more enjoyable for both you and for them, because they’re so much more calm. Now, the, the challenge is for you to create this in your own business and do not make this more difficult than it is really think about how you, what you do and then create a framework for it. So all I did was I kind of looked at my business and what I do for every single client. Let’s just take the listing side for example. And I said, okay, well, here’s all the things that happen. And then some of these have to happen, you know, to prep the house because I can’t start marketing the house. I can’t take photos and start doing any of the stuff I need to do to market the house unless the house is prepared and looking good. So first it has to get prepared. Then I can actually start my marketing. Then I can put the house on the market and there’s, this is how that process works. Then we have to go under contract. And this is how that process work works. What that also does is make sure that your clients understand that your job as a real estate agent and your value to them as a real estate agent, isn’t in just being on the market, especially nowadays in this crazy market for a couple of days, that your value is in all four steps and that they don’t think for example, that just because their house is under contract, that your job is done and their job is done. No, there’s a whole process, a whole lot of things that have to happen in that under contract phase. So think through and create your own framework. And for you agent grad school, students who have all this in your, I give you everything that I created. And I would love for my students who are listening for you to create your own version of this for your audience, maybe renaming it or adding in things that I didn’t add for my audience and really changing it and making it yours. All right. I hope this has helped. I can’t wait to talk to you next week about the under contract phase and how you can save so much time and energy in that phase and really keep your clients calm and informed in that, in that phase. So that, that, that, that time period between going under contract and settlement is very clear to your clients about what needs to happen and what’s happening behind the scenes and who’s doing what and why. It’s so important that they don’t like celebrate, but also that you create an under contract phase that doesn’t take a ton of time and effort for you. That is a huge mistake that I see most real estate agents making. They either kind of don’t spend enough time in there, or they spend way too much time in there. So I’m going to teach you a strategy for kind of striking that balance and seeing you’re under contract phase is just another step. Another pillar in this strong foundation, you’re building in your business and how to kind of communicate, who needs to do what during that under contract phase so that your clients are happy, they’re under control and that you are getting a lot done without putting a lot of effort and time into it. All right. So think about, you’re doing Phase. Think about your approach and communicate it in a way to your clients so that they feel calm. They feel a structure, they understand what’s happening when they understand who’s doing what in this goal accomplishing part of buying and selling a house. This is really that doing Phase is what they hired you to do, create an experience that they feel like they got their money’s worth because they’re doing the math. And that’s the goal here. All right. See you next week. When we talk about the under contract Phase, thanks so much for listening. I hope this has helped you. If you have anything else you want to talk about, you can always go to Agent grad school.com forward slash podcast. And drop me a question. I love getting those. I’m going to be doing a bunch of a listener questions coming up here in a couple of weeks. So feel free to do that. And you can always go to Agent grad school.com anytime to see our past episodes. Listen to those past episode, join the inner circle and even become an agent grad school student. It’s all there at Agent grad school.com. See you there. 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