Empower your PM Growth
I was in a meeting with Bob Walters in New Zealand recently after the last of the BWT Peak Performance national seminars, and Bob brought up the fact that it seems that every time he is speaking with an agent or property manager, they mention that more and more of their prospective clients are asking for fee discounts! A lot more than is considered ‘normal’!
Continuing on from part one; we take a look at the next five keys to beat fee discount requests.
Extra Bonus Tip- Know your competition! – you must know your competitors; not only their fee charges and their likelihood to offer discounts but also what they look like with their perception strategies. In a world where perception is reality, what perception do they give your prospective clients with their marketing materials, website etc? If they look better than you, then you are encouraging fee discount requests simply on this issue!
“If people like you they will listen to you, but if they trust you they’ll do business with you.” – Zig Ziglar
This quote explains it all!
It doesn’t matter how low your fees are if you cannot win trust you simply will not get the business.
It’s very annoying when you know the other agent down the road has quoted a rent amount way above what the market is doing!
The reasons are varied but sometimes they’re just quoting it high to get the business. And you can see the prospective client is tempted by this information.
How you ‘come back’ with a suitable answer will determine whether or not you get the business.
Everyone wants to know how to effectively win the business with prospective landlords – so what is the secret?
It takes lots of practice, great people skills and understanding the sales process to become really good!
A lot of property managers struggle in getting the business and resort to aggressive discounting as the solution. What happens instead is property managers ‘win more workload’ without the financial reward of profit.
A PM listing kit is something you don’t see too often these days. Too many property managers and business development managers (BDMs) don’t use a visual display of their services or show examples of property management in action.
The ‘show and tell’ just becomes a ‘tell’ missing the stronger impact of an added visual presentation.
Tight low vacancy markets come and go.
We all need to adjust to a tougher rental market when the supply of quality rental properties outweighs the demand by quality tenants.
This can happen seasonally, or if there is simply too much new ‘stock’ on the market in the area. Sometimes the main industry (employer) in the area has suffered a downturn resulting in a lesser demand for rental properties by tenants as laid-off workers now seek employment further afield. Of course, it could be a number of these factors at the same time.
There is no denying that the use of Social Media has completely taken over the internet. People are quick and willing to place their entire lives online, for all to see on a public level.
For tenant application processing, there is certainly debate about whether we should use this tool to ‘judge’ an applicant.
The general attitude among property managers is that, if a person has set their social media platform to the public, you may find a treasure trove of useful information that’ll assist you in the processing of an application and, therefore also in coming to an end decision.