Login
iscover
A real estate veteran has shared how she prioritises effective communication to equip her team for success in 2025.
In a recent episode of Secrets of the Top 100 Agents, head of people and growth at Laing+Simmons, Jacqui Barnes, said she believes real estate professionals should continuously develop their communication skills as they are key in real estate.
Speaking on the importance of this process, Barnes emphasised that “communication is just the most critical piece in real estate”.
“At the end of the day, people want to do business with people that they like, people they know and people they trust, and the only way to become that person is to communicate with people,” Barnes said.
To develop these dynamic insights into a market, Barnes said that agents should be door-knocking a “minimum of five streets” every fortnight and should know “who is behind each of those doors, whether they’re a tenant” or “whether they’re an owner-occupier”.
In addition to being a good communicator, Barnes also said that agents must “know what’s been sold overnight” as the market is always in flux, and said that “people don’t list with real estate agents, they list with market experts”.
While Barnes acknowledged that honing these market insights “takes time”, she nonetheless said that performing these routine activities can enable agents to become “the most knowledgeable person” in their marketplace.
Beyond local market features, she said that agents must also seek to constantly educate themselves on external influences, such as changing interest rates and policy changes which impact market conditions.
She highlighted that landlords, tenants, buyers and sellers are all impacted by these factors which are outside an agent and agency owner’s control, and said that owners should create an environment where agents are able to collectively benefit from sharing information.
“Even just in a simple standup morning meeting every Monday, what’s the highlights from the news today that we might have a consumer ask us about? What do we need to know? What do we need to be aware of?,” Barnes said.
Beyond regular meetings, Barnes also emphasised the benefits of sales and property management role-play scenarios in which agents can apply their knowledge while exploring how a “conversation might take place in a living room”.
For teams that cannot attend routine meetings, Barnes said agents can still keep themselves informed by leveraging artificial intelligence to efficiently summarise the “three most important things” real estate professionals should take away from a news article.
Regardless of how a team shares information, Barnes said that simply “providing that platform in the office for the team to be able to have those conversations” is the “most important thing”.
Barnes said that agents can control “how many people you speak to every day” and the “quality of [their] conversations” by fostering an environment where they are encouraged to continually develop and grow their knowledge and skill set.
“You can control your output, you can control how many people you speak to every day, you can control how many doors you knock on every day, you can control the number of listings that you have, the number of sales that you make. You can control all of that,” Barnes said.
Listen to the full conversation with Jacqui Barnes here.
You are not authorised to post comments.
Comments will undergo moderation before they get published.