Hayley Van de Ven is an agent growth specialist, owner of RE/MAX Results and RE/MAX Bayside Properties – ranked as the top two RE/MAX offices in Australia – and Director of the Limitless Group. With more than 20 years of experience, Hayley is recognised as an inspirational female leader in real estate, known for her negotiation expertise, industry insight, and passion. Under her leadership, her team has achieved over 4,000 sales across Queensland, and in the past eight years, she has grown her business from a small team of four to 120. Her success has earned her recognition as a respected real estate mentor and global sales leader.
As an influential leader in the real estate sector, Hayley shared her insights with Securexchange on how to set your agency up for a successful year and the strategies she employs to position her agency as a leader in an increasingly competitive and evolving market.
The new year starts the year before for our team. I like to reflect on the year that has been – assessing what worked, what didn’t, what went well for us, and things I’m proud of – then evaluate the learnings I’ve had. This enables us to plan for the year ahead by taking everything into account.
Each business unit sets their own strategical plan, which we weave into our overall growth plan for the year ahead. We break these plans into quadrants: financial management, sales and marketing, people and culture, and business operations. Then, we reassess each unit’s vision to ensure it aligns with our overall goals.
Setting big, hairy, audacious goals, establishing time frames, and assigning accountability for the work are the next steps we take to set the year up for success.
For us, being authentic and abundant is one of our key values. We find it’s easy to connect with our clients and maintain strong relationships when we stay true to this by making authenticity the norm. Getting to know our clients and showing them how much we care is not a faux pas – I think it’s essential. Likewise, with our internal clients and agents, being a good human and expecting your team to be good humans breeds more good humans.
This year is a big year for nurturing for us! Strengthening touchpoints and adding real value is the aim of the game by plugging holes and ensuring we make the most of the immense lead machine we’ve created for our agents.
We understand that the market moves quickly and that immediacy is currency, however we plan for the year ahead based on our goals and clients’ needs. We test and measure all areas of our performance, particularly in the marketing space. We feel we are quick to adapt to changing market conditions and pride ourselves on staying ahead of the curve. Most of our agents are highly experienced, so we’re well-seasoned in all markets. This level of expertise provides us with a solid foundation for continued market share growth.
We love technology and have always been early adaptors. This year, our focus on nurturing is heavily driven by tech automations and relationship drivers. By using technology platforms, we’ve created a powerful lead-generation machine to drive opportunities back to our agents. This isn’t driven by technology alone. It’s also by using my virtual assistants, which have a robust plan in cleaning and maintaining the relevancy of data.
Leverage, leverage, leverage. Use your time as an agent to do the dollar-productive activities: face-to-face relationship building and fostering loyalty and trust in your personal brand, consistently, day by day. Big learning of 2024 – do more with less.
I see a continuation of investors offloading properties as legislation continues to tighten for landlords. This will keep vacancy rates at record lows and continue to drive prices upward as availability dries up.
Think big but think about details and processes. Consider how your business can grow while you sleep. Get granular to grow!