Times have changed. The global landscape has changed. The real estate market has changed. The Henry Wong Team® has changed too! We’ve adapted and forged new paths of selling property. Digital paths that are safe and extremely effective. Paths that leverage our large social media presence, our huge database of buyers and the most up-to-date technology available.
It’s all about engaging with active and passive buyers, expanding our reach and creating competition. Let’s look at how.
Active and Passive Buyers
It’s safe to say that in life there are far more people who don’t know you personally than those who do know you. It’s the same with the property you’re trying to sell.
There are active buyers, who are buying in your area, and know your home exists and is on the market.
Then there are passive buyers. This is a much bigger group. These people aren’t aware of your home being on the market… they probably aren’t looking in your suburb or might not even be aware your suburb exists. Or they could want to buy in your suburb at some point but aren’t actively looking.
No matter what, an active buyer will find your home if you’ve listed it on the main property portals like realestate.com.au and domain.com.au. They search weekly or even daily in a locality and at a certain price range. If your property falls in their range, they’ll find it no matter who is selling it, whether it’s you or a real estate agent.
Passive buyers aren’t actively looking in your area. If you’re listing on the main property portals, you’ll only find them on the off-chance they happen to check your suburb during the time your listing is live. If a buyer is looking in Stretton and you’re selling a home in Wishart, you have no hope of reaching them. This is because Stretton isn’t a ‘surrounding suburb’ of Wishart, so your property won’t be promoted to them by the main property portals.
As a seller, you want both groups of buyers to know about your home and be interested in it. This increases the competition for it, which drives up the price. So how do you access the larger group of passive buyers? How do you get them interested and engaged with your property, drastically increasing the competitive element between buyers?
Well, you need someone to introduce them to your home or suburb. Essentially, you need the right real estate agent. An agent like The Henry Wong Team®, with many buyers in their database and a large and engaged following on social media.
The Social Media Effect
The best method of reaching large amounts of passive buyers is through social media. If a real estate agent has a large social media following who positively engage with their posts and interactions, that following acts as your introduction to passive buyers.
You see the circle of passive buyers includes the agent’s followers who might follow them for their interesting advice or inspirational content. Then when the agent lists a property, they’ll get notified about it. It might be the home they never knew they wanted. Suddenly they become an interested and active buyer and contact the agent for more information.
If an agent uses the social media algorithms to their advantage, they can effectively reach the connections of their followers. Adverts on social media allow you to reach far more people if you’re an active and engaged user. For the same price, your reach can exponentially extend to a far greater number of people.
This means the buyer we spoke about in Stretton who hasn’t thought of buying in Wishart, will be alerted to and consider your Wishart home for sale.
An agent’s social media strategy can’t just include spamming followers with listings and self-promotions. They need to provide real value to their followers and engage them with their posts. Then their followers take notice when they post and will see their listings come onto social media.
The Henry Wong Team® recently sold 1 Elkana Place in Wishart. We received 72 enquiries through Facebook alone, many of them from out-of-area buyers. On auction day, which was a resounding success, we had nine registered bidders in competition with each other. Similarly, at 14 Nabeel Place in Calamvale we had 69 Facebook enquiries, helping contribute to the 12 registered bidders. This property was also successfully sold through an online auction.
That’s the power of social media.
Social Proof
Another beautiful thing about social media is that it’s the ultimate source of proof of excellence. If you do a good job, people will find out about it over social media. Similarly, if you do a bad job, people will also learn about it over social media.
A strong presence on social media, backed up by positive reviews and kind words from clients, is powerful. It goes a long way to building trust with people who are looking at doing business with you.
The Henry Wong Team® are one of the highest reviewed teams of agents on the southside of Brisbane, with 95 five-star Google Reviews at the time of writing. We’re also the most followed agent on the southside on social media. This helps us create a trusting bond with people even before we meet them.
The Database Effect
Here at The Henry Wong Team® we’ve built up a massive database of buyers over the years. These are not just a bunch of email addresses we collect and ignore. These are people we’ve built relationships with who we personally know. We regularly stay in touch with them and keep them updated about our properties. They know us and they trust us.
These contacts are also part of the circle of passive buyers. When we list a property the first thing we do is email them and let them know about the home we’ve listed. Even if they’re not actively looking in the area, they become aware of the home and it might convert a number of them to being an interested and active buyer.
An agent who doesn’t have this large relationship database simply won’t be able to reach multiple passive buyers in this way. Our database has allowed us to sell many homes before they have even been taken to market. It’s also led to many sales to buyers who weren’t even considering the suburb a home has been located in.
Online Auctions
In today’s post-pandemic world, online auctions have emerged as a leading method for getting properties sold.
There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, social distancing. Bids are obviously all placed online, so there’s no need for people to be in the same room. In fact, you could have wealthy buyers from China bidding on your home with interstate buyers or buyers in your own suburb.
Online auctions also create transparency in what is an uncertain environment. When you have active and passive buyers competing in the auction, everyone knows where the price is at. Compare this to a private treaty, where buyers don’t know what others are offering. They factor the uncertainty of the times into their offer, which means offers will be lower.
With auctions, everyone knows what’s being offered. The value of the home is clear to see, low-ball offers won’t gain any traction and competitiveness is assured. It’s easier for buyers too, because if they really want the home they know how much to offer. This gives them a better chance of securing it for themselves. If they offer too low on a private treaty, they’ll end up missing out on the property.
The Henry Wong Team® has an 81.8% online auction clearance rate at the time of writing. In this current environment we’ve sold nine out of 11 homes under the hammer, with the remaining two of the 11 under contract post auction. The following homes were all sold online:
SOLD – 5 St George Ct, Wishart
SOLD – 2 Chelva St, Wishart
SOLD – 2 Agaton St, Wishart
SOLD – 41 Stackpole St, Wishart
SOLD – 20 Effra St, Wishart
SOLD – 34 Winthrop St, Wishart
SOLD – 53 Garie St, Wishart
SOLD – 1 Elkana Pl, Wishart
SOLD – 14 Nabeel Pl, Calamvale.
Our strong marketing strategies in place have been adapted to suit this method of selling. The results speak for themselves, and we have multiple happy buyers and sellers to back them up.
The Henry Wong Team® Effect
We’ve leveraged our social media presence and contacts to create strategies that sell homes, no matter what environment we’re in. Of course, we still list on the major real estate portals, because we need those active buyers to help create the competition with the passive buyers we attract.
At the time of writing, 73% of our sales in 2020 either came from our social media following or our database of contacts. These buyers offered the most and successfully secured the purchase. They’re the ‘passive buyers’ who were first introduced to the property by us and not the online main portals. This is why online auctions haven’t gone as well for other agents. They simply don’t have the strategies in place to attract passive buyers.
If you would like to have our strategies, knowledge and skill working to sell your home, then you’re in the right place. Just get in touch. We can’t wait to get started.
