The Desert of Arizona
Sunny 76 Degrees – 6:43 a.m.
Last week I spent some time with a friend in town talking about her new rental on Airbnb.
She had rented one night, I believe, in October.
She was getting some nibbles, but not the right kind.
“I know you say no pets, but we only have one, will that work?”
“Can you do anything about that cleaning fee?”
When you’re getting questions like this, you know you’re not attracting people you want.
It’d be like a prospect saying, “I know you charge $10,000 for this, but how about I pay you $5,000 and we call it a deal? That works for me!”
How about no?
I haven’t spent much time on Airbnb, so I took a few minutes and looked around at the listings.
It probably comes as no surprise, but they are all basically the same. “We have a great property, beautiful views, yada, yada…” They all shout, “Me too, me too!”
This is a problem because, with that approach, the only thing you’ve given the prospect to work with is the price. And they never ask for it to go up!
The situation reminded me of a successful real estate guy I knew. Instead of following the path of most real estate professionals and looking for “traffic” and “showings” right before telling the seller to drop the price because it’s “all about price,” he was smart.
His approach was more like this: “We need exactly ONE buyer for this property, so I really don’t care about anyone else. I only care about attracting THE one buyer.”
And he would create the advertising based on that concept.
It’s about the people and what they want, not about the property.
So instead of shouting the praises of this Airbnb property (which is what everyone else does), we wrote an ad that called out the perfect buyer in a unique way.
What happened?
In less than 24 hours, two bookings were made for a total of 11 nights, with ZERO questions about terms or discounts.
Same property, different THINKING, different results.
Real estate (and all business 🙂 is not about the product, it is about the buyer and the perfect product for that buyer.
Stop thinking about how to sell what you have, start thinking about the ideal environment in which a certain someone would naturally WANT to buy what you have.