CANADA 12-13-21

CANADA EDITION

HOW TO BUILD A TEAM

24-HOUR TOUCH-UPS to Maximize Your Price List

THAT WILL WIN BIG NO MATTER ITS SIZE

COVER STORY

FRANCOIS D’AOUST & ROCH ST-JACQUES FEATURED AGENT

MELANIE ARSENAULT

CANADA EDITION

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FRANCOIS D’AOUST MELANIE ARSENAULT FRANCOIS D’AOUST MELANIE ARSENAULT & ROCH ST-JACQUES & ROCH ST JACQUES

CONTENTS 4) 6 WAYS TO GET YOUR CLIENT TO TRUST YOU

15) 24-HOUR TOUCH-UPS TO MAXIMIZE YOUR PRICE LIST

6) HOW TO BUILD A TEAM THAT WILL WIN BIG NO MATTER ITS SIZE

22) MODERN EMAIL ETIQUETTE FOR TODAY’S AGENTS

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6 Ways to Get Your Client to Trust You The word “REALTOR®” can leave a sour taste in some people’s mouths. Many of today’s home buyers and sellers grew up during the 2009 recession. They are wary of anything 4

or anyone who comes off as too salesy, and they want to work with individuals who they can trust.

But how do you prove to someone you’ve likely never met that you can be trusted?

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Put Testimonials or Case Studies on Your Website

When something goes wrong, own up to your mistakes. Don’t hide bad news from your clients. Be upfront and responsive.

Testimonials and case studies are social proof that you have both the experience and the skills to do the job your clients are hiring you for. People often leave testimonials when they are either incredibly disappointed or extremely happy with the service they were provided, so they’re a good indication to prospective clients of the treatment they’ll receive.

Case studies, which you can post on your blog or website, have much of the same effect, but even more than testimonials, case studies demonstrate your real estate and finance expertise because they explain how you achieved a specific set of results.

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Be Responsive and Accessible

Can your clients reach you easily? That doesn’t mean you need to be available 24/7, but you should respond to your clients within a few hours of receiving their message. When agents don’t respond to their clients’ calls or emails for days on end or fail to provide them with a direct line of contact, their clients’ experience can quickly become frustrating.

Agents are busy but so are their clients. If you constantly show up late to or reschedule meetings, your clients won’t feel like their time is respected or their business is valued. Make sure you set a realistic schedule for yourself rather than spreading yourself too thin.

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Be Honest and Transparent

Sometimes you don’t have the answer to a client’s question. Be honest about your strengths, weaknesses, and the limits of your knowledge. A good response might be, “I don’t know, but I can find out.” Be transparent with your clients, and they’ll respect you for it.

You should always act in their best interest.

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Go the Extra Mile

If you do the bare minimum, that’s what your clients will remember. Their experience won’t be memorable, and they won’t gush about you in online testimonials or in real life to people they know who could use your services. It’s that simple.

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Put Yourself in Your Client’s Shoes

Clients understand that you need to earn money, but that doesn’t mean they want to feel like they’re just a dollar sign to you. Be empathetic to your client’s concerns, even if you’ve heard it all before. Your clients should know that you are there for them.

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Be Consistent

Being responsive, friendly, and knowledgeable shouldn’t be an act. If you “turn on” your personality for clients and then suddenly become a different person when they leave the room, it’s likely that the cracks in your mask will eventually become apparent.

But “faking it till you make it” is so common it’s become a cliché. When we are starting out, we don’t always have the systems or resources in place to create a smooth client journey, from onboarding to closing, so instead we constantly try to reinvent the wheel. Give yourself time to pause, slow down, and reevaluate your workflow. Creating systems creates

consistency, and those systems can and should be constantly updated.

Developing trust between you and your clients will take time, but doing these things can give you a running start.

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How to Build a Team That Will Win Big No Matter its Size In the real estate world building a team is a goal almost every agent strives towards achieving. Doing business with a team as opposed to solo has numerous advantages. With more agents handling clients as well as other employees specialized in areas such as marketing and administrative support there to assist you; you can greatly increase your business and sales.

