We Are Selling with Lee Woodward
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We Are Selling with Lee Woodward
Seven, Eleven, Four with Mark Burgess
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In this podcast episode, we interview Mark Burgess, who provides valuable insights on the connection between consumer connections, AI, and the agent's communication plan to generate new business from seasoned data. During the conversation, Mark explains how agents can leverage AI to improve customer engagement and drive sales. He also shares his expertise on communication sequences such as seven, eleven, and four, proven methods for building solid customer relationships. Whether you're a business owner or a marketing professional, you will want to attend this informative discussion on how technology changes how we connect with customers' life cycles.
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Meet Mark Burgess And Iceberg Digital
SPEAKER_01Hi everyone and welcome back to the program We Are Selling. Over the last few weeks, incredible interviews as some of our Australian agents have gone through what they're doing, the results. Steve Cromney last week, 10 listings in a week and a half. These are incredible international results. Which brings me to a point. What is going on internationally? And our next guest, we're very, very lucky to have on board, huge in the UK, as the CEO of Iceberg Digital, Mr. Mark Burgess. He joins me today. Mark, welcome aboard. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me. Mark, give us your background. I think you've been in real estate 30 years. So we've been around the same vintage of time. But tell us about what you do over in the UK.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so as you say, I've got a background in uh real estate, uh, been around that industry for like we'll say about 30 years. But for the past 20 years, I've been an entrepreneur building up various different businesses. I've built seven-figure businesses, eight-figure businesses. I've written two best-selling books around marketing, sales, and data, how that stuff really works. Um, I've had a TV show on Sky teaching entrepreneurs that sort of stuff, and been fidget on Forbes. So I'm hoping that I can give some sort of useful advice to your guys today. Everything we do in the UK with Iceberg Digital is based around growth for agents using innovation and learning. So hopefully there'll be some golden nuggets in there for your guys today.
SPEAKER_01Fantastic and well done. That's a huge achievement to not only experience what you have, but still be communicating and allow others to profit from your knowledge. Now, I do know you've visited Australia a few times, but for a lot of our audience, they may or may not know you. But Mark, at Iceberg Digital, you built lifecycle, which I think is an interesting piece of software because it's about the nurturing process. Whereas most people think if they're not doing anything in the next two weeks, what's the point? Yeah, not everyone's available to do anything in any given time. And I know myself from being an agent, if someone wanted to sell right now, that would be the okay, what's your fees, what's your marketing, and we'll make a decision. Versus if I met them 12 months out, I had a chance to impress them, get to know them. And for me, it was just a far safer lead to prove myself over a period of time to win business rather than go into these shootouts where it doesn't come down to, you know, it's not business you want. And, you know, something starts wrong, it doesn't go better. If it starts on fees and marketing and let's call it a lack of professional trust, well then that's what you've got, but it's not a great way to earn a living. Take us in the life cycle. Why did you design it and what does it do?
From Hustle To Scalable Growth
The 7-11-4 Trust Framework
SPEAKER_00Yeah, okay. So I said I've had a uh been an entrepreneur for 20 odd years. Probably the first 10 years of my business, I worked exactly the same way. Kind of an accidental business owner. You know, I'd start businesses just to try and make some money, and everything was about the here and now. Uh, the only goal each month was to make a little bit more money than we'd made the month before. And sometimes that worked out well and sometimes it didn't. But you kind of found find yourself on this sort of roller coaster whereby you have incredibly great times and then, you know, incredibly low times where you sort of question everything that you're doing. And then I reached a stage, probably 10 years in, where I had decided there's got to be another way of doing this. Um, and I sort of started doing lots of self-development and uh I stumbled into this group of entrepreneurs that had all built hundred million pound businesses and just spent a lot of time hanging around with these people and they made it seem very simple. Like you do these seven things, you build a hundred million pound business. It's not really, it's not really luck or chance, it's it's quite obvious. One of the main things that I started to learn from them and then started to explore further myself was this idea that actually people don't really care what sort of fees you're charging. They do care if they don't really care about your business. So a great example would be let's say you're thinking about buying, I don't know, a new lawnmower, let's just say for argument's sake. And you do all your research and you you you sort of narrow it down to two, and then eventually you you narrow it down to one, and you're just about to make that purchase. And then somewhere, someone says to you, like, oh wait, before you buy it, we've got a new lawnmower. Like the very first thing you're probably gonna ask them is how much is it? And if they say a number that's way more than the one you were gonna buy, you'll be like, I've already got it sorted. I'm okay, thanks very much. I started to dig into why this happens and how this happens, and it's quite an interesting thing. Actually, Google already gave us all the answers back in about 2014, and they wrote this white paper called The Zero Moment of Truth. Why do people buy things and how does it work? And they they had looked at all of their data, people's browsing data, why they buy stuff, and then they teamed up with