Ray White SA | NT moves into winter market

The Adelaide market has seen huge growth over the past two years with the Ray White Group in South Australia increasing its listing market share to more than nineteen per cent during this period, including taking the number one spot in Eastern Adelaide.

“Our market share has been consistently ticking up over the last two years,” Ray White SA | NT CEO Matt Lindblom said.

“One thing we need to be looking at is total listings which are down by approximately 20 per cent across the state, however, our volume of listings is only down 13 per cent year on year, so we are getting more of the market available to us than our competitors.”

Ray White head of performance and recognition Bianca Denham (pictured above) spoke about the scarcity mindset and how it can affect performance.

“Our businesses are often based on scarcity. A scarcity mindset is when you believe there are limited resources,” she said.

“You can see this reinforcement of scarcity turns up through everything we do. It turns up through listing volume and rejection – from the get go you have had the idea of limited resources reinforced.

“It forces you to have an extreme focus on the short term and reinforces all the stuff that is going to keep you in a loop. It’s all in your head, you can sell anything, you’re amazing salespeople.”

Ms Denham then spoke to “trailblazer” Tiger Malan (pictured above), CEO of Ray White Burleigh Group from one of the country’s highest profile markets, the Gold Coast in Queensland.

Leader of a second generation family business, Mr Malan’s commitment to innovation has cemented the group as one of the leading agencies on the Gold Coast.

“The Gold Coast has an aggressive recruitment method, that’s the environment I grew up in so I know that we have to find ways to offer more value. You can’t be a leader unless you play the game,” Mr Malan said.

“But if you lose your best writer, I’ve found there’s always someone who steps up to the plate if you give them the opportunity. Sometimes it just takes time and support.

The Gold Coast agency leads Ray White for volume of calls through the group’s sales management platform NutureCloud. Mr Malan said real estate is getting faster with better technology and that’s changed the way things are done.

“We were an early adopter of NutureCloud. I’m a big believer in only having a few KPIs to move the needle so we wanted to focus on a couple of things and one of those was focusing our efforts on prospecting.

“NutureCloud is the only program that offers a true compass. You put the work in, you see the results.

“We went on a journey of prospecting reforms, I don’t talk to our agents about call volumes anymore. I’ll call their associate and rev them up so they make more calls which in turn motivates our lead agents who then make more calls themselves.

“They know what they need to do and know what they want to do. Most people actually want to improve and they want an accountability partner to a certain extent.”

Ray White are market leaders in the auction space and the South Australian and Northern Territory networks help drive this. More than 43 per cent of all auctions conducted in South Australia are through Ray White while over 35 per cent of total auctions in the Northern Territory over the last year were also Ray White.

“I speak to a lot of agents who say they can’t sell by auction because they are going up against other agents who say auctions don’t work,” Ray White SA | NT chief auctioneer John Morris (pictured above) said.

“But when the market was easy, they were the people who were listing everything through auction and now they have just fallen away.

“Ray White SA is currently recording about seven registered bidders per auction on average. So anyone who says auctions don’t work when we are getting on average seven bidders per auction are wrong. The activity out there is unbelievable.

“Our data says that over the last year, nearly 100 per cent of all auctions that attracted five active bidders on average sold. These are compelling numbers.

“And our clearance rate over the past two years has consistently been 70 per cent and above. Four years ago, we would be lucky to have a 50 per cent clearance rate.”

Copenhagen-based Steen Nielsen (pictured above) introduced Fliva, a program that produces videos on a large scale using a fully-automated platform to create individual and personalised videos.

Mr Nielsen showed the audience how the platform could easily create high-quality professional videos to communicate with clients, property videos and videos for listing presentations. He is now the CEO of Fliva Global RE, but Mr Nielsen spent 16 years as a top prestige agent for Ray White Remuera in Auckland.

In the property management session, Ray White SA | NT’s Chris Tepper (pictured above) covered strategies to reduce conflict, leading an interactive session to come up with useful ways to proactively and empathetically handle property management issues.

Ray White Glenelg | Brighton managing director Justin Kurenda said recruitment was currently a big focus for his business.

“Tiger Malan runs a really tight ship, he’s very process driven and something he’s been able to impart on us, it gives me a lot to think about,” he said.

“I certainly took something out of the recruitment strategies, we’re probably a bit softly-softly in the beginning where obviously it’s a lot more of an aggressive market on the Gold Coast, so that’s something we need to consider because in the past it has been challenging to recruit.”