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So, when creating a team, logic would tell us that the bigger it is, the better, right? Wrong. When it comes to real estate teams, size doesn’t matter so much as the players you bring onto that team to work with you. A team doesn’t have to be big to win big, and here are the secrets to building a team that wins big no matter its size.

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Hire the Right Team Members

Put Your Team Members in the Right Positions to Win

You’ve probably heard the saying, “you’re only as strong as you’re weakest link.” That idea holds true for any kind of team, including those in real estate. If you have weak members on your team, then it’s not possible to have a strong team. Drawing strong team members to your business is essential.

Finding strong team members is just one part of the equation. As the leader of your team, you now have to assess each member’s strengths and weaknesses and position them appropriately. You want the best player for each role playing that part and catering to their strengths. Choose your team member’s roles wisely, and place each individual in the position where their strengths can shine and they can best contribute to a win for the entire team. Every role is important to the team working smoothly and winning as a whole, so it is important to place each team member in the role most suited to his or her skills.

To better understand what kind of person would make a strong addition to your team, you need to ask yourself what skills and characteristics you want your team members to possess. The strongest members are often ones that share their leader’s values. When you share values with your teammates, you are all running along the same course towards the same goal as one. Your definition of a victory in this case is also your teammates’ definition of it. This helps strengthen even the smallest of numbers because you are all working together toward a common goal.

Another characteristic too look out for in potential team members is a positive attitude. You can teach someone the skills needed in real estate, but you can’t teach someone how to have a positive attitude.

Positive members tend to achieve more due to their optimistic nature, but more importantly, they spread that positive attitude to the rest of the team, which improves every members’ performance.

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Communicating Your Vision to Your Team

Your team members are the key ingredients to ultimate victory, but what recipe do you follow now to lead them to victory? That is what communication is for a winning team; the recipe you will use to

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help best utilize each team member and instruct them on how they need to work together to fulfill the recipe that will lead them to be a winning team. Your team members need to know the plan and you must give them the tools to successfully execute it.

It is up to the leader of a team to help your players see your vision and help them understand what a victory looks like. The goal may seem simple and obvious to you, but you must communicate it over and over again to your team members, so they understand it as well as you do. With different personalities coming together to form a unit, you are going to be dealing with numerous challenges such as competing agendas. You will find this on any team. You must keep the goal and at the forefront of your player’s minds in order to encourage them to put aside their own personal desires in order to come together as one cohesive, single-minded unit and push towards the team’s goal.

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Give Your Team Members the Tools to Help Them Perform at Their Best The final thing all great leaders do is equip their team members with the proper tools and training needed for them to succeed. You have to show them how they can each come together with their different strengths to work as a team towards one unified goal. This involves more than simple skills training, but also endurance, so they can last as a team and win even those matches that seem unending and impossible.

Think of all the challenges that they could possibly face ahead, and clear their path to victory by giving them the necessary training and tools they will need to get past any obstacle. As the leader, you must be prepared to continually communicate the team’s goal and your vision. Use that vision to motivate your team members throughout the journey towards victory.

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FRANCOIS D’AOUST & ROCH ST-JACQUES Top Agent Magazine

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Top Agents Roch St-Jacques and François D’aoust of The Roch St-Jacques team serve the Outaouais region, including Gatineau and the surrounding area.

Roch St-Jacques began his real estate career in 1987, merging into new home sales in 1990. In 2003, Roch created a company called Integra Management to manage home sales and construction follow-up for different builders. “That brought me back to reactivating my Realtor® license,” Roch recalls, “because we were referring people to Realtors® when they wanted to resell their homes in the new home project, and we were getting feedback that they were not served as well as they had been served in our project. So I decided to get my license back and do both new home sales and resale.”

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François D’aoust, meanwhile, was working in the service industry at a clothing store and a bar when the owners of both those businesses left to join Roch at Integra. “I saw how much fun they were having,” François says.

“I was studying architecture, but I was also in the service industry, and sales were appealing to me.” François went to work with Roch too, and the rest is history. “I’ve never looked back since,” François says. “I found a passion that I didn’t know I had for sales and real estate.

