Born and raised in a real estate family, property management runs through Nicholas Chant’s veins. Today, he heads up the Property Management division of a growing real estate business in Lake Macquarie, NSW.

From a primetime TV commercial to a whiteboard full of new business leads, Nicholas gave us a glimpse into his teams’ growth strategy and shared his advice for Business Development Managers keen to kick goals.

Word of mouth! A lot of our investors talk about us. We are well-known for our high service levels. And a lot of investors have loved Ailo, too. It takes a little while to get used to, but once you’re on it, off you go!

We also like to get creative and experiment with out-of-the-box campaigns. We recently did a TV ad, which aired in primetime in our market. We highlighted Ailo as a communication tool. We had a lot of investors enquire in the sales department, which translated to us getting a number of new managements.

You’ve got the tools, it’s just about being able to use them! When we’re onsite meeting with a prospective new client, we take out the Ailo app and literally take them through it. A lot of investors love it.

I have an edge in the sense that I rent through the agency too, so I can show them both the tenant and the landlord side.

I’d say social presence is really important. Being present and interacting with our local community and our followers has been really effective for us. Answer their questions promptly, educate them. We have a marketing expert on the team who helps us manage this.

We’re currently finding seasonal campaigns are good. So, for example, when you come into winter pieces about mould, and pest control coming into summer. And of course when legislation changes come in, it’s an important opportunity to educate people on what is happening since we are on the forefront of this.

In terms of messaging, it’s also important for us to demonstrate that not only can we manage properties effectively, but we can move properties quickly too. And social media really lends itself to this.

I’m a little old school, and I use a whiteboard!

We also use Vault and Ailo has started to really advance in terms of reporting, so we’re looking forward to tracking it exclusively there eventually. For example, in Ailo we can easily see how fast and how slow we are going in certain areas of growth, including tracking new management and if we’ve lost any. But we’ve really only been losing management to sales, which is fantastic. We haven’t truly lost one management yet!

The most important and effective thing you can do in business development is to just be yourself.

When you’re meeting people, you have to be you. A lot of people go in and try to be something you're not. If you can connect with them on a personal level, you can make them feel like they are on the journey with you and that’s important.

Oh, and also another piece of advice: Don’t promise something you can’t deliver. Honesty will always get you what you want in the end.

You will always have an owner who thinks they have the Taj Mahal of investments or their house is worth more. We’re not here to sugar coat things. We are here to manage their investments and build their portfolio of wealth.

In saying that, don’t kill dream. If they want $800 a week but you think it’s worth $750, then you approach it more as ‘happy to try it your way but ultimately the market will tell us in a week’s time whether we are in the right place or not’.

I think if we re-did it, we would include more snippets of who we are as an agency. It’s hard, because you don’t have a lot of time on TV to get things across. In my experience, people relate to people, versus just information about a product or service.

So I would talk more about what our customers experience. Compared to what the market is used to here, we communicate well and we’re very prompt. We work hard to understand our clients’ needs, what they do and don’t want to do with their property, and their expectations on what they want to achieve.

I definitely think TV is worth it, but it has to be done right.