What Do Real Estate Agents Really Do For Their Money?

I see a lot of people on online prop­erty invest­ment for­ums pos­ing ques­tions such as “I would like to know what Real Estate Agents actu­ally DO to earn their com­mis­sion on the sale of a property? 

The answers given by respond­ents are gen­er­ally mixed. Some say “By find­ing a buyer”, oth­ers say “By giv­ing people the oppor­tun­ity to buy your prop­erty”. Well this is true.

We do bring buy­ers to your prop­erty, but that is only what the pub­lic see.

Do you want to know the real secret about real estate agents?

Well as you have prob­ably figured out your­self, any mon­key can put up a sign board, order a pro­fes­sional real estate pho­to­grapher and load the pho­to­graphs up onto the internet.

Yes, of course buy­ers will come to your house in droves (provided the advert­ised price is right).

The agent doesn’t even need to be the one show­ing them through. At this stage you’re prob­ably think­ing “I’m selling myself out of a job!”

I’ll tell you the secret now….. The answer is NEGOTIATION.

If you are a buyer, here are some great nego­ti­ation strategies for get­ting the home you want.

Now let me break this down for you.

A good agent cre­ates an environment, almost like a pres­sure cooker situ­ation, where he/she can make the buyer push up their offer bey­ond what they were ori­gin­ally will­ing to pay for the house.

So when the agent is talk­ing to the seller, he/she can say with con­fid­ence “This is the max­imum that all the buy­ers can pay”.

Now you might be think­ing “Well I can do that. I’m good at negotiating.”

Well, good real estate agents spend $1000’s of dol­lars learn­ing from the top Agents in Aus­tralia and the U.S.A.

I have seen some Top Gun real estate agents spend count­less hours in coach­ing and hon­ing their selling sys­tem in the real word.

If you look at the top ten real estate agents in Aus­tralia you notice they are highly sys­temised in their nego­ti­ation pro­cess, stick to what works, and learnt it all from the school of hard knocks.

If you are still not willing to pay an agent for this skill let me tell you a little story

In the 1980’s there was a big-time news­pa­per company in New York City but there was a problem with their printing press.

The whole thing shut down des­pite the efforts of staff and for each minute the print­ing press was down it cost the news­pa­per com­pany $10,000.

They called in a spe­cial­ist engin­eer imme­di­ately at 3am in the morn­ing.

He was down there in 12mins, walked up to the machine, asked one ques­tion, opened the oper­at­ors box, rubbed his chin, and said “AAHHH… here it is.”

He turned one screw and the print­ing press restar­ted. 2 days later the spe­cial­ist engin­eer received a phone call from the news­pa­per com­pany editor. “A $100,000 bill for one screw and 5mins? Are you crazy? How do you jus­tify that?” the editor screamed.

The engin­eer said, “Well if you want an invoice break down: call-out free $40, know­ing what screw to turn, $99,060.”

Nego­ti­ation skills are the same and a 5 minute con­voc­a­tion can make or lose you $10,000.

If you want to prove that a real estate agent is worth their money, ask them to demon­strate their nego­ti­ation pro­cess and skills.

If you’re not happy with the answer don’t hire them. Simple!

The art of prop­erty sales writing and how it’s proven to gen­er­ate more buyer enquiry

I per­son­ally know a real estate agent that sold a house in 11 hours because of his cre­at­ive sales writ­ing skills.

Agents call this skill copywriting and it is tech­nical writ­ing skills all big news­pa­pers.

My agent friend was try­ing to sell a DUMP of a house and the pre­vi­ous agent had got­ten very little enquiry on over 18 months. and magazines use to get you to read their stor­ies.

So what did he do? No he didn’t write “ren­ov­ated delight”.

He did copy writ­ing 101, he wrote an enga­ging head line, “A-grade dump” and went on in the description Tell buyer to ‘Bring your vomit bucket’, ‘wear your safety goggles’ and ‘call in the CSI crew’.

Now I don’t suggest this for all homes in all markets but think about it, would you read this ad if you were scrolling for homes on your mobile? I would.

Now this gained the attention of the British and Australian media. What I found most inter­est­ing is that the buyers loved it, it was mem­or­able and they shared it with their friends.