some universities to look at how the brain works. And what they found was that basically it boils down to something called 7-Eleven Four. So you have to spend seven hours with somebody, have 11 touch points, and meet them in four different locations, and then a part of the brain opens called the hippocampus, whereby you move over into this part of the brain where someone knows, likes, and trusts, whether it's a product, a person, it doesn't really matter. Good evidence of it would be things like when a celebrity dies and people genuinely get upset about this person that they've never even met, um, the digital version of that person has spent seven hours, more than seven hours, had four touch points, seeing them in different locations. So I found that really interesting, and I started to look more and more into it, and I started to realize that when you're working the way that you mentioned, and the way that I was to begin with, if you imagine a big circle, which is the whole marketplace, and then in the middle there's a tiny circle that's the active market. You're just trying to find everybody in the active market, and you want to deal with it, you want to find a deal right now, today. I'm not, I don't care about the rest of the people. They're a waste of time to me. But actually, you can only 7-114 people in the dormant market. You haven't got time to do it in the active market. Well, then it's too late. They're gonna ask you how much do you charge? And you're gonna win it or lose it based on that. Okay, if you're lucky, you might get to spend a bit longer with the person and build a bit of a rapport, and before you know it, like they're a client. But you've sort of speeded up the 7-11-4 process by chance. You could actually be doing it with tens of thousands of people, and when they do make their way to the active market, it's a fast decision for them. They don't have to spend too long thinking about it, they don't really know why, but they're already saying, you know what? I think we should use these people. And the fee becomes kind of irrelevant in the whole process. Getting back to the question, sorry, the question was why do we build lifecycle? I discovered that myself in business, and then I built software for myself to take advantage of it, and it worked so well. We we went from having outbound sales teams to having no outbound sales teams and suddenly shooting up in revenue, and as I say, building seven, eight-figure businesses with no outbound sales teams whatsoever. And so I looked across at all my friends in real estate in the UK and thought, you guys are heading for big disaster because somebody is going to come on and just do this process, and we're going to end up in a sit in an Amazon situation whereby there's sort of one giant company that's done this, and all of these small independent companies are going to go out of business. So we built software that while the agent was doing their everyday work, it would take all the rest of the information of the people that were just floating around the market and start 7-Eleven 4 in those people and let the agent know when they were getting more active and when it was a good time to speak to them so they could be more productive with their time.
Building Lifecycle To Nurture At Scale
SPEAKER_01Internationally, real estate software is built based on let's do the transaction. We've got the business, we've listed it, let's settle it. And the focus is on the transaction. So behind that firewall in a real estate business, we've uh, and I use this term, Mark, and it's a book coming out this year called Claiming Doors. And claiming doors in property management, I've got clients with 5,000 doors. And then you look at every settled sale, every transaction, every buyer who's been entered, every tenant who's inquired, there's all this data that sits behind the window, behind the firewall, but no one does anything with that unless it's been listed. And now the process of software kicks in. Yet, you know, internationally, we all understand that business about lead generation, lead conversion, client fulfillment. But the software in real estate's based on the last part and you don't get the first part, and you're in the shootout unless they knew who you were. And it's like uh over here in Australia, a lot of people will say to me quite often, Ollie, but I get 80% of the business I go for, but you don't even get called in on most of it. So I think you get 80% of the business of people who know you well or have had time to know you, but if they didn't know you, you know, you've seen a signboard go up as you've driven past it, which is right in your turn, and you had no opportunity, they're not even in your database, or even worse, they're in your database as a tenant, but you never trawled it and fished upstream to find out could I help, could I provide something of value to those people? Not hi, it's me, do you want to sell your home? That that that's a bit like the dating scene. I'm just gonna go to the bar and ask anyone, do they want to marry me? versus you may get to know them a little bit first, and it could be two years and then that you end up married. Uh, to use that analogy, and it seemed to me life cycle was about, well, you got all this data floating around. Why don't we? And I love this term, and I have no concept of AI to the level you do, but people ask me all the time, Lee, what do you think about AI? Well, to me, it seems like a great way of warming up the data that you can then at the right time, at that right moment, make a connection, and maybe they do feel they know you. But I I I listened to you say something once, Mark, that the human brain can't determine the difference between a digital connection or a physical. Like they just feel like they know you. And I had an example of that one day. I had a a lady who was on one of our soap operas over here, and you know, she was very famous uh as a nurse in this TV show. And I was showing her apartments, and every time I walked in, everyone would go. And they actually felt they knew her as if they were cousins, or but they'd just seen her on television for 20 years and did not connect the TV version to the she's in my lounge room version. And that's when you think, wow, that you know, you've never met, but you actually feel like you know that person.
