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It’s a competitive market for real estate agents. To be successful, they need to work quickly and diligently.
During an Inman Connect session on Tuesday, leading agent in Northwest Florida, Jonathan Spears, and New York-based power duo Dolly and Jenny Lenz, tuned in with Inman News founder Brad Inman to talk strategies, deals, and what it takes to get to the top in today’s market.
When asked whether experience or eagerness has been most handy during recent deals, the three powerhouses had valuable takes.
Dolly Lenz, founder of Dolly Lenz Real Estate and one of the most productive agents in the world, told Inman that the success of a Manhattan sale that took place in the middle of the pandemic was due to her daughter Jenny’s tenacity.
The duo complimented each other, Dolly explained, with her experience and Jenny’s eagerness.
The sale was especially stressful because they had just sold the owner a new apartment and wanted to get the unit in someone else’s hands quickly as possible.
“It was unbelievably difficult,” she said. “To Jenny’s credit, her tenacity really got it over the finish line. Nothing was dropped. Every day we were thinking about it: ‘We just sold them this $12 million apartment, we can’t just let them down here.’ And she was all over it.”
The building the unit was in had a lot of others for sale, which increased the competition. But the duo stayed focused.
“We kept rethinking the strategy,” Jenny said.
The unit had a beautiful terrace, but it wasn’t furnished and there was scaffolding on the top because of building work. To work around this, they had it staged virtually in addition to in person.
They proved successful and sold the unit, which was the only deal to close in the building at the time.
Down in Florida, Spears, founder of one of the highest producing medium-sized teams in the country, Spears Group, told Inman that the people who are spending the most money in his area are the ones who are spending the least time there.
With homes flying off the market, he said being able lean on his experience to educate both buyers and sellers quickly has been more important than ever.
Figuring out how to price a home for sellers has been a process of trial and error given the face that home values keep rising.
“You had a lot of buyers entering the market, especially new ones, who had surveyed what was going on,” he said. “They certainly weren’t ignorant to value, and you were trying to help a buyer and help a seller understand ‘How do we make a decision based on zero comparable sales?’”
Spears reflected on a house his team recently listed for $15 million. “The highest sale in our market at the time was $12 million,” he added.
To make a buyer comfortable enough to make an investment that was $3 million more than the top sale wasn’t an easy task.
“I think it took tenacity, passion, but it also took education,” Spears said.
To secure a deal like that, there needs to be trust. To gain the trust of a client, an agent needs knowledge and experience.
