How to win instructions on prime property

The answer, straight away

At the top, instructions are not won at the moment of decision: they are won in the months before, while the owner has decided nothing. Whoever arrives after the decision is one of the four who call. Whoever was already there is the only one.

That changes entirely what you do with your weeks.

One: choose a perimeter, and make it small

One area, or one type, narrow enough that you could list from memory everything that happened in it over twelve months.

If you cannot list it, the perimeter is too wide and you will not notice anything.

Two: build a list of properties, not contacts

Fifty properties with owner and approximate year of purchase.

It is a list that exists before anybody decides anything, which is why it works.

Three: note the life events

You already hear them, you simply do not write them down. Children finishing school, a separation, a business sold, an elderly owner moving near a daughter, an inheritance.

Property moves when life moves, and no system predicts that better than somebody who lives in the place.

Four: be useful before it is relevant

The valuation given free two years earlier. The name of a good surveyor. The answer to a question that earned you nothing.

This is what separates the agent who knows the area from the one circling families in difficulty, and the difference is perfectly visible from outside.

Five: arrive with something nobody else brings

Not a valuation. An analysis: who the likely buyers are, how many you hold now, what it would cost to rebuild that property today, what holds it back and what fixing it costs.

An owner receiving four identical valuations picks the highest number. One receiving three identical and one analysis picks the analysis.

What no longer works

Letters that are the same for everybody. Cold calls on properties already listed elsewhere, which put you in the queue with the other six. The message that opens with I have an interested client when the client does not exist, because one question exposes it and it burns everything.

How long it takes

Between six and eighteen months before the list starts producing.

It is slow, which is why almost nobody does it. Those who do stop competing on fee, because they arrive before everybody else.