Data You Ignore Is Money You Lose
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we get stories of it all the time from agents that have started working this way. Just last week's uh one of our agents, this lady was telling me that she turned up to do this to this person's house, and the woman said, Oh, you've changed your hair. And like, she's like, I've never met this person before in my life, you know. So um there's so many examples of it. But the difficulty, I think, is that um to do it really requires a whole new way of thinking, a whole new way of working. And if you're making an okay living in in real estate, then you sort of do you really need to do that? It's a bit like that, the whole sort of good to great book, isn't it? Like the enemy of great is good. If you're at good, then it's very difficult to push yourself through to great. Um, but agents that do it, it's it's it's just transformational. And it doesn't really uh take much imagination to know that this is this would work. You know, you only have to look at the rest of the world around you to think about how you buy and sell things. If you're thinking about buying something at the moment and you've got to convince your partner, rather than telling your partner you're thinking about buying it, just send them a few links and watch them 7-Eleven for themselves, and before you know it, they'll they'll agree to the whole purchase. It's it's really not that that complicated. Where it becomes complicated, like you say, the the softwares that exist for real estate agents at the moment, you can't really do it with them because they were there just to help you get the process done as simply and easily as possible. So most of them have just got text fields. I can fill it out if I want to, I don't have to fill it out. The primary goal is to you know book the viewing and get the get the sow done, really. But in life cycle, it's a bit different. There are lots of fields that you need to fill out and um lots of data that needs to be collected because we're going to use that data as we go along the process. It might not be that they do a transaction straight away. But as an odd for instance, um when someone registers looking for a property with an estate agent in the UK, uh usually they speak to them over the phone, they take down a few details, and maybe they'll keep them up to date with some stuff that comes up on the market. With lifecycle, it gets done online. Um so the person fills out all their information online and they're very specific with it all. So there's no awkward conversations about their finance or anything like that. They just put all the details here online, people are used to doing it. But then lo and behold, lifecycle will then make sure that that person starts receiving relevant content on their social media and in their email and all that sort of stuff that's based on their answers. So, of course, if I see, if I say, yes, I'm looking to buy, I need a mortgage, I haven't arranged it yet. The reason I'm buying is because I'm uh I'm a first-time buyer, I want to get on the property ladder. And then suddenly I start seeing content from that company about here's a guide for first-time buyers that are looking to get on the property ladder. Or, you know, here's a quick mortgage calculator to find out what what your mortgage might be worth. Of course, I'm going to interact with that content because it's relevant to me. And by me interacting with that content, they're going to 7-Eleven for me. If they didn't put that data in, they'd just be putting random content out that's for everybody, and content that's for everybody is for nobody, right? So it just would get lost in a sea of content. We even have a we have a website company now that it links with lifecycle. So when someone hits the website, if that person's inside lifecycle, it will read through the whole database faster than you can blink and remake the website specifically for that purpose. So all of these processes need to be done in order to 7, 11, 4 people. You can't just say, oh, great, okay, I'll start putting some content out then. It'll just get lost in a sea of content that nobody needs. So it kind of starts with the data and structure of the system, which means a slightly different way of working, which is a bit of effort for people. And then, you know, people decide then if they're going to take this challenge of moving to running their business this way, or if they're just going to go, you know what, I make a decent living. Like you say, I convert 80% of what I get on the market. I'm not that interested in it. I'm not thinking for over about the next five years. I'm just thinking about the next five days.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this is such a POW topic. And no matter who you are and what you do, there's two forms of income. There's passive and active. I look at that in lead generation. So, you know, I'm coming over to Birmingham there due to audio podcasting. But I look at that and think none of that would have happened without it being out there in a place. And I I love that terminology that everyone needs stickability, a reason why people would stick with you. And that and that's all from allowing people to profit from knowledge. Now, in digital, we can send the right stuff to the right people at the right time, or we can just send it, as you said, blast everyone, and they think switch off. That's got nothing to do with me. I would never be interested in that. And for all our listeners now, what do you follow? You know, I know myself, there's uh there's certain technologies that I follow, especially in multimedia. I'm fascinated with how I can be in a studio like this today, yet they used to be 10,000 a day. Yet here I am in my own home. I'm in the evening, you're in the morning in the UK, and we can do this. Uh, but that takes a little bit of investigation and learning, but it's life-changing. And I think you're right. The real estate industry has been they've hit the handbrake thinking uh all this stuff's trying to take us over and they're trying to replace us, and it's it's the opposite. What if you got home on time? What if you wake up tomorrow and there were 10 people that wanted to speak to you because they found you interesting and the article you wrote?