Aaron Horne
One of the main parts that I'm always working on is getting that call to action together so that if you're seeing the property, you're not then having to go on a wild goose chase. To find out more about. I want to make it as easy as possible. So if you're getting served an ad for 12 Smith straight, you want me to click on that and it take you to the information to where you can.

Aaron Horne
All right, guys welcome back to the property pod. Your Wakeling guys went into real estate here in the Hobart marketplace. I am joined by four and four probably current state agents, but not all at the desk today. I've got some news for you out there. I've only got one team member in here with me. J-Mac, welcome to the studio.

John McGregor
It's. It's much colder in the room without all the heat from, you know, all these old, normal, hot individuals.

Aaron Horne
Yeah. Radiating from yeah. From the other side of the desk. But, yeah, let it be let it be known that someone is locked in their house with the old a spicy calf. How are you, Patrick Berry?

Patrick Berry
I'm doing good, guys.

Aaron Horne
You look really fresh. Yeah, you've come down with the covered 19, and yet you're looking sharp as a tack.

Patrick Berry
Oh, yeah. It's, you know what it's like. First couple of days are pretty horrible. Then in the next five days, you want to be stuck in lockdown. It's so frustrating.

Aaron Horne
And daily dirty has had it a go for it. You hit your hard or did you come out okay?

Patrick Berry
Yeah. Now the first couple of days are really hot, actually. But, you know at first I want out. It's I don't know what other people have experienced but yeah I found it really hard for the first two days and then we got through it. I passed. I'm just counting down the hours and try to get out of here.

Aaron Horne
So you're, you're one of those guys that normally has kind of, you know, the super immune system. Like, I never know Pat to be sick. Like, I think in the older years I've known you, you've kind of been down with an illness twice. So, yeah, dealt with the sickness, come.

Speaker 2
Home and get down. So yeah.

Aaron Horne
Obviously I get it. But you couldn't escape this one.

Speaker 2
All right.

Aaron Horne
I might have. What about the family? Everybody was okay on that front.

Patrick Berry
Yeah. And no one else seemed to get it in the house and. Yeah, so we've been lucky there. So they've been able to go along to business like normal. But yeah, that's is what it is. It's got to sit it out and wait.

Aaron Horne
I guess being the digital mastermind that you are and having everything set up in their offices as a kind of online place, it wouldn't have slowed you down too much. I guess you kind of are going to open homes and shootings and stuff like that, but I'm sure you still were able to kind of get a fair bit of stuff done in this time.

Aaron Horne
We just sit around watching everyone rises.

Patrick Berry
Not only on Sunday night, but now I was able to continue working like normal so we are very lucky with our office being a fully digital set up. So it does mean that you can just pick up where you left off. And I'm very lucky that I set all of my stuff up, but I do use my computer only and I don't use a lot of paperwork.

Patrick Berry
So everything I had, I needed I had to stay working like normal here at the kitchen bench and just working through it.

Aaron Horne
How do you find, I know some impressive talks, the working well, it sounds like you want to get out of the house, but yeah, the talk of revolution has changed his business model. What about yourself?

Patrick Berry
I don't know what Tom is talking about. It's absolute rubbish working from home.

John McGregor
For him to go outside. It's like a really pleasant temperature and you just freezing, freezing the entire time.

Speaker 2
So you want to scare the backyard.

Patrick Berry
So I don't know what Simon thinks is so great about working home, but I need you guys. It's too lonely here.

John McGregor
I did see you did? You were thinking about letting back into the couch, to the laptop, but it looked like that was incredibly uncomfortable, so.

Patrick Berry
No, it was. It's on. It's actually quite comfortable. I thought my slippers in the shop.

Speaker 2
Were very.

Aaron Horne
Well, I was just glad to say that you got pants on that stuff that plays with us to no end.

Patrick Berry
So I thought, I'm going to lean forward and hide the slippers, but you had to bring it out. So you know.

Speaker 2
Yeah.

Aaron Horne
I had something I want to bring up today. I was actually spotted in the wild as somebody actually hit me up and said, Are you Aaron from the property? But I might not. I said, Are you? And he said, Are you on the property? Thought I was. How is that clicking collect on Sunday, getting my groceries and, you know, just sitting there waiting for the food shopping.

Aaron Horne
And this kid shows, I'm going to say kid A, he's rolled up to the back of the car and he's putting the groceries. I'm having a big chit chat and like, hey, go on.

Speaker 2
He says you want the property part of it all smacked. I said, yeah, yeah, I might, you know, he said, oh, yeah. Listen, if you like, oh.