Throughout the process of Roch mentoring me, we became great friends, and now we’re partners in a real estate business together.”

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The Roch St-Jacques team serves the Outaouais region, including Gatineau and the surrounding area. Their commitment to their clients sets the team apart. “When Roch was mentoring me, he taught me to always be a source of information for clients,” Top Agent Magazine

François says. “So we developed a system that is there to properly appraise property, either for the buyers or for the sellers so that we can understand what its value is. There’s a lot of depth to the process, and not a lot of Realtors® do it because it’s really time 11 Copyright Top Agent Magazine

The Roch St-Jacques team offer unique services like consulting for builders. “Because of our vast experience in new build and also in resale, we are able to offer something that no other Realtor® in the region is able to offer at this point,” Roch says. consuming, but that’s what we truly value.

That’s the only way we can actually give counsel to our clients properly.”

The team is also highly respected among its peers, and they offer unique services like consulting for builders. “Because of our Copyright Top Agent Magazine 12

vast experience in new build and also in resale, we are able to offer something that no other Realtor® in the region is able to offer at this point,” Roch says. “Our goal is to serve customers. Our focus is not on the money we can make. Doing a good job, having happy and satisfied customers is the Top Agent Magazine

focus, the side effect of that is you’re going to make money.”

The Roch St-Jacques team give back to their community whenever possible. Roch is vice-president of La Chambre Immobilière de l’Outaouais Council. The team were also Top Agent Magazine

involved for the first time last year in fundraising to buy winter suits for kids in need, helping 100 families, and they hope to help even more this year.

In the future, Roch and François plan to continue growing a team that shares their values.

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“The comment we hear all the time from people who work with us is that we treat the real estate business as being not just about buildings, but about people,” François says. “It’s really about the human beings in all aspects of the transaction, and making sure that they

go through a due diligence process where they feel comfortable, well taken care of, and protected, and they have a joyful experience.

We always say that we don’t build houses, we build relationships. It’s always about the people, and that’s all there is to it.”

For more about Roch St-Jacques & François D’aoust, you can contact them by phone at 819-213-4749, or online at courtiersrochstjacques.com https://

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24-Hour Touch-ups to Maximize Your List Price Sometimes it takes a full-scale overhaul to prepare a house for market. Other times, only a series of small adjustments are required to make a listing’s true potential shine. Whether you’re gearing up for an open house, assessing a list price, or maximizing a property’s appearance prior to photography—the devil is in the details. However, touch-ups and refreshes don’t have to dominate your schedule or break the bank. For a few ideas of where Top Agent Magazine

to begin, consider our handy check-list below for quick home projects that will fortify your bottom line.

Refresh grout for a sparkling clean look.

Perhaps the quickest and most cost-effective way to make bathrooms, kitchens, and other tiled areas shine is to refresh grout until it looks

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good as new. Specialty grout stain removers and cleaners are inexpensive and sold at most home improvement stores. Plus, the project only takes a bit of elbow grease and an hour or two for a major makeover effect. Suddenly, dark, stained, and worn-down bathrooms gleam as if tile has just been placed.

Create mood lighting with soothing bulbs and fixtures.

A warm white light from specially chosen LED bulbs creates a welcoming environment when potential buyers come calling.

If outdated fixtures are bringing down a home’s otherwise modern styling, consider more design-neutral replacements that won’t

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detract from the property’s charms. These are inexpensive but highly noticeable and impactful upgrades that shift a home’s ambiance for the better.

Repaint doors for an updated and inviting entryway.

It may sound like a hassle, but repainting doorways with a fresh coat signals a wellkept property—and that’s before prospective buyers even pass through the threshold. You can also change out generic doorknobs and switch-plates to add an updated flare while on a budget. Color-of-the-year trend choices can turn heads, while neutral paint choices signal less hassle for future homeowners.

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scrub, or with the addition of new shelves or styled bulbs.

Make windows shine— both inside and out.

Cleanliness goes a long way in communicating a well-cared for home in which buyers can imagine themselves. Cleaning the inside and outside of windows not only refreshes a room, but it allows light to infuse the space while appealing to the move-in ready crowd.