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I was just gonna say that that uh I I think you, as I say, you you only have to look at the world around you. Like we as entrepreneurs or business people, we we tend to for some reason default to this idea that uh if I can offer somebody more features for less money, then surely they're gonna want to take my service or product. But universally, you can look around the world, it doesn't work. It just that never, never, never, never, ever, ever at any point has worked for anybody. So, how does it actually work? Why why why do you buy an iPhone that's 10 times the price of a phone that you could get that's possibly got more features that you don't even think about it? Like, why would you buy a, I don't know, five guys burger for£10 and you could get a McDonald's one for for two pounds? Like, why do you why do you do these things? Yeah, and it's more psychological than logical. If you look at the backdrop behind you, that city, you know, there was a point in real estate whereby, like you say, we're just gonna make our way through with hustle, we're gonna phone as many people as possible. I've heard lots of coaches talk about it. I phone 100 people a day, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. No one wants a phone call from you anymore. I don't want to phone call. If I get a phone call from my agent every day, I'm pretty quickly blocking him. So, like, how do you do it? Who's gonna win the war over the course of the next five years? If I find the details of all of those people in that city behind you, and I send them content that's relevant to them over the course of the next five years, and you just try phoning them all, who's gonna win that? I mean, aside from the fact that my data is incredibly valuable for all sorts of things, and you've got something that if you don't keep hustling, falls to pieces the next week. Like, aside from that idea, I'm just gonna win anyway. Um, but in terms of value of the business, my business is ten times more valuable than yours because if you stop phoning people, you haven't got a business.
SPEAKER_01So true. I was in a big workshop yesterday, and you know, everyone was saying you've just got to make calls. And I said, Yeah, let's be clear on that. Calling off the rebound is very different to making calls. And some someone said, What do you mean? I said, You can ring people so much today, you'll lose the business. You'll get a restraining order on you. Whereas calling off the rebound is someone's quick drop a video saying, Look, I saw this the other day, I'm thinking about doing this myself. Um, could you give me some guidance on it? That's totally different when you're calling off the rebound.
Personalised Content That Actually Converts
SPEAKER_00So, what our agents learn in in life cycle is it's too it's it's too much to go into on in this Zoom call. But as uh as an example, uh in the UK, a lot of it is about trying to get listings. Um if you get the listing, then you'll you can you can spend take some time finding the buyers, but the listings is where all of the stuff is. It may be slightly different in in Australia with the buyers and stuff, but but we want the listings. So someone is going through an automated form that I spoke about and they're filling out all of their details when they're looking for property. Um they're learning about property from this agent automatically before it hits the big main website, so there's a reason for them to do it. And as they're doing it, they're saying, I've got a property to sell that's not yet on the market. Now we know what their address is, and lifecycle knows whether the agent covers that area, so it knows they've got a house to sell that's not yet on the market. Now, let's imagine that that person then just puts it all on hold. They don't do anything, they're one of these people that an agent would consider just a time waster or a tire kicker or whatever you want to call it. In a traditional system, they're going in the archive, they're being deleted, they're just a waste of space. But that doesn't happen in life cycle. They're staying in the system, and Life Cycle continues to send them relevant content and show them stuff on social media. And in six months' time, when that person clicks on an article that says what to do if you're thinking about putting your house on the market, Life Cycle grabs them and puts them in front of the agent and goes, Hey, this guy registered for your property alert six months ago. They've got a house to sell on this road in this estate, and they've just been reading what to do if you're thinking about putting your house on the market. Now is a great time to make that phone call. I'm not saying don't make phone calls, but what our agents are able to do is they're able to automate a lot of the admin using, you know, AI tools and all of that sort of stuff. They're able to automate communication, they're able to automate chasing reviewing feedback, they're able to automate all of that sort of stuff, which frees them up to be able to make content. Otherwise, people look at this whole idea and go, listen, I've barely got time to make my phone calls, let alone start making content. I'm doing all of this, getting into this idea. It's a great idea, but I haven't got time to do it. But this is why this is what you use software for. Get the software to do the automations, get the software to make allow you to do more meaningful work. So I can just make 10 phone calls and I'm likely to get five listings out of it instead of having to make 500 phone calls to find those five people. Belove it. Isn't it amazing? We've never met.