Aaron Horne
The penny drops say, well, yeah, so big will shout out to you, my friend. You made my Sunday by letting me know that you listen to our podcast. I'm not sure if you're in the market for a home. You didn't seem like a a young.

John McGregor
Lad who is getting that information working hard. Yeah, he will be eventually.

Aaron Horne
Not shout out to Will I? Yeah, I've been spotted what he said. Do you get, do you get it much? Do people often ask you are you on the.

Patrick Berry
Probably yeah. Because we're celebrities in Hobart.

Speaker 2
I said I it.

Aaron Horne
Is a pretty rare occurrence my friend. But yeah. Know my mum died so it's we are making a splash out there guys and.

John McGregor
A click and click. It's nearly 100% of the time. We get recognized at this point.

Patrick Berry
Well I was thinking about it, you know Jimmy, a night they've moved on from Tassie, you know, next opportunity we might be running the Jack Jumper games or the next hurricanes that it might.

Aaron Horne
Yeah, look at that. It's definitely scope for that. On those right up emotions perhaps we could get on there and so.

Speaker 2
The.

Aaron Horne
Sky's the limit actually I was only speaking about the green screen to some of the stock.

Speaker 2
More.

Aaron Horne
And saying Yeah, maybe we could be a weatherman doing weather reports. They look anything can happen at 414 and moving into the future. There are many many exciting things plant so I thought today jumping into the real estate side of things we could talk about kind of the 20, 23 plants or lack marketing for marketing properties to marketing the business for marketing kind of ourselves to the greater public.

Aaron Horne
And I thought Pat no better time to talk about it than when you've been at home working on a bunch of the marketing stuff at your desk.

Patrick Berry
Now just thinking about it now, you told me that we have such reach with the pot. I don't know if we have to market anymore.

Speaker 2
Oh my name is where.

John McGregor
It's, it's critical mass.

Aaron Horne
Yes, my job's done on a van out of here.

Patrick Berry
Yeah, well we've got to the click and collect people. We are we're done.

Speaker 2
A lot of thing.

Aaron Horne
Is a lot of the time when I am kind of getting Facebook ads organized and marketing properties, one of the really good demographics to do is cause a Woolworths to kind of get a bunch of people who are buying the groceries or the, the money spenders is in the family. So look, cause I'll just have to add clicking collect and then you sold it.

Aaron Horne
That's not people who are really into the digital age.

John McGregor
And I think that really needs recognition because I don't think many people know about it yet. So I think it really benefits Coles for us to give them a shout. It will make a difference their bottom line.

Speaker 2
And.

John McGregor
Just like on a Campbell win, I think it was, who's the guy from the Beatles? Not John Lennon.

Aaron Horne
Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney.

John McGregor
McCartney he he went on stage with one of the one of the rappers, I can't remember which one it was.

Aaron Horne
Oh, Kanye West. Yeah, yeah.

John McGregor
And I think he's one of Cognize fans is it looks like he's going to blow up after performing with Kanye hotel manager. I don't Paul McCartney blown up after.

Aaron Horne
Is in this little band you might have heard of.

Patrick Berry
That kind of talk.

Aaron Horne
The talk is talk us through kind of the grand plans for marketing across the across the future forward one for I know you've never been one to keep your secrets locked away Pat you're pretty transparent with a bunch of the the ways you go about business you want to talk about that kind of where you say property marketing in the future.

Aaron Horne
Yeah on the.

Patrick Berry
Line. Well for all the real estate agents listening grab a pen and paper because you're going to learn some cool stuff.

Aaron Horne
So if you can just just swing any big.

Speaker 2
Business.

John McGregor
I will get my pedicure one.

Patrick Berry
Step one start a podcast.

Speaker 2
You know, look.

Patrick Berry
Like Aaron said, we did things digitally. You had 414, and it's a good opportunity to, I guess, run through how we market a property these days. So I know we've spoken about in the past and, you know, everyone does professional photos and, you know, drone photography, things like that, but there's so much more that we do to advertise a property now at 414 that, you know, just getting some pretty photos taken by our amazing photographers, isn't there?

Aaron Horne
Yeah. Well, so I guess like, yeah, all that stuff on the back end that actually goes into marketing the property is, yeah, a lot different to what we've spoken about. Like even if you were to go back to episode, I think 22 or something is one of the first times we talk about marketing your property, even from then to now, which is probably only two years time.

