Your Problem Will Only Get Worse

On the Problem Underneath the Problem

Not enough leads? No, that's not it.

Struggling to recruit good staff? Not that either.

Competitors racing each other to the bottom on fees? Nope.

Overheads on the high-street premises quietly eating your margin? Not that one, either.

There's no shortage of problems in this industry, and no shortage of consultants charging handsomely to fix each one — without ever touching the actual root of it.

Here's the root. You're seen as an estate agent. A label you chose, defined by narrow terms you didn't. "This is what I do, and this is how I do it," says every agency in the country, more or less identically, chasing brand awareness over genuine engagement, numbers over people, doing more of what worked once and hoping it works again.

That narrow definition hasn't served the industry well these past several years. If it weren't for politicians and journalists occupying the two spots below, estate agency would sit at the very bottom of the trust rankings, on its own.

You can't fix the lead problem, the staffing problem, or the fee problem while the actual problem sits underneath all three, untouched. You're not trusted. That's it. That's the whole thing.

Fix that first, and the leads follow. Fix that first, and the right people want to work for you. Fix that first, and fees rise to match a reputation actually worth paying for. Fix that first, and the rest of the business starts to move.

You might assume this doesn't apply to your agency specifically. It does. By simple association, you're an estate agent, and vendors have already assumed the worst before you've knocked on the door. You get roughly an hour to talk a wary stranger out of that assumption.

Comparable evidence, suggested price, a few objections handled, an attempted close, all of it delivered with as much charm as you can muster inside sixty minutes. A tall order, made taller by the fact that nearly every agency in town is delivering some version of the identical pitch — occasionally pushy, usually charming, essentially indistinguishable to a vendor who isn't experienced enough to know what to ask, or what answer they should be listening for.

So they choose anyway, because they have to choose someone. It might not be you. You could push the close and still lose. You could handle every objection cleanly and still lose. You could leave politely and find out the next day you weren't first choice, for reasons that had almost nothing to do with anything said in that final hour.

The real reason, most of the time, is simpler and harder to fix with a script: the vendor didn't like you quite enough. The charm didn't land, on this particular occasion.

Here's the fix. Build The Brand Within. Very few agents are doing it at all. Fewer still are doing it properly. You can follow the herd and squeeze harder on the same transactional approach, or you can actually be different, and be recognised for it.

To be clear about what this isn't. It isn't chasing followers and a spike of likes from strangers. It isn't the odd Facebook post about your hobbies, your awards, or your holiday photos. It isn't becoming yet another "local property expert" in a market already drowning in self-declared experts.

It's simply sharing what you actually value, so there's some genuine affinity before the conversation even starts. And no, discovering you both like cycling doesn't count. A shared hobby isn't a shared value — nobody's instructing an agency because they're both into road bikes. Values and beliefs run deeper than that. An agent who values truth, freedom, and strength operates in a fundamentally different way from one who values excellence, compassion, and integrity. Neither is wrong. They're simply different people, and vendors deserve to know which one they're dealing with before the meeting, not during it.

Share those values honestly and some people won't like what they hear. That's fine — it just means they were never a good fit for your agency to begin with. I can already hear the objection: we can't afford to have vendors not like us. Which is exactly why most agents end up, in trying to appeal to absolutely everyone, appealing to no one in particular.

It takes nerve to be that transparent, and to be genuinely comfortable with some people not aligning with your worldview. What you get in return is a smaller, tighter group of people locally who share enough of your values to actually know, like, and trust you — not for the job title, but for who you actually are underneath it.

People generally buy from someone they like. When every other factor is equal, and often when it isn't, that single preference still wins. Which means when they're finally ready to sell, you're their first call, and quite possibly their only one, because vendors were never really buying your services in the first place. They were buying your character.

"There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story." — Mary Lou Kownacki

Give them something worth wanting to buy. The Brand Within is the actual fix for the industry's core problem: right now, vendors neither trust nor particularly like estate agents as a category. Make them like you specifically. It really is that simple, even if it isn't easy.

Make your story interesting. Make it about you first, so vendors know exactly what sets you apart from everyone else pitching them that week. Earn their trust — it takes a little time — and the competition thins out almost entirely, because everyone else is still just another estate agent, ranked a notch above politicians and journalists on the trust index.

Solve that, and everything else starts moving in the right direction.

— The Brand Within

thebrandwithin.me

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Originally published on LinkedIn.