SPEAKER_01We're in two different countries at two different time frames, but that is working off the rebound. Uh, another thing I communicate to the to the agencies, you know, your best data is seasoned data. So you know what I mean? And this this is how analog and digital are the same in different times. When I first came into real estate, Mark, uh, I was in the lead generation team, and if we had no leads or listings at all, The sales manager goes, Lee, go to the diary room and pick up a diary from five years ago, and everything was colour-coded. Green was listing of presentations, yellow was buyer appointments, and you pick up the phone and say, Oh, hi, is that Mr. Burgess? It's Lee here from First National. We did an appraisal on your property 1995 at 4 p.m. at 20 Prescott Avenue. Are you still there? And they go, Yeah, yeah, no, we're here. I go, What made you not move? Ah, it was just too hard. And if you could find something, what would it be? What would be the perfect move? I'd want this, this, and this. I've got one of those. Do you want to have a look at it? And the hit rate was insane because five years ago, they actually let us in, did nothing. Five years ago is like that, as we know. And seasoned data is really what you've digitized in life cycle.
Automations Free Time For Real Work
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. That's that's the that's the whole thing right there. It's just when I, as I say, on my own journey, we were selling, selling products, and it just dawned on me one day that like, what happened to all those potential people that we spent all that money marketing to trying to find? Where are they all? It's like, oh, I don't know, they're gone. It's like, oh my god, I'm I'm spending money trying to get more leads. And if I looked in my archive, there's about 30,000 of them sitting in there already. Like, this just this is mental. It's a it's a crazy thought, but as you say, it's just it doesn't bring money today, and that's people get caught up on that. And I'm not saying don't go hunting the money today. I'm saying go hunting for the money today and make sure you're planning so that in two, three, four years' time you can get a little you can start stepping off the hamster wheel a little bit.
SPEAKER_01Love it. Uh, a big theme for me over here at the moment when I'm talking about communications plan, because everyone will ask me, what's the fastest way to get listings? You're not gonna like the answer. No, no, tell me what it is, I'll do it. Okay. Love the one you're with. They go, what are you talking about? You've got 365 established clients who you ignore. You're chasing strangers every day, and it's not even if they sell, they know someone who may know someone, and you're advocates and love the one you're with. I know for me, if I had to redo what I'm doing now, the first thing I'd do is my connections and relationships who would want to help because they know me, trust me, and have worked with me, versus oh, I'm gonna get this brand new audience who've never heard of me before. Why would you do that when you've got all this gold sitting there and you just got to reconnect?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, absolutely. It's a crazy idea. But as I say, it's it's just a rethink on the way that we work. You know, you cut most people hear it, it makes sense to them, and they'll think to themselves, okay, great, well, I'll I'm gonna start doing a bit more content. It's not enough. You you have to go deeper with it. You know, I wrote a book in 2020 called The State Agency Revolution. It just starts to dig into how this stuff works. You know, if you go to a coffee shop and they let you order ahead, because they want to collect the data. They want to collect the data on what you're doing, and lo and behold, you start getting relevant content and relevant adverts and messages and stuff that makes you go there more often and increase your spending. It's no different in real estate. We've got so much incredible data, like amazing stuff. So when people are moving, why they're moving, what their financial circumstances are, like what they're looking for in their next home, and all of these sorts of stuff. And then we do nothing with it and just find them and go, hey, you still looking to move? And the person goes, Yeah, yeah, well, have you got nothing? I just wanted to see if you're still looking to move. It's like, this isn't this isn't useful to me at all. It's much more I could actually probably win more clients by going around over the long term, by going around local businesses, talking to those local businesses and just asking them what they're up to in the local community. In a weird, I would 7-Eleven four more people, and they would go, Who is that guy? He's the real estate guy. Even though I've not I've not done anything around, I've just done really useful content that is likely to get watched by my target audience. I was 7-11-4 those people, and have people actually go, Oh, you know who you should use to sell your home? The guy who goes around and talks to local businesses is is crazy. Love it.
SPEAKER_01Hey Mark, what are the biggest challenges in the UK market for the UK agents at the moment? We know listings are tight, and that's brought in the distress of dropping of fees. Uh, what else is challenging the UK market?
