The Great Battle For Property Management Mandates. An Analysis Of How New Real Estate Agencies Are The Losers !
Are you having these challenges? 1. Not having enough customers
immovable property owners (landlords), prospective sellers, prospective buyers and tenants with real estate information that they can use in informed decision making so that they genuinely benefit from the world’s best investment - real estate and live happier. Since his property blog tops major search engines’ rankings for certain key words and its accompanying Facebook page has a strong property specific following Cain also help estate agents, conveyancers and property search sites with digital marketing services that exposes them to exactly the right prospects so that they improve their sales.
I understand your pain …
In 2007 a friend called Thando helped me to get employment as
a sales negotiator at an estate agency. The remuneration wasn’t desirable
because it was a commission only arrangement that meant no sale no income.
A national economy that was nose diving, competition and the
company’s poor marketing conspired to hit hard on my sales. These moments were difficult
because I was just a school leaver without any relevant training. The only
thing I knew best was writing poems a high school passion and my master piece which
was titled Wilderness Wanderer talked
about a beautiful girl in search of true love. Surely I could not write love
poems for prospects but somehow I managed to turn poem writing to property
article writing.
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| Size of mandates lost by some of seven biggest agencies in Zimbabwe. Strategies for gaining and sustaining property management mandates in Zimbabwe’s real estate industry, Cremio Kazembe |
Property
investors preferring in-house management to outsourced property management.
According
to an MBA research by Cremio Kazembe seven biggest agencies controlling the
Harare CBD property management market have lost a considerable amount of
mandates as property investors prefer in-house management.
“The study found out
that the seven large firms lost a total lettable space of 55 818.33 square
meters over the last 10 years. Dawn Property Consultancy lost management
mandates with an area of 20 444 square metres, followed by Knight Frank
Zimbabwe, Bard Properties (Private) Limited, Rawson Properties (Private)
Limited, Mashonaland Holdings (Private) Limited and Old Mutual Property
(Zimbabwe) Private Limited with 20 374, 6 000, 4 000, 2 000 and 2 000 square
meters, respectively.”
Due to a
number of adverse factors like high void rates emanating from a bad economic
environment many property investors are preferring in-house management as a
survival strategy.
Not just too
many competitors but strong ones also!
As a new
estate agency maybe a micro enterprise with 1 – 5 employees or a one man
enterprise you face competition through a multiplicity of ways.
1. Lack of
trust
I have
noticed that the biggest challenge of being new in real estate is being knew. On
a viewing tour during my real estate agency days many prospects would ask, “
What is the name of your estate agency ?” and I would answer like , “
Shungudzevanhu Real Estate.” Then the prospect would say, “ I have never heard
of that name.”
Many
prospects who would say this quickly concluded I was one of “those” although
Shungudzevanhu would be a registered agency. By those he meant bogus operators.
The reason why the prospect didn’t know
my agency’s name is usually the fact that the agency was new and still
establishing its brand. But many would equate the fact that they didn’t know
the agency with the outfit being obscure therefore, suspicious because unscrupulous
operators are always obscure.
2. Competition
from your likes
Although
small players individually are weak the combined strength of their competition
however, is a force to reckon with.
3. Competition
from strong competitors
Big players
like Old Mutual, Knight Frank and Mashonaland Holdings have already been
mentioned noting that they have lost a lot of valuable business to in-house
property management. Now their aim basically is in two;
i. Return
existing business
ii. Acquire
new business
Competition
from the large players should be vicious for at least three reasons;
i. They are
already wounded by loses to in-house property management .
ii. They
have stronger brands.
iii. They
are well resourced especially financially.
A great
battle at the hands of a new comer !
1. Not marketing your website or blog
Many believe that once a site is live it will market itself
and visitors will flock to it in their millions. This is fallacious of course.
Why ? Because without real efforts to distribute your site’s content especially
on social media and search engines your site is wasted resource. There are over
1 billion websites on the internet today so what are the chances of someone
stumbling upon yours?
2. Having unrealistic expectations
Sometimes this is caused by the assumption that online
initiatives have overnight results. Yes there are cases of exceptional success
but these are rare at best. If you are wise you don’t base strategy on
exception but on rule . The rule is that online success is built upon hard work
not shortcuts.
3. Engaging in shady practices
A programmer once told me he could improve my blog’s ranking
on Google for certain key words. When I asked him to explain how I discovered
that his methods were what Google Inc call SEO spam or black hat methods that
may involve tricking the search engine into giving you a better search ranking
for certain key words. Google has invested millions for combating SEO spam that
is why they have developed Google Penguin a software dedicated to punishing
websites involved in what it may deem black hat methods. Being penalized by
Google is something difficult to fix.
4. Marketing to everyone
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