Tia Petch might have only worked in real estate for 18 months, but she’s already making a big impact.
As Head of Agent Services for Ray White AKG, Tia is on a mission to grow both the overarching brand as well as the profiles of the real estate agents that work at the three-office agency.
“I really want to position AKG as a forward-thinker in the industry,” Tia notes.
“For us, we absolutely love everything the Ray White brand offers, but we also want to be known as an individual in the group.
“We really want to push our small, boutique branding alongside them and have the two supercharged.”
Tia reveals that the goal is to foster a tech-forward culture, but for that ethos to come without confusion or extra work for the selling agents and property managers.
Rather, it’s Tia’s aim to build and equip the team with the technology, marketing strategies and essential tools they need to thrive.
She also wants to discard the ones that don’t serve the business.
“You can give agents a lot of tools to hang on their tool belts but if they’re not used, or used correctly, they’re either a waste of space or they hurt you,” Tia says.
From viral videos to real estate innovation
Tia’s real estate journey started somewhat by accident when she combined with her husband, Daniel, to film a humorous sales video to sell his parents’ block of land.
Tia was running her own marketing agency at the time and Daniel, an exercise scientist with a knack for SEO writing, had an allied health clinic and gym.
“My husband’s parents had a block of land in Tamborine that they couldn’t sell, so my husband asked if we could make a funny video and push it out to our friends who were all in that first-home buyer bracket,” she says.
“We made this funny video, which was pretty silly, and it went viral on Facebook.
“Then the Daily Mail contacted me and wanted to do a feature on it.
“Within a week’s time, it had over 100 million views online and he (Daniel) was on CNN, he went all across the UK, he was on Sunrise and we had real estate agencies calling us saying to contact them if we ever wanted to get into real estate.”
The couple dipped their toe in the water with another agency for a short period before meeting with Ray White AKG CEO Avi Khan and sales executive Kaylea Sayer.
Tia notes that they were immediately impressed with Avi’s innovative mindset and approach to the industry.
“We immediately thought, ‘We can make some real change here’,” she says.
Tia and Daniel joined the team about eight months ago and immediately started building up AKG Media Group, which looks after photography and videography for property listings and agent branding, while designers take care of print marketing, and ad specialists and SEO copywriters are also part of the team.
Building trust with connection marketing
It’s Tia’s job to sit down with each agent and analyse their position in the market before working out a plan to elevate their personal brand.
She notes that a big push at the moment is connection marketing and how agents can build trust with, not just clients, but the community in general.
“When you look at various reports and how well agents are liked versus not liked in the industry, they’re not very high on the list,” she says.
“So we’re really focusing on building trust.
“The first thing I say (to an agent), is to look through their followers and to tell me what percentage of those followers are agents and what percentage is the public.
“Nine times out of 10 they find their following is agents from the industry, so that usually means they’re creating content for agents, not for the public.”
Tia reveals that video is a key medium for building a personal brand and one way the AKG Media Group facilitates this is through welcome and local tour videos, where agents team up with the neighbourhood bakery, butcher, cafe or other small business.
“Video is a currency in itself and you can get them talking about the local area and it allows you to collaborate with them and tack onto their audience as well,” she says.
Sponsoring a local community or sporting group is another way agents can raise their profile in a positive way, but Tia stresses it needs to be an authentic relationship.
“One agent thought he had to sponsor an AFL club and he hates AFL,” she says.
“So we asked him, ‘What do you like doing?’ and he said he loved UFC and MMA, so we suggested he sponsor a local MMA team.
“It’s something he likes, it’s something he can talk to his clients about and it’s authentically something he cares about.
“It needs to be authentic, otherwise it comes across as icky.”
Harnessing technology to scale
The AKG team is also embracing the latest ways of working, both when it comes to human and technological resources.
Tia says there’s a team of 30 virtual assistants that help the group’s agents with a range of tasks including contracts, scheduling and other administrative tasks.
They also assist with marketing, but when Tia noticed copy coming through containing Americanisms she quickly devised a solution.
“I built a custom GPT for our VAs to use that covered our market here in Australia,” she says.
“I also scraped a lot of data from online, including CoreLogic, Domain and REA Group, and I gave it (the GPT) all of the pain points in our market and for our sellers.
“I built the GPT for our agents and our VAs to use when they are writing sales copy, Facebook ads, property listings and any other tasks.”
Named mamHAUS, which stands for marketing advertising media house, Tia has shared the custom GPT with the industry and about 450 agents currently use it in Australia.
Next on the list for Tia and her team is building a custom leadership GPT that contains the knowledge of the 15-member leadership team.
“We want to grow our team, theoretically, to a team of 30,” she says.
“We want to double each of our outputs. And why we want to do that is because their time is best served listing and selling and communicating with clients.
“They get so inundated with small, minute tasks that can be adapted and done through AI to make their time so much more efficient.”
Closing the gaps
Tia’s also focused on growing the people in her team and helping them reach their full potential.
One way she’s doing that is by closing internal knowledge gaps and aligning all team members with the strategic objectives of the business.
Addressing industry challenges such as the saturation of lead-generation tools and the rise of predictive AI, Tia's team is pioneering sophisticated campaign marketing that merges traditional strategies, inspired by LJ Hooker’s iconic campaigns, with cutting-edge digital tactics.
One initiative, "There's no I in AKG," highlights their unified approach to property sales and that while a client may list with one AKG agent, they still get access to the group’s entire buyer database and collective desire to work together to sell every property.
Tia notes that along with tapping into clients’ pain points with their language, they’re also focusing on bridging the education gap.
She says that while the media paints an often grim picture about the rental market and prices increasing, segments of the market are often different.
“We have several rentals we can’t find a suitable tenant for and in certain areas the market isn’t slowing down, it’s actually speeding up,” Tia says.
“We have this knowledge, but the public doesn’t. So our notion is to give the public this information but not to ask for anything in return.
“The return will come tenfold when you build trust with them.”
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