Seasoned Data And Rebound Calls
SPEAKER_00Interest rates obviously pretty much around the world went up, didn't they? So interest rates went up, but that that people seem to have got to a stage of acceptance with that now. You know, it's it's always a comparison in people's heads, isn't it? It doesn't matter if interest rates are 1%, 6%, 15%. It depends on where they've just come from, where people start comparing. So in the earlier days, they're like, wow, this has really gone up. And mortgage rates have sort of stabilized a little bit, maybe even dropped a tiny bit. That seems to be stabilizing. I guess the issue is probably still around um sellers being a bit overambitious with the pricing. Um, but you know, that's always a challenge because obviously the agent wants a price where they can sell it so they can get paid, and the seller wants to maximize that price and doesn't mind often waiting, which isn't in the agent's best interest. So there's a little bit of a tension there between what somebody wants to sell it for and what it's actually gonna sell for. Um, like you said, fees, fees are the big one because most people are still just thinking too logically about it. They're thinking to themselves, oh wow, this is really difficult now. I've got John down the road who's decided that he's gonna cut his fees. So it's getting a bit difficult for me. I'm probably gonna have to cut my fees. But the the world just doesn't work like that. Like I say, it just doesn't. There's no reason to do that. If there was, in the UK, there's a company called Strike that sell people's houses for free. Like, if that was how it worked, then universally everybody would just be using that company. And what's happened is that nobody uses that company. So we can forget the fee and we can start looking at how do that how do we actually get people to realise that we're the right choice for them. And that's just about niching down into what you actually do and then communicating that with the right people. So in the UK, more and more companies are starting to realise that, but it's still it's still possible to make a living the way that we've been doing it since you know the 1980s. So, you know, a lot of people are still just they're just getting on with it day to day and they don't can't really see the tidal wave that's coming in their direction. Whereabouts in the UK are you, Mark? I'm based in London. Right, beautiful. So I actually I actually did just out just outside London. Um, so yeah, that's but we deal with agents all over the UK, so I get a good feel pretty much. At the moment, agents have got low cash flow because last year was not great, but they've got good pipelines. So they're suffering, but they're they're hoping that they can see the light.
SPEAKER_01And and help me out with this one. I was over in the UK, must have been three, four years ago. I was doing the complete salesperson course over there, and I had a moment with the audience where, you know, we were talking about VPA, which used to be vendor-paid advertising. Today it's value performance advertising and the importance of you know, showcasing the property, the way the video looks, uh, creating an incredible digital inspection before the physical inspection. I had a lot of kickback on that of, oh no, we don't really invest the funds in that, but yet the timeline on market seemed really long. What does happen in the UK for showcase marketing today?
Price Wars, Positioning And Niches
SPEAKER_00It's getting a lot better. A lot of people do stuff, but they're still very obsessed with the fact that if no one else is charging for this, I can't charge for it. The agents in the UK are totally obsessed with their competition and what the competition is saying. And the and the reason that happens is like you say, it's because they get into this showdown whereby they imagine that someone calls in three agents and it's the whoever wins it on the day. But it doesn't need to be that way. If you can get the person to decide when they're in the dormant market, then it won't matter if you're charging for upfront advertising, it won't matter if you're charging for video, it might won't matter what you're charging to sell. They'll have already decided. They're just getting three three people around to seem like they're making a smart decision. Um, so in terms of the marketing up front, the majority of big corporate agents are still quite poor with it. Um, but again, that probably proves because people already decided they wanted to use that company. The smaller independents um are doing you know good video, good video marketing, they're using social media a lot. They're trying to they're trying to find ways to uh make people want to use and come to their agency to find out about property as opposed to just going onto right move or realestate.au and you know discarding the the use of the agent. So they're sort of saying, look, we're gonna launch our properties here maybe two to three weeks before they go onto the main portals. And if if you're not serious and you haven't registered with us personally, then you're probably always gonna be missing out. But if you're just browsing the market, that's fine. Just go use the portals. But if you're dead serious, you need to register in our database. And they're using that as a way to build their data and build their database over the long term, all those people that have got houses to sell and that they can then nurture. And then they're putting out useful content to those people as well. Well, so the video marketing has been upped, the content has been upped, and now people are just starting to starting to get to the stage where they're starting to understand it's not just putting out random content. If I can get good data and lifecycle can segment those people automatically for me, then it can start sending people off in different directions, showing them different things and telling me when it's the right time to speak to these people.
