Look out the window. It will either be a clear, sunny day or wet and dreary. If it’s sunny, that’s a fact. If it’s raining, that’s a fact.
You can’t change it. It’s just weather, and it’s not good or bad.
When you are stuck in traffic, you might think, ‘How dare all these other people leave at the same time as me to get to work on time’.
But never forget the fact that you are part of the very traffic you’re lamenting.
Neither of these, the weather or the traffic, are in our control.
Just like the market that many of you find yourselves in right now.
It’s neither good or bad. It is just the market. It is what it is.
Very few agents gave the market much gratitude when it was booming, but quite a few seem to blame the market when it becomes challenging.
Stop talking about the market, and start focusing on things you can control.
Let’s go for a walk down the path of logic and understand that the agents that will thrive throughout this market are the ones who reallocate hours.
When the market was on fire, we had huge numbers in our open homes, and it would take up to a day for a good agent to service those calls through their callbacks.
Now, in some cases, with very little or no bodies through, logic will tell you that you now have a few more hours up your sleeve.
How you reallocate those hours will determine your trajectory.
I have always believed that when the market is challenged, we must follow what we call the ‘sequence of sale’.
The first step in the process is traffic.
Though the traffic was organic, the market has just provided us with a huge number of inspections; now you have to reallocate your hours to spend time on the phone to drive traffic.
The biggest mistake most agents make is to use that traffic to try and create a sale, and get caught up in the initial trap of trying to match someone ready to buy today with someone that’s not ready to sell.
Use the traffic to build what we call the ‘platform of information’ – feedback, offers, and a sense of where the market is – so you can sit down with your owners and have a sensible and professional conversation.
The better the platform, the better the conversations.
The third stage is the repositioning of stock.
I believe that stock has to be moving every day and the businesses I am involved in has created a platform called ‘stock in motion.’
Stock can be repositioned by price, by methods, by marketing or even attitude, but your success in the marketplace will be directly aligned with how you effectively reposition stock.
Then and only then, may you create a platform to make the sale.
Many agents want to go from step one, traffic, to step four, sale, and leave out the middle two steps.
Remember, you can’t control the weather, you can’t control the traffic jams, and you can’t control the market.
But you can control your attitude and your process.
