Value Performance Advertising with Tom Panos

In this episode of We Are Selling, Lee Woodward is joined once again by Tom Panos, one of Australia’s most respected real estate educators, for a focused and practical conversation on Value Performance Advertising (VPA).

VPA is more than a budget conversation, it is a professional responsibility. Lee and Tom explore how modern agents can confidently communicate the importance of marketing, protect the client’s asset, and ensure no money is left on the table in today’s market.

💡 In this episode, you will learn:

• Why VPA begins with belief, and why agents must genuinely value marketing before they can sell it
• How strong case studies and storytelling help owners understand the true cost of under marketing
• The staged four part marketing approach, including VIP preview, social release, portal launch, and direct consumer outreach
• How to position yourself as the custodian of the owner’s investment, showing care, caution, and strategy
• Why off portal and off market often lead to missed opportunities, and why every property deserves full exposure
• The behavioural economics behind vendor decisions, including Daniel Kahneman’s research on pain avoidance

Tom and Lee also break down common misconceptions about selling quickly, why properties are often undersold, and how impact marketing helps shorten time on market without compromising the final result.

Hosted by Lee Woodward Training Systems

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Transcript

Lee Woodward: 0:04

Hello and welcome to the podcast We Are Selling. Selling as a transference of feelings. We're always selling through to our consumer that vision, that decision, and that reason to appoint that real estate professional which we want to be you. In the last few weeks, we've had a sequence of incredible sessions with Mr. Tom Panos, one of Australia's greatest real estate educators. He joins me again today. Mr. Tom Panos, welcome back to the program.

Tom Panos: 0:33

Absolutely a pleasure, Lee. Love being co-pilot with you on these sessions. I think they're short, they're sharp, they're fast, they're action-oriented, they're practical. And I think I want to let every real estate agent know that they work when you work. Don't think that, you know, the podcast itself does the work. Pumped about today's topic. It's one of my favorites, Lee.

Lee Woodward: 0:53

We had such a good response to our last segment, which was the moments of a listing presentation. But one of the biggest moments in that needed its own podcast, which is VPA. And as you and I were discussing, Tom, we've reworded that to value performance advertising. Because the word vendor paid advertising is a really old-fashioned thought now, and especially with these incredible products we have in the marketplace that fund the actual promotion of a property. I think all agents need to have faith in the process and not shortcut. There is no shortcuts to an incredible price, and every property deserves that international chance of selling. Otherwise, you left money on the table, you're not a professional, you've got to let it have its chance in this incredible market. Tom, VPA, what's the biggest things for you?

Tom Panos: 1:46

You're an agent. If you're going to go down the path of marketing, VPA, I'm going to say you're going to have to believe in it. Because if you don't believe in it, you're selling something to someone that you don't believe in, and that makes you a con man. That makes you someone that's benefiting themselves, but the client's not benefiting. So number one is I think, Lee, you're going to have to develop a strong belief in it. Number two, you're going to need to have strong case studies. Stories sell, facts tell. Be a good storyteller. Show case studies. Number three, you need to be able to sell it. I think you can believe in it. You can have case studies, but I think you've got to have this ability to tell a narrative that essentially leaves an owner with the view of this. If I don't market my property, I'm going to save maybe 1%. But I'll probably undersell it by 5 or 10%. So it's this ability to show a vendor that marketing is purely an exercise. And by the way, vendors don't have to be guinea pigs in this whole process. I mean, we know Apple market, we know Macca's market, we know BMW markets. We know that any organization that has a product or service uses marketing. And it is really no different in the world of real estate. We have owners that are selling a property. Generally, it's being sold on the market in competition, not in isolation. And I've got to tell you, as a vendor, you've got to stand out to win out. And marketing is the solution to that, Lee. Tom couldn't agree more.

Lee Woodward: 3:33

And I think agents make the error of going for the budget, but not explaining what they'll do with someone's funds to improve it. I'll give you a quick quiz story. I had a property rented and the lady running it was great. And she rings me out one day and says, Lee, we've got to replace the table, it's going to cost a couple of grand. I went, oh, okay. And uh then she ran me back and said, Oh, by the way, I just had another holiday let get sold and I found a table for 500. I'm taking that one. The fact she demonstrated she was cautious with my funds versus it doesn't matter, it does matter. So I think we need to explain to an owner that it's our job to generate profit. It's our job to make sure we don't undersell the asset. And our job is to protect the asset. And I'm going to do that, Mr. Panos, by using a stage marketing campaign where I'm going to run four campaigns. And if it sells along the way, that would be your decision. My job is to get it out there to the world, and I mean the world, as internationally, Australia's on the radar. So campaign one is going to be our VIP preview. I'm sending a digital inspection direct to our people who are registered to see if I can get a buyer engagement level from them. That'll be the first part of my campaign, and we're funding that because we've got all that information and technology to do it. Campaign two is going to be social. Now I'd love you to launch on social that you're delighted to announce the property's gone to market. You've selected us as your agent, but the someone who knows you, knows you, knows you and your family could be the buyer. And again, it gives us that generation side to it. Campaign three, we're going to go live to the portal because now we've got enough facts and evidence to know what we're talking about, and we don't want to project at the wrong time to the wrong people. Then campaign four is our direct consumer people around the property, either door knocking through the streets or the surrounding appraisals we've done. But by doing that in a full campaign, I can make sure I've left no stone unturned, but you could leave here knowing everything was done to get you the greatest money we could.

