Sales Secrets I Learned From Real Estate Sharks

I’m here in Iceland and I’m preparing to go to Vancouver. I’m travelling with some of my friends who are hustling and implementing new ideas like me. When you travel with people like this, you always end up learning from each other. Another learning opportunity comes from when you rent a place to live. Every time you travel somewhere, you end up spending a lot of money. With three guys, it ends up being thousands of dollars worth of rent.

So I just got off the phone with a shark real estate agent. She was brutal, and she didn’t flinch at all. It was an interesting experience, and here are the lessons that I learned from a shark real estate agent.

ABC – Always Be Closing

When you call most real estate agents they will easily let you go. On the phone they’ll willingly let you hang up, or get away with soft promises to talk through email or chat later. The agent who I dealt with understood one of the key principles of sales:

You do not let your lead go until you’ve moved the sale forward.

When I said “oh yeah, I’ll let you know on Sunday if we can come over for an appointment” she did not let me go. She knows that once I get off the phone I’m never contacting her again. There are lots of other real estate agents that are going to call me, I’m going to get distracted, I’m going to forget, I’m going to lose her phone number, and so on. She knows that.

To keep me on the phone, she told me “lets set up an appointment for Monday, and you can always cancel it later”. This brings her one step closer to closing the sale.

Another thing that she did really well was to get rid of chit-chat. Every single thing that she told me was designed to lead me forward towards the sale. The first thing was to get me to commit to an appointment. The second thing was that when I had more technical questions, which means I’m more likely to buy, she described it in a way that made it seem like there are not a lot of places available.

Getting Rid of the Competition

Vancouver is a huge city, and of course there are a lot of places available. But in my head she made it seem like there are not a lot of three bedroom houses for rent. She also told me to not contact any of her fellow real estate agents because it would be a waste of time. She specifically said “you only deal with me now” and she said it in a way where I really wouldn’t want to contact anyone else.

Once she got the opportunity to talk to me about a place and a neighborhood, she described it in such a way that I actually changed my mind about where I wanted to live. She took my interests into mind and told me why I should consider this new area.

“This area has lots of clubs and bars. All the partying is here but it’s also quite. You can walk around and you’re close to public transport. You even have a pool and a Jacuzzi.”

She said all this in a way which actually made me look forward to going to this part of town, instead of where I had wanted to live earlier. Did she have to do that? No, she could have just wasted her time on the phone talking about trivial matters. Instead, she took that time and the opportunity to anchor that location in my head. She made sure that I’m not looking at the other part of town and talking to another real estate agent.

Different Sales Techniques

She also made it very clear that the place that she’s describing is the only place. There are not a lot of other places available. She told me that the guy I’m meeting with is very important. He has 5,000 properties and it’s very difficult to get a hold of him.

Of course it’s not hard to get a hold of him. If he’s renting out a place he probably doesn’t even have to be there. She’s just using him as a way to get me to show up and to value the place that she’s going to show me.

All of these are techniques that she’s using and they are very, very effective. Especially the technique that’s going to get me to show up and not procrastinate. She executed this perfectly. Which is surprising because most salespeople actually do this wrong. When I listen to most sales calls, that is the number one mistake that people make.

Any time you’re spending money you’re dealing with a salesperson. To learn about sales yourself, you need to pay attention to what these people are doing. They’re closing tens of thousands of dollars worth of deals every day. If you’re spending money, you may as well learn from it. You can think of it as a little investment.I just learned a little bit more about sales from her and it didn’t cost me anything.

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