Taney Jain never expected a career in real estate and thought he would end up driving trucks for a living. But a series of events steered him along a road that has proved highly successful for him, having just won the Tom Panos ‘My Prospector’ calling challenge, making 2,200 calls in a single month.
Taney Jain almost didn’t make it to real estate. After a few years of being a door to door salesman, he had every intention of switching his career to become a truck driver. He passed the theory test, but had to forgo the practical examination when he fell ill.
“I called up the driving school, and they told me that they couldn’t postpone the exam. So I cancelled it; my money was wasted, but later on I met my current principal Sunil Kumar at Reliance Real Estate Werribee through a friend, and he encouraged me to make the move into real estate.”
Jain was sceptical at first but after some consideration decided to give real estate a try. The rest, as they say, is history.
“Initially, I was like, ‘Who will buy these big, big numbers from me?’ I didn’t even know how to write the zeros in $400,000 or a million dollars at that time – I had never written big numbers like that before.”
But Jain took on the challenge and switched to real estate. Today he is successfully listing and selling nine to ten properties in a month and is on track to make $2 million in GCI this year.
Jain attributes much of his success to his principal and is thankful he made the decision to join Tom Panos’ Real Estate Gym program very early in his career.
“I joined Real Estate Gym from day one. When I met Tom after winning the My Prospector competition I was very emotional, because he’s a mentor for all of us. It felt as though I was getting an Oscar!”
Jain says that the Real Estate Gym program helped him to muster the courage to make cold calls and convince people to list their properties with his agency.
“I used to do door-knocking before, but the thing that worked for me was cold calling. And [in doing this] you need to be different.”
If you call someone you need to be very honest and you have to win them over by being original.
“You don’t want to sound like a marketing call. There are ten different marketing companies calling people, cold calling every day, from telecommunication to gas and electricity. If you call the same way they’ll just hang up. They might be interested in selling but they’ll say, ‘Not interested’.”
Jain believes that jotting down personal details of the people he calls goes a long way in helping him get listings from strangers.
“Whenever I called, I noted down details about the conversation – for example, how many kids they have – both in my diary and my database. So the next time I call them I ask them how their three-year-old is doing, which makes them feel personalised: this guy remembers about my kids, or my family.”
Another telephone tip from Jain is to let potential clients know from where you are calling.
“When I call them it doesn’t have to be a marketing call, or ‘Do you want to sell your house?’. I just introduce myself and say, ‘My name is Taney and I’m calling from Reliance Real Estate on Watton Street’. I say Watton Street because it’s one of the famous streets in a farm area where I live, so people know it’s a local person and not someone calling from overseas. I say I am just calling up to see if [they] need some real estate advice. If they say yes, I’ll take down their contact details, organise to meet up or ask them what type of advice they are looking for.”
But, as is sometimes the case, if these prospects are not willing to chat any further, Jain says his method was to check back with them in six or seven months’ time. This trick always worked well for him.
“Ninety per cent of the time they will say yes in six months, or say to send some market updates, and there you will get their contact details. [Then] you’ve started to build a relationship with them. So I then send a thank-you card in the post as well, with a personalised handwritten note to say ‘Thank you for speaking with me’, and urge them to save my details.”
On the number of listings, Jain says that on a monthly basis he clocks in about nine to 10 listings, with the house prices ranging between $300,000 to $400,000, by working close to 15 hours a day.
Although the competition is now over, Jain said he still takes the same approach to prospecting as he did when he was competing.
“I don’t take buyer’s calls. I’ve an operations manager in my team who does these calls, and I just keep on listing. My aim is to make as many calls and list as much I can,” he said.
“I sometimes feel very blessed because when I joined real estate I didn’t know a single thing about housing. Now 2017 is going to be a very, very big year because I’ve started myself into larger, higher-end properties as well, like the one on my site. So [things are] looking up; double the listing that I used to do in my first and second year, and growing my team as well.”
On how he deals with competition posed by other real estate agents, Jain says the pie is big enough for everyone to share; but the biggest tip he had for new people coming into the industry is to make sure they are adequately supported.
“Don’t go out there on your own. You might think you know people out there, but they might be living in different parts of that particular city; you can’t just go and sell in every single corner. You have be selective in your farm area, keep it to around 1,000 homes.”
Tom Panos says that My Prospector works because it assists an agent to comply and not procrastinate their prospecting; what you measure, you manage. “Taney Jain is living proof that you can be a million dollar agent in any market. He has simply done what most agents are not prepared to do – make prospecting a daily, non-negotiable event. When you become addicted to the process, the results will come.”
My Prospector is the official accountability tool of Transform 2017.
