How to make sure you prepare and survive a tough market

Just as sure as the weather will go through the four seasons of the year, Estate Agency will go through its own cycle of springs, summers, autumns and winters and each of these seasons in estate agency has its pros and cons.

Of course, when we are experiencing a busy sales market, we hope it will stay that way for as long as possible but in reality, we need that market to die down at some point to regulate conditions in order to create enough demand for another spike, or ‘summer’. 

Again, in just the same way as many animals get ready for winter by using autumn to prepare, we should follow this basic survival instinct too.

To do this you must rethink the way you look at ‘time wasters’ and instead start to look at them as your stored food for the winter months. In the same way in which you keep a close eye on your pipeline of sales waiting to exchange, in order to be ready for the slow times you must be monitoring and nurturing your pipeline of potential new instructions. This pot is critical for having potential new listings to go looking for when there is little to no activity in terms of new listings.

During your busy seasons this ‘pot’ can be filled up with all of the valuations and even instant valuations that you have been out on but have not yet come on the market. This invaluable data is your harvest for the quiet months, that will allow you to maintain and survive through to the next period of busy activity.

For the last 20 years estate agency systems have only been built around the transactional side of their business and even though those systems may be full to the brim of potential future business, the systems themselves are not built to nurture any of that business for the future. Yes, you may email the database sometimes and call them but doing this alone will just let that fruitful data die and become a total waste of your valuable resources.

By using a platform to store your data that looks at the whole Lifesycle of your potential clients you can easily ‘refrigerate’ your potential new business by letting the system work out what your potential new business pipeline is and where they are on their journey towards becoming a client. Lifesycle will then place the right content in front of those people regularly in order to stay in contact and provide you with small harvests over time by showing you who are the most active people on your emails, social media and website. Allowing you to let the system just run in the background while you focus on who to speak to and when.

Even for those agents that have not been using Lifesycle to prepare them for their next slowdown in the market, it is not too late as you can backdate your old valuations from the past, plus start adding your new ones from right now to ensure you have the best opportunity to make it through any ‘winter seasons’ to come.

To find out more about how Lifesycle is totally revolutionising the way agents work, use the get in touch form and one of our team will reach out to you.