In life and in business when we set high standards for our self, we reap what we sow. When you pay for a luxury vehicle such as Mercedes Benz, Porsche or BMW, you know without a doubt you’re getting the epitome of quality, craftsmanship and detail. When we fly business class on Qantas or Emirates, we know we’ll be treated like royalty. When you buy Hermes or Louis Vuitton clothes, you know they’re going to fashionable and eye-catching.
When you pay for a real estate agent, you also reap what you sow. A good real estate agent is going to pay immaculate attention to detail, give you their full attention and be fully committed to the success of your sale. A detail-oriented agent is a successful agent; an agent who understands their clients are counting on them and will put the extra effort and time in to not let them down.
So when choosing an agent go for character, class, track record, and importantly, attention to detail. Here are some of the areas you can look at to see if they set the same high standards as you:
Marketing
This is an incredibly important aspect of real estate, that requires utmost attention to detail. Start with looking at how they market themselves and their own business first, because this will be very indicative of how they market your property.
Firstly, look at their personal presentation:
– Are they well-presented and dressed nicely, with clothes that fit properly and decent shoes? A sloppily dressed agent will probably apply that same attitude to selling your home.
– Do they drive a nice car? Agents do a lot of mileage, a well-kept, well-maintained vehicle is necessary for them to do this.
Then look at their professional presentation:
– Are their business portrait photographs taken by a pro photographer?
– Do they have an informative, clean website with a blog? Their website should include their name in it somehow, such as henrywong.com.au.
– A dedicated agent will have gone to the effort of trademarking their name and mantra (for example, ‘The Henry Wong Team’ and ‘Opening Doors to Greater Markets’ are both registered trademarks.)
– Look at their business card. Is it badly designed and printed on the cheap? A high-quality card, for instance one printed on 420gsm board with a velvet coating, shows a dedication to creating a good first impression.
Next, take a look at how they market the properties they’re selling:
– Do they use a professional copywriter? Do they use professional photography to market each home? Do they use videos and floorplans too? Are they created to a very high standard? Professional visual presentation of a property is essential to standing out in a crowded marketplace. Attention to detail like this leads to faster sales and better deals.
– Remember when we set a high standard, we reap the rewards. So if an agents standard when they’re marketing is just to throw a few photos online and hope for the best, then the results are going to be mediocre at best. If their standard, like the Henry Wong Team, is to include professional copywriting, photos, videos, floor plans and site plans in both English and Chinese, then you’re going to enjoy a high standard of result.
Research and Knowledge
It should be a given that your agent has paid particular attention to detail with familiarising themselves with the real estate market in your suburb, city and state. You want to know your property is priced competitively and marketed correctly when you sell with them. An agent should be able to show evidence of extensive research into the sales in your area, to complement their intuitive knowledge of what properties are worth.
The Henry Wong team is dedicated to knowing every suburb we operate in inside-out. Here are some of the ways we share this information to you:
– Market Updates: Every three months we release a highly detailed market update for every suburb we cover. These include details on every home sold in that suburb during that period, as well as the average days on market, the average price achieved, the highest selling home and the lowest selling home. Published in magazine format, these informative guides are freely available to our network.
– Comparative Market Analyses: For each and every property we list we provide the sellers with a detailed CMA. This document includes information on every similar home sold in the neighbourhood in the last six months, including the list price, the selling price, method of sale, photos and floorplans if it’s available.
– Auction Reports:One of our team attends every auction in the same price bracket and same area as a listing we have. For example, we have a listing on Garie Street in Wishart for $650,000. So we attend every auction in Wishart for similarly priced houses. If another property on Mt Gravatt-Capalaba Road sells this Saturday for $700,000, that result isn’t published at all until after settlement. But because we have a team member at the listing, we have this information.
Then, a buyer comes to us with an offer for the house on Garie Street. We’re able to tell them that a similar house on Mt Gravatt-Capalaba Road sold for $700,000. Remember, a house on the main road should sell for less… this means the market value of the Garie Street house, which isn’t on a main road, should be higher than $650,000. A serious buyers next offer will undoubtedly also increase.
If a buyer is interested in a property, they will pay the money for it so long as they can justify the price. So by having information from auctions in the area, we’re able to help them justify the price they’re paying on the property.
Other information we get when attending an auction is the number of bidders on a house, whether or not the auction got passed in and what the property ended up selling for.
The majority of agents simply won’t do this. They don’t have the resources to pay people to attend the auctions, and they don’t have the ability to collate and present this kind of knowledge and use it in their negotiations.
Communication
Attention to detail is invaluable when it comes to communicating with clients. It’s essential that real estate agents maintain open, transparent channels of communication with buyers and sellers. Keeping them regularly updated with any developments makes them comfortable and informed.
The Henry Wong Team has adopted the following to ensure the utmost attention to detail is applied when communicating with our network:
– A dedicated online portal for sellers, accessible 24-hours a day. This is updated in real time by members of our team, so vendors can log on at any time and check on the progress with their property.
– Bilingual communications: As a truly bicultural and bilingual team, we cross the divide between Chinese and Australian buyers and sellers. We can maintain fluent and clear channels of communication with Chinese buyers, without the hassle of having to bring in an external translator. We are also very active on WeChat, the Chinese messaging service.
– Easily Contactable: You can reach us in any number of ways, from land lines to mobile phones, from Whatsapp to Wechat. We have multiple email addresses, a contact form on our website, and a physical office location that we work out of.
We also don’t stick to normal working hours. If a buyer rings at 9pm at night and we’re awake and able to take the call, we’ll take it. And if we miss the call we’ll ring back as soon as possible. This is especially important for keeping wealthy Chinese buyers happy. They have an incredibly high work ethic, and work at all times of the day or night. If a real estate agent fails to accommodate that, they will miss out on creating relationships with important buyers.
So those are some of the things to look for when checking to see if an agent’s attention to detail is up to scratch. Remember, an attentive agent is a motivated agent, an agent who loves their job and wants to go the extra mile for their own business and for their clients. You will depend on your agent to know their processes inside out, and you want to make sure they don’t let you down. Errors, misplaced paperwork or omissions could can have a serious impact on a deal. They need to be on-the-ball and organised.
If your agent is organised and detail oriented, you can rest assured they will also work with a network of professionals that are the same. That means you’ll be able to trust the tradesmen, lawyers, financial advisors, inspectors and so on who they recommend.
If you’d like more information on how important attention to detail in real estate is, please give Henry a call on 0412 471 588. He’ll be more than happy to go through his detail-oriented approach to marketing and selling properties.