Aaron Horne
It's still the landscape is changed all over again. And that's the way the market moves. But yeah, the way people are accessing information, like the amount of research I've been doing into tick tock marketing and advertising on Spotify or advertising on listener or these other places where, you know, you might not even been seeing images of the property there, but still letting people know about it in an audio format to then have somewhere for them to link that information from.

Aaron Horne
So I guess one of the main parts that I'm always working on is getting that call to action together. So that if you're saying the property, you're not then having to go on a wild goose chase to find out more about it, want to make it as easy as possible. So if you're getting served an ad for 12 Smith straight you want me to click on that and take you to the information to where you can, you know, fill out information about that or find out all the things you want to know and who to contact from that.

Aaron Horne
So even getting qualified leads from this, you know, clicking on that and then being able to find out more information is something we're working on and finding the, the reach of the property ad is now so much more than just we hope that all these people in the newspaper and man I hope they'll reach out to us like way.

Patrick Berry
And that's a that's a great point. There was like the newspaper when John and I used to advertise it and it did and we still do, but it's not much anymore. John does the occasional ad I can't remember the last time I did one, but occasionally a window once it had the mercury they used to. You know, coach, I think correct me if I'm wrong John you know 60, 65,000 readers or something per week or some sort of number like that.

Patrick Berry
It was.

John McGregor
It was 55,000 prints.

Patrick Berry
Prints. Okay, so print. So that's copies of that. The real estate guide going out to people to read and obviously a printed magazine would have a turnover of potentially two to three people say you know, maybe it's 150,000 people is picking up that from now people obviously don't use the newspaper as much and they utilize a lot of services like real estate dot com to buy real estate view to advertise properties and that's great if you're a buyer you know that's actively looking but we want to try target fires that passive buyers like the newspaper used to do and I guess that's where Aaron and I spend a lot of time in recent period learning

Patrick Berry
how to really successfully advertise via social media and when I say social media, it's not just putting an ad online and you know, saying you're listing check it out like and share. It's actually paying for data from these big giant tech companies and then serving those ads back to the people that we think best suit the property. And that's that's something that we're really excited about at the moment is because we're really dialing in who we think the demographic is for a particular property and then making sure the ads go to those exact people so that we can target people in their living room that may not even realize that they're looking for a house

Patrick Berry
to buy at that point in time until the right one gets put in front of them.

John McGregor
And I know it sounds a little bit insidious. The reality is, though, all those you can if you're starting up a new little business and you use that ad spend on Facebook, you can throw a lot of bad money at, you know, at the wall because it's just not going to get you on. The stats may look impressive, but it's actually not converting in any meaningful way.

Aaron Horne
I yeah, look at we've done a bunch of kind of workshops with. Yeah. To Laura from Kingfisher Marketing a great company here and there in Launceston. So they have that Tasmanian based but yeah, we've done a bunch of, of just kind of mentorship, I guess you could call it Pat. We were discussing with them and they just giving us some really good insights into, you know, like, yeah, you can be talk of money and stuff like this but yeah, that's really like kind of hone it in and find the right people for it.

Aaron Horne
So rather than yeah, like as you say, throwing money at a wall and hoping it still makes me think of the spaghetti. Is the spaghetti ready? Is it cooked? Well, you gave chucking it and see what happens. It's got a bunch of testing and measuring is, is really, really good to do. And if you've got the the scope to be able to kind of say, oh, well, I think this campaign works and how come this one didn't.

Aaron Horne
Yes. One thing that yeah I was really thinking bouncing off pat there was finding the right demographic for like say you've got a brand new listing and you know, that it's going to be perfect for investors. Let's market to investors. Let's look into people who are looking into the investor space already have a portfolio, build that audience around and then serve them the ads so that it's not going to grandma and grandpa who probably are going to be looking for a downsize a one.

Aaron Horne
So let's go to an audience for that. Yeah, let's find audience I know you were doing that in training session yesterday with a goal. I was kind of talking I was listening in from my end of the room. They were talking about some really similar stuff of setting up kind of. Yeah, I a database of yeah, these are the people.

Aaron Horne
And so I'm, I'm just going to be words doing now. But I actually was worried today that we wouldn't have anything to talk about. Now I'm just ready to spew it all out I don't want you want our secrets. And it's like we got this.

Patrick Berry
And test measures the correct thing. Like, you know, you're not going to get it 100% right every single time and look, the other day Parker was sitting here and he got super excited and ran over and showed me one of my ads running on his YouTube video. And I'm like, Well, that didn't work.