SPEAKER_01Very good. And what about there was some agency that would have the owner show the home versus the agent? Uh what's the the take on that now?
SPEAKER_00Um I think most agents uh would take people round. Um there may be still situations whereby, you know, it's not possible for one reason or another, and the viewing would they'd still like to get the viewing to take place, so the owner's happy to do it. You know what? I I think one of the big problems with the UK estate agency, I don't know if it's the same in Australia, is that a lot of the teachings and a lot of the uh courses and mentorship is the same for everybody. So it's like this is how you do real estate. Um what we're trying to explain to people is actually you need to have a unique uh you have to have to have something unique about your business. There's a way of finding it, but it takes a little bit of digging. Now, if you if what's unique about your business is that you do it, you offer it cheap and they do their own, they do their own viewings, then that's fine. You do that. That's not a problem. You don't have to take people around the house. Majority of agents do because, as I say, they're obsessed with their competition and and all of that sort of stuff. But uh what I think over here, people are just they're starting to try to break away from the idea that they're an estate agent and all of these estate agents are the same, and now it's gonna come down to who's doing gonna do it the cheapest, and trying to move more into some form of niche. You know, I I specifically, you know, perhaps it's a situation where somebody says, you know, I specifically have a much more of a fun family feel to my estate agency. If you want to deal with like real people where we become almost, you know, friends for life, then you might want to come and work with us. But if you're just looking for somebody to get your house on the portals quickly as cheap as possible, then it is not really for us. And then they can start to tailor their content and their marketing and everything to try and appeal to those people. And guess what? If somebody watches all that content and then makes an inquiry, they're going to list of you, as opposed to just getting random leads in for the sake of getting leads, and you spend half of your time trying to convince people what your value is. Very good.
SPEAKER_01And what about the digital sale? So we've had this really impact the Australian marketplace where the purchaser goes online, they register, they put their driver's license in, uh, the agent has to approve them, and then they get to bid or make an offer. It times out in two and a half weeks' time, but they're the highest bid, the digital contracts are signed, the deposits taken. Has that taken over in the UK?
UK Market Realities And Fees
SPEAKER_00No, because the problem with the UK system, a lot of people say, oh, we need a system like Australia, or we need a system like, you know, insert any country. But in the UK, we have chains, and chains cause big, big delays and big problems. So very rarely, very, very rarely, do you get somebody that's ready to move right now with a seller that's also ready to move out right now. Usually in the UK, what you've got is you've got a seller that will sell their house if they can find somewhere to buy, and a buyer that will buy it if they can find someone to buy their house. And this creates a chain of eight houses. Incredibly complicated. So you don't really get many people that are in a situation whereby they could just go online, make a bid, and pay the money, and the person will get out of the house and they can move in. Uh so it's not so much of a thing over here. Wow.
SPEAKER_01So I could actually attract someone, engage them, they commit to a price, the owner accepts that price, but that doesn't mean we're going ahead.
SPEAKER_00No. You you attract you I can this is crazy, right? Um you you're an estate agent in the UK and you're obsessed with fees, right? So what you end up doing is offering a price whereby you're not gonna make any profit, but you haven't really thought about that. So you're gonna sell this person's house and all you're gonna charge them is, I don't know, let's pick a random number like uh£1,500, right? Uh so they go, yeah, okay, I'll put my house on the market with you. You start advertising that house, and maybe it takes four weeks to get to the stage whereby you've got an offer on it. You've got an offer on this house now, but the person who's buying it is selling their house, and uh the person who's buying their house is also get is also maybe getting a mortgage and is a first-time buyer, and the person who's moving out is buying one that's empty. So we've got to now wait for this whole process to get together. It's gonna take probably six months if we're lucky. And in in and in month five, the person two steps down the chain says, I'm not buying anymore, and the whole thing falls apart. And it so I I earn nothing, or it all does go through and I do six months worth of work for 1,500 pounds. It's just it's it's beyond ridiculous, but uh but still estatents are caught up in this world of just getting excited and happy about winning listings, any cost. I just I just want more listings than my competitors. That's the game. But it's not the game. The game is making enough money to have freedom in life, right? So we could slow it down and we could do less sales for more money and think a bit more about the whole process and get the end result that we were looking for instead of just staying on that hamster wheel.