Tom Panos: 5:36

Love that, Lee. I tell you, as you were speaking, I was visualizing myself sitting at a dining room table and you were the agent. And here are the moments that I'm feeling that you're using an incremental approach. Yes. And that what you're doing is you're making sure that you're not spending unnecessarily money for me, that um which you talked about earlier on, Lee. Um the other thing I like about it is that there's a logical sequence that is sort of saying we're doing this, this, this. People love certainty, you know, people love things that are predictable. People love to actually know, oh, this is the path it's going down. They know, you know, plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D. They like that, right? So as you describe that, it makes a lot of sense, and I can see exactly what you mean by winning trust off the vendor, by showing them that you're the custodian of their money and that you're going to look after that money very carefully.

Lee Woodward: 6:40

Yeah, it's such a good um signal to send in one of these presentations, and I and I like that conversation around protecting the asset. We're actually using VPA to protect the asset because it's very easy to undersell a property. It happens all the time. And Tom, it's freaking me out out there where people are posting left, right, and center, sold at first day, full price in one hour. Okay, why didn't everyone see it? Why did you do that? Yeah, why did you go to a registered local sale when internationally everyone should have a chance at that property? Because once it's sold, the values pass on to somebody else. And we're seeing properties undersold. There is no doubt about that. The consumer is reaching out saying, I think it all happened too quick. Now, sometimes it happens quick and it's the right person, but if you didn't even give it a chance and it didn't get out there, I don't think that's the best use of our skills because, and I keep hearing this term, Tom, off-market, which does my heading, because the next craze is going to be off-agent, I can tell you. Because people think it's easy. It's not easy. We're project managers, and it's really important that we get the property out there. And that's why doing value performance advertising and having the owner understand we did everything we could to get that great result. And Tom, you know this more than anyone. Real estate's pretty simple. Attract, engage, commit. First you've got to attract them, then you get them engaged, and then we get them to commit. And this is where you know the auction process has been such a powerful sales process for so long, and now we're seeing an expansion of that. But VPA is a skill of an agent. It's not something you try and get away with. And one line that I'd like all our agents to understand, and we should be saying to the owner, is this Mr. Panos, the reason I'm suggesting this particular stage marketing approach is if I don't, I don't have the impact on the property and the timeline of the sale. And one of the greatest sins of real estate that a lot of consumers are never told is the longer the property is on the market, the less the purchasing community expect to pay. So when you said to me before, Tom, that you're in no hurry, that puts a shudder through me. Because I've seen people sell for so less after taking so long, because they break the golden rule of real estate. The longer it's on the market, the less people expect to pay. I've got to reverse that, and that's why I use impact marketing.

Tom Panos: 9:08

Yeah, well said, Lee. I mean, milk and bread at Woolworths doesn't get dearer the longer it stays on the shelf. It gets cheaper, let's be honest. It gets slashed, right? That's the first thing. The second thing that you said, Lee, uh, you know, about this off-market. Well, guess what? You know, we've moved from a nuts to normal market in 2022, right? It was nuts last year, and it was nuts the year before, right? We're moving to a normal market. As far as I'm concerned, off-market, you could get away with it in the last year or two, right? There wasn't a lot of stock on the market. The buyer energy was incredible, very high absorption rate, everything was being consumed. Lee, if it's not on the market, it's not in the market in 2022. That to me is critical. The third thing is, Lee, and this is a very important lesson, in 1979, Daniel Kahneman, who was a behavioral economist economist, he won a prize. He won a prize, the Nobel Prize, for discovering something quite remarkable. That people feel more pain losing a dollar than pleasure winning a dollar. And this is critical because it basically says human beings will actually do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. Which essentially means if you want to win VPA, if you want to become one of the master people in the marketing game in Australia, if you want to become an attraction agent, you've got to learn to explain to a vendor something along the lines of this. The worst that can happen is if you overmarket is you lose five grand. The worst that can happen is if you undermarket is you lose fifty thousand dollars. What's more important to you, Mr. and Mrs. Vendor? It's using Daniel Kahneman's research about pain avoidance.

Lee Woodward: 10:58

John, that is so powerful and it's so right. And I know during the last 18 months I had to do some study on this term off-market. And just for our listener, give this a thought, because a lot of people are making stickers of this slogan on it. Off-market means you didn't have an agreement signed legally. That's what it meant when I did the research. As soon as an authority is signed, it's on the market. If you choose to market the property, that was a marketing decision. So I think the term off-portal is different to off-market, because if an agreement is signed and it's bought in the next hour, it was on the market, otherwise it wasn't available. And some people get cranky over this conversation. That's all good. We're here to challenge that thinking. But Tom, great little session today. I'm hoping for those fresh agents coming into the marketplace, and our greatest agents are starting their careers at 50 now. It's absolutely awesome to see who's joining this industry. People think a fresh agent's a young agent. I've got to tell you, Tom, there's some great people that have run restaurants or they've had their own business and now they're thinking, you know what? Real estate, why not? And they've got the work ethic, they've got the people skills. They understanding this is a real powerful thing. Another great segment. Tom, you're going to join us again next week.

Tom Panos: 12:11

Absolutely, Lee. Looking forward to it. Short, sharp, useful information for our real estate agents. Pumped. Absolutely pumped. And I love this subject because I've got to tell you, if you can win the marketing conversation, Lee, you'll essentially become the marketing based attraction agent in your marketplace. Absolutely love agents that are curious about marketing.

Lee Woodward: 12:32

Tom Panos, thank you for joining us on the program.

Tom Panos: 12:35

Thank you, Lee.