Aaron Horne
And they say it's like a 24 year old male on.

Speaker 2
Not that. No.

Patrick Berry
But apparently apparently somehow that I got sent to him. So like nothing's rocket science. But the key is, is that we, we keep pushing and we keep developing these methods. And I look for the last two weeks, I think we've generated 116 inquiries from our social media campaigns. Was that correct? Yes.

Aaron Horne
Lots of check. Yeah, we were, we were sitting at 122 we had a few extra ones picked up this morning. So yeah, it's look what you're getting there is, is leads that we can then kind of retarget ads to them. And so you know they've interacted with some of our stuff. So, you know, what's to say if this wasn't the right one because obviously old 116, 122 people there haven't purchased the properties.

Aaron Horne
So you know, there's a pool of people there who are interacting with that. Whether it is, I'm just interested in looking at this, find out what it's worth like you know with weight and then later down the line serve those ads to those people if you're in the market to find something that's going to come to you. So that's good for you to get a little sneak peek on the market overall.

Aaron Horne
Other than having to check real estate dot com every day to be like, I wonder if there's anything new out there. You might be getting that stuff from us organically, just from being interacting with an old Internet's a scary place that people are going to want to, you know, have all these targeted ads. But I always think of that.

Aaron Horne
Remember Minority Report, that Steven Spielberg movie where he's walking through the supermarket looking for the girl and or the ad to talk to him is like Mr. Antigen, like, come and try this. And they're all target ads. And this was way before targeted ads were a thing so that was one of those things where they put heaps of work into future proofing or working out what things will be in the future, like driverless cars and all these things that are coming targeted.

Aaron Horne
Ads were kind of, yeah, pinned by Spielberg and that back then and said, like, this is something that's coming. So yeah, it's, it's just it's such an exciting space. I, I'd never thought I'd be a marketer or working in marketing, but yeah, I'm really good. Yeah, I really love it. And you know, the, my Instagram reviews are coming through and what they're saying is, oh, this marketing idea, this marketing idea, I'm like, I'll get all this stuff targeted to me and it excites me.

Aaron Horne
So if you're in the market for property, look, if you listen to the probably iPad you probably have with it, you probably already in the bucket that we're serving the ads too. So yeah.

Patrick Berry
And speaking of target marketing, I guess another thing that we've been working on that's I think is a game changer and I might regret sharing it in case you're a real estate agent about this.

Aaron Horne
All right. Yeah.

Patrick Berry
I do, because I think it's a great idea and I, I, if anyone's interested, reach out to me because I'm happy to talk to you about it. But we started doing geo advertising as well. And for a vendor thinking about selling jail, advertising is an advantage that we currently have. That is a game changer in my opinion. So for anyone that doesn't know what geo advertising is, it's still works through the Facebook and the Google network of ads that we would currently just talking about, that we can actually make it so that a certain ad gets to people that enter certain areas.

Patrick Berry
So I like an example would be, say, John's running an open home on Saturday morning at once. It's straight and I've listed Ten Smith straight and it's coming up for sale in two weeks time. I could set a geo fence around John's open home on Saturday morning between ten and 11:00 when he's got his open home running and anyone that goes to John's open home gets my ad later in the day advertising 10 minutes straight for sale and I, I really like it.

Patrick Berry
I think it's a game changer because we're able to tap into a network of potential purchases that we don't actually know and serve them in ads about a property they may be interested.

Aaron Horne
In our look. And the other thing is, you know, only one person can be successful in purchasing the property sale. One attends Smith's one Smith's right, the one at Piazza Ten. If we would just look here one to one, we loved it. Like, Oh, it's really similar. It's just not the thing. Can I get to it? Yes. It might create more competition across the the board because more people are finding out about it.

Aaron Horne
But also your job as the agent for the vendor is to create the competition and get the best possible results so.

John McGregor
And obviously changing markets like this one. My sort of conversation with the purchasers right now is they're all saying, Well, what else have you got? So they're all looking for other avenues especially the first time buyers that they feel at the moment. They've got a lot more time, they've got a lot more choice. So it's on its so the idea that the owner could slip up a private for sale and just sell it in 5 minutes previously, but that market's going to slowly go, yeah.

John McGregor
So they're going to need assistance and will need assistance to make sure that we can introduce people to multiple properties to fit in their right position and getting all these tools in order to provide that information to them. Whether otherwise I mean, a good example is a suburb vehicle desk, but it sits in Robert's plain good OK, but even on real estate, a.