SPEAKER_01So, Mark, isn't it amazing? And for our listener, that they would have just been so interested that that goes on in the UK. And for our UK listeners that may not know uh the Australian market or the other markets, but speaking with the Australian market, if we get an offer accepted and it goes unconditional, that owner's got to be out in six weeks, otherwise they're gonna be evicted. It's not their house anymore. The future owner is taking over their house, and it's very strict. And six weeks is a normal settlement, four is quick, but six months and you still don't have to go ahead. Uh, that would be very hard for a lot of people to process or budget on. Like, I've sold ten. Oh, not really, eight didn't go ahead. Versus once they're unconditional, it is unconditional. The vendor is no longer the owner of that property, they're staying there till the end of settlement, but the future owner is taking over that property on the 4th of June, and you've got to be out.
Marketing Quality And Portal Strategies
SPEAKER_00Uh absolutely. The thing is, is obviously being in the in the digital like technology side of the industry, proc tech, if you want to call it that, uh, I get asked to go to lots of events where people are holding uh seminars and and discussions about how to improve the process in the UK. And I've I'm just by myself saying it's there's it's not even complicated. Like the problem is chains. If you take away chains, the problem's solved, but you're not gonna take away chains. So you're just wasting your time having a conversation because this the whole sale they're only gonna move as fast as the slowest person in the chain. So even if five people in this chain do these things that you're talking about, if the sixth person in the chain doesn't, it's not gonna speed it up. Um, so yeah, crazy, but I guess, you know, it's whatever's it's just proof, isn't it, that what you think is normal isn't normal somewhere else. So, you know, you don't need to get bound in by these ideas that, like, you know, it only works this way. No, it can work a million different ways.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's amazing. And you look at efficiency, like people are late for a plane, yet everyone has to step on the train, and you've got a minute or two and it's gone. And that's saying, you know, uh the trains left the station. It's an efficiency thing, like it's gonna stop, you hop on or you don't, but it's going. And if you're buying it, you've got to be out in six weeks because it's not yours. But just for our audience, that is just absolutely mind-blowing. Uh, Mark, final question for you, and I really do appreciate your time. What are you passionate about yourself with iceberg moving forward into the next part of your chapter of real estate? Where's your focus? What are you really passionate about?
SPEAKER_00We we built life cycle because I've got this connection with with estate agency, real estate, however, you, whatever you want to call it. I I was an estate agent when I first left school. I worked as a mortgage broker. And I think once you've worked in that industry, you either love it or hate it. And I ended up loving it. Even though I was no longer a real estate agent, I love that industry. I've got lots of friends in there, and I've had lots of different businesses relating to that industry. And so when I looked across after I'd revamped the way that my business worked and what I could see was coming down the road, I just looked and thought, this industry's finished. I've got two choices here. I can finish it off myself. I can be the one that makes the one product and like, you know, we try and kill a state agency like a like a sort of purple bricks tried to do in the UK. Or I can actually make a product that will make these people much more valuable and survive. And that's the road that we decided to take. So we believe that, you know, it come the next five to ten years, at least 50% of the estate agents that exist today in the UK won't exist anymore. And the ones that do will be data-driven businesses that create content and nurture people and bring people on board that way. Um, they've got their perfect customers and they know how to attract them. And it becomes more of a process whereby the public are really interested in having meaningful conversations with somebody that they trust, as opposed to just picking three random estate agents and then knowing that they're all lying to them, but going with whichever one is the cheapest. So my passion is trying to save that industry, to be fair. Um, it's a bit of a tall order, but um, it's the one that we've chosen. So we're just to continue pushing along those roads of being the innovators for our agents so they can concentrate on having great phone calls and conversations with their clients.
SPEAKER_01Excellent answer. Absolutely brilliant. Well, Mark Burgess, you've just appeared on We Are Selling, uh, the Australian version of your own podcast over there where you're interviewing people all the time, facing similar challenges, and the conversation's real. Us understanding, might be a lot of people in Australia right now thinking, I just wouldn't know what to do with that. I'm gonna take back my own problems of miss this and that happened. Like, imagine dealing with that where you've got no certainty. Yet for the estate agents in the UK, this is just the way it's always been. It is different in different parts of the world. Yes, we've got to find the buyer, find the seller, match them up. But the laws do change, and I think for a lot of our incredible Australian agents doing the wonderful things, they struggle with that uncertainty compared to I'm guaranteed a sale and being paid within six weeks. And all I've got to do is follow a shorter sequence and process to get that result and repeat the performance. That is a difference, and I I wanted to find a difference, it's not the same anywhere. But Mark Burgess, thank you for joining us, and we look forward to speaking to you in the future.
SPEAKER_00Thanks very much.