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When it comes to drumming up listings, don’t overlook the power of forging relationships with other agents, panelists at Inman Luxury Connect in Las Vegas told attendees Monday.
In a session called “Strategies for Finding Listing Inventory When There Is None,” Jon Grauman, a luxury real estate agent at The Agency and a cast member of Buying Beverly Hills, said inventory is “the central issue” of the real estate industry right now and noted that sales volume in Los Angeles is down 45 percent year over year and in New York it’s down about 24 percent year over year.
He isn’t chasing deals right now, but he is chasing relationships because that’s where a lot of deals come from, he said.
“We work in a really unique business where our competitors are also our colleagues, but you have to embrace that,” Grauman said.
He likened the process to “really targeted matchmaking” where instead of marketing to a broad audience, he tries to identify a specific buyer that’s right for a home.
“There’s an element of what we do that’s essentially like legalized insider trading,” Grauman said.
“We get to know about deals before they come to market,” he added. “We often have all sorts of insights about deals that the rest of market isn’t privy to. Even if it’s listed for sale, you might know the back story that the market doesn’t and you can be really strategic about how you use that information to your advantage.”
He’s putting all of his time and energy into building relationships with other agents because he’s thinking of the long game, he said.
“When the market does take a turn, I’ve stockpiled a bunch of goodwill and relationships and just trying to educate myself to what’s happening and be able to provide that value to clients,” Grauman said.
“Every conversation becomes a new opportunity,” he added.
He noted that he’s been “getting back to the basics” that he didn’t have time to do during the frenzied market before the latest downturn. For him, that includes focusing on pocket listings, picking up buyers during coming soon phases, door knocking, hosting events for neighbors, and combing through leads. (Pocket listings are a controversial practice, in part because they come with potential fair housing implications.)
“We’re not reinventing the wheel here,” Grauman said.
David Kramer, president of Hilton & Hyland in Beverly Hills, agreed that agents should be networking with other brokers as well just generally with people they already know.
“I always look at warm leads first,” Kramer said. “It’s really easy to forget our warm leads. If you look at acquisition costs it’s much easier to get someone you already know.”
He said he starts calling his contacts alphabetically to say hello and ask for their business politely.
“In a down market, by the time I get to E or F, I usually have a listing or a buyer,” he said.
Lisa Song Sutton — an agent at Engel & Volkers, serial entrepreneur, real estate investor and former Miss Nevada — turned to a new category of clients to find inventory: institutional sellers such as AMH in the Las Vegas area.
Such sellers need to offload properties in tranches after a certain amount of time and, although they tend to be properties under $600,000, they can sometimes go under contract in a single day, she said. They also have their own processes in terms of setting a list price so she developed standard operating procedures (SOPs) to working with them so she can handle those deals efficiently.
Another source of listings for her are title companies, she added.
“Every week they send me notices of default and notices of sale [for a particular ZIP code],” she said.
Additionally, her team hosts game nights where they play Cashflow, a board game created by Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki. They put the event on Eventbrite and invite local real estate investors to come.
“We literally had such a great turnout doing this,” she said. “It was a fun unique way to be ingratiated into the community [and] not do a hard sell, like ‘are you looking for an agent,’ but really just being a resource.”
Kramer had one last bit of advice: Don’t keep clients you shouldn’t just because the market has changed.
“Firing a client is the most exhilarating experience you can have,” Kramer said, prompting chuckling from attendees.
“If you have that person who’s taking up your time and your energy and your money and your thoughts and everything else, just just say, ‘Listen, maybe another direction is a good way to go,’ and that frees you up to make sales,” Kramer said.
“I can’t tell you how many times people come to me and said, … ‘I was able to pick up two sales as a result of having the time and the space to deal with nicer people.'”