John McGregor
Com, it'll end up on the bottom of a search results suburb's below and people don't know it exists, but if they had these avenues where that gets shown for property, you know, across the road, well then obviously we'll get a lot more engagement.

Aaron Horne
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And look, you've sold a few properties in some point, like the case study we did at what was the old cottage? That was the turn was cottage or something, right? Yeah. Amazing, amazing. Probably. And the amount of interest that was in that, imagine being able to buy this was before the time we were doing a bunch of this targeted advertising.

Aaron Horne
But imagine being able to kind of, yeah, just really hone in on older people that were after that renovation. That's a big issue. You should talk to that guy again. With needing to renovate some more homes and he killed it.

John McGregor
So and that's the for me, a lot of these additional tools that we can ultimately which is to solve people's problems, which is introducing them to homes.

Aaron Horne
Yes, exactly.

John McGregor
And that's what these are helping us to look.

Aaron Horne
As I mentioned before, the idea of yeah. Being in marketing was was never on my radar. It's something that, you know, I used to like watching growing on the TV and be like, man, it's not so bad. Like imagine doing it. But even switching from starting off as a photographer for the time in and growing into this role is shows how in since 2018 how different the landscape is and it's kind of I'm sure that would have been lovely for the small agency what we were when I started to have a marketing manager.

Aaron Horne
But now it's kind of like oh man I've got this many staff on to me working on us like as we grow and grow and grow popping in the bank of the site offices. This space is so exciting and to be yet sitting in here chatting with with Pat while he's on his couch in his slippers, there's not a better feeling that's it.

Patrick Berry
And look, if you're a vendor out there and you're thinking about selling.

Speaker 2
And.

Patrick Berry
Not that I want you to obviously I want you to come sell it off because I think we can do an awesome job for you. But definitely talk to agents and get a really good understanding of the marketing they're offering. If they're just saying, you know, we're going to go do social media advertising and we're going to put it on real estate, they'll come grill them a bit harder.

Patrick Berry
And if they don't know the answers, get them to go back to the agency and get the extra information on exactly what that looks like and then come back to you because you want to be with an agency that understands the new digital landscape and understands the best way to expose the property to its maximum amount of buyers, not someone that just says, Oh, we'll put it up as just listed on our Facebook page, because that's not going to cut it anymore.

Patrick Berry
That's just pointless.

Aaron Horne
Slavin just kind of the age old post post is yeah. Something that I know I was doing before. And you're like, man, but like you're saying, throwing spaghetti at the wall, it's kind of like abusing a post, a circuit. Yeah, yeah. So many more avenues that you can do to actually really fine tune that marketing to find the right people.

Aaron Horne
So yeah, it's a very exciting space. And yeah, as Pat says, reach out he's happy to talk to anyone about it, even whether you think with him or not, or you just want to know a little bit more about it. Yeah, this guy, I pick his brain. Yeah, I can help out anybody with kind of the nitty gritty of the things we're doing.

Aaron Horne
But Pat's got a digital brain and there's little ones and zeros running around in his noggin that he's it's all coded so yeah, he's the guy to talk to about this. And then if you want that pen and paper, John used to work before emails existed, so.

Speaker 2
Let him know hey.

Aaron Horne
Sign these. He's a guy for that.

Speaker 2
I really.

John McGregor
Should get my pen.

Aaron Horne
Targeted.

Speaker 2
I love that book.

Aaron Horne
I was so worried coming in the studio today. I was like, We haven't planned anything. This is going to be so much fun talking about all this stuff. I would happily revisit this any time. So thanks for your time, Pat. Go jump in those slippers again and continue working out there in the studio.

John McGregor
Yeah, I'm jealous.

Aaron Horne
We will catch you when you are safely out of your private bubble, and we'll see everybody next week back here at the property pot.

Patrick Berry
Sounds good, guys.

John McGregor
Here's my.

Aaron Horne
Sweet.

Speaker 2
Sale. You have been listening to the.

Aaron Horne
Property bought, recorded and edited by Fool One for Media House in conjunction with Fool.

Speaker 2
One for Property Code.

Patrick Berry
This podcast is general information. Only in the.

John McGregor
Thoughts of views expressed is the opinion of our panel and listeners should always seek the news their own investigation into any topic we discuss to ensure they fully understand their own situation. It does not constitute and should not be relied on as purchasing, selling, financial or investment advice or recommendations. Express or implied, and it should not be used as an invitation to take up any agent or investment services.

John McGregor
No investment decision or activity should be undertaken on the basis of this information without first taking qualified and professional advice.