Ray White lights up New South Wales with Ignite 2019

AROUND 400 Ray White Group members from across New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory have today descended on Bicentennial Park's Waterview function room for Ignite 2019.

Hosted across capital cities by Australasia’s biggest real estate group, the Ignite 2019 program would provide a new and improved training format for salespeople and property managers.

The sessions were designed to help its agents navigate and adapt to current market conditions.

Ray White Group Managing Director Dan White (pictured above) said he was proud to see so many members attend from across the two markets.

"Today is a day to celebrate our members and if you look at the financial year just completed, by any metric, it was a great year for us," Mr White said.

"Across the 12 months, our listing share has never grown so much, we're now at 11.5 per cent across Australia and New Zealand. But that doesn't entitle us to anything going forward.

"A good year last year doesn't mean a good year this year, so we clear the whiteboards and start again, there's no room for complacency and we have to ensure that our clients remain at the very epicenter of everything we do. We must keep trying new things to benefit our customers."

Ray White New South Wales CEOs Andrew McCulloch (above left) and Jason Andrew (above right) said members had the opportunity to use a road map to get to where they wanted to be.

"Days on market were destroying our business. This is a market that rewards prospecting and rewards businesses that have stock," Mr Andrew said.

"We recently had an auction that sold $500,000 over reserve with 25 registered bidders on the day. We're seeing more and more of these types of results.

"The great Australian love affair of real estate is back and the depth of resources we now have at a corporate level for our businesses is probably at a level that has been unmatched for some time."

"For the first time ever we've moved into TV advertising. This has given people more confidence in our brand and we're getting in front of more eyes than ever before," Mr McCulloch said.

"We've been running plans for a number of our businesses and have been able to look at what they want to achieve and how they want to achieve it.

"Being a part of a large network, one of the benefits we have is that whatever you want to do and wherever you want to go, we've got someone that can show you how."

Key speaker and former Lonely Planet CTO Gus Balbontin (pictured above) said for a team to be successful there had to be common goals to work towards.

"You need admiration and respect to build the best teams and that doesn't usually come from just numbers and statistics, but from humanistic stories," Mr Balbontin said.

"In life, we all track along a bell curve and at times we'll all be high performers, low performers or average performers depending on the current time.

"But if you're a high performer all the time then you'll head towards a burnout. The ideal scenario is to just push that bell curve along together as one team.

"But you need to be prepared to be average, performing averagely is absolutely okay. The trick is to raise that average level to be bigger and better than your competitor's high performance."

In the first case study of the day, Ray White NSW Development Manager Tim Snell - on behalf of Ray White Canberra's Phyllis Tidmarsh - discussed how to keep growing at any stage of a career.

"We can all look at recruitment challenges, not letting go, fear, physical capacity of being mentally drained, but these are the things that stop us from growing," Mr Snell said.

"Self-belief, complacency, comfort, lack of desire to do more and not knowing what great looks like will prevent us from becoming an Elite performer.

"Once you realise that something bigger is possible, then it becomes achievable.

"We can't control everything, but what we can control is time and capacity. We all have 24 hours in a day, but it's up to us to own how we spend that time.

"Getting stock in matters as much as getting stock out and confidence creates momentum. If you manage stock control by days on market, it'll increase clearance and open up your capacity.

"We're a check-box business and doing exactly the same thing repeatedly, results in success."

Ray White North Quays Sales Consultant Ben Keevers (pictured above left with Head of Growth Mark McLeod right) said success was available to everyone.

"I got to the point where I reached the capacity within my business and nothing was changing, so I was honest with myself and I decided to strip the business back," Mr Keevers said.

"If I was going to make the move to auctions, then I wanted to take a good hard look at myself and took a look at how I could improve the processes, structures and the business as a whole.

"The average days on market for our private treaty properties averaged at 80 days, whereas the average for auction days on market was just under 20 days.

"I managed to save myself more than 50 days on market per property and that allowed me to gain valuable extra time to run auction campaigns.

"Your pipeline of properties is where the money lives and Saturday is the most important day of the week. That's the day you meet every one of your future clients."

Ray White National Head of Property Management Emily Sim (pictured above) discussed how the new Ray White Complete App would be rolled out to automate the property service.

"This is a tenancy application management platform to automate the application by checking tenancy agreement preparation in a business," Ms Sim said.

"It increases efficiency, reduces costs, increases revenue and will also give our property managers some capacity back.

"By adding technology, we can reduce property manager's time and a business owner’s costs. The Compete App is our point of difference.

"I look forward to seeing all of our property managers at the big PMC 2020 conference which'll be held next year at RACV Royal Pines on the Gold Coast on 22-23 March 2020."

Ray White Communications and Customer Experience Manager Natalie Hortz (pictured above) said it was always easier to maintain existing customers than going out and looking for new ones.

"Every day we should be asking ourselves, are we comfortable not knowing what our customers are really feeling? Because that's so important," Ms Hortz said.

"Communication is the number one most complained about thing, and if you don't listen to your unhappy customers, then your competitors will.

"If you're not engaging a customer in their preferred way then you'll lose their business. So much of who you are is why your clients sign up to your service."

Ignite 2019 was well received by members from both markets, with a number of key takeaways and learnings taken on board throughout the day.

Ray White Freshwater Senior Property Consultant Jacquelynn Watson (pictured above) said the event was a good reminder of how many tools Ray White had on offer.

"Today's event was amazing. Sometimes it's great to just get out of the office, to network and to learn from others in our group," Ms Watson said.

"The highlight for me was Gus. The stories of his travels and experiences were inspiring. I can definitely take home some of his experiences and apply them to how I operate," said Ray White Freshwater Sales Assistant Andre de Ruyter.