Closet spaces are not an afterthought.

Every prospective buyer wants storage options, and you’ve surely led a home tour where guests inspect closets and pantries.

Don’t let these hidden spaces go overlooked. Make sure they’re clean, cleared as much as possible, and you can even touch them up with fresh paint, a good

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Remove tough appliance stains with a bit of elbow grease.

If you’re packaging appliances with the sale of a property, you’ll want to make sure those big-ticket items are also in top shape to showcase their value. Stainless steel polish, electric cooktop polish, and stain removing pads for the kitchen sink can make your appliances look five years younger with nothing more than an hour or two’s labor.

Organize garage and basement areas to maximize storage and hint at bonus space.

It may take a labor of love, but organizing and decluttering these special storage spaces

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can add significant value to a property. Instead of telling prospective buyers how much storage space there is—let these areas speak for themselves by giving them a neutral, airy bout of cleansing. That way, craft-lovers, car aficionados, and buyers with interest in renovating basement areas can witness the potential immediately.

Individually, these bit to-do list items might seem like extra work without the promise of 18

a major return. But combined? These small tasks go a long way in crafting a home’s image and projecting pure potential. After all, prospective buyers imagine their lives unfolding inside those walls. That’s why cobbling together these small-scale projects can have a big payoff in the end. Not only will a home present itself in a cohesive, attractively-packaged form, but it can also translate to higher interest and a significant pay-off—in more ways than one.

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MELANIE ARSENAULT Top Agent Magazine

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MELANIE ARSENAULT

After working successfully in consulting for years, Melanie Arsenault decided to follow that little feeling inside that told her to move into real estate. She met someone at a networking event who encouraged the move, and she hasn’t looked back. Drawn by the freedom and flexibility the field offers, Melanie quickly fell in love with the myriad opportunities to help and get to know people in her community. Now she has been working in the industry for two years, and is making a name for herself. She works incredibly hard to get consistent results and brings excellent service to all of her clients.

Melanie’s service philosophy is very client-centric. She puts sincere effort into furthering the best interests of her clients and providing a comfortable and smooth 20

transaction experience for them. With the consulting experience that she has under her belt, Melanie is very capable of handling any obstacles that get thrown her way during a transaction and is quick to earn the trust of her clients. “Real estate is similar to consulting in that you’re working to solve issues,” Melanie says. And she adds, “My goal is to match my clients with their dream home.” Clients notice the work that Melanie puts into enhancing their experience, Melanie’s client satisfaction is very high because of it.

When it comes to interacting with her clients, Melanie prioritizes building lasting friendships with her clients. She says she “thrives on connection” and thus, communicates effectively and efficiently with clients throughout the transaction process and makes Top Agent Magazine

herself available to answer any questions a client might have, but she also maintains those relationships after the transactions have closed. Melanie’s motivation to keep close contact with her clients is apparent in the process, and clients love her personal approach – she gets lots of her business from word of mouth and referrals!

In terms of marketing, Melanie uses social media platforms, particularly Instagram and Facebook, where she posts everyday or every other day and is working on her TikTok skills.

She is currently working with a co-op student who she mentors to get the next “in thing” to add to her marketing plan. Additionally, Melanie uses word of mouth and networking to get the results that helped earn her recognition as 2020 Keller Williams Capital Realty Rookie Agent of the Year in New Brunswick.

Melanie believes in community involvement.

She served as Deputy Mayor of a town she recently lived in and helped start and organize a running event to raise money for an organization, Kids Sport, which helps kids from disadvantaged backgrounds across the area she works get involved in sports. In her free time, Melanie loves spending time with her husband and their two young sons in sporting activities. She has always been athletic and a fan of health and fitness--and was a competitive volleyball player throughout her youth. And now her son plays hockey, which she encourages and supports. For the future, Melanie hopes to continue providing phenomenal service to her community and helping people find their dream home, and growing her already thriving business in the process. If you’re looking for a Realtor® in New Brunswick who is focused on people and a great work ethic, get in touch with Melanie Arsenault today!

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For more about Melanie call (506) 878-0243 email melaniearsenault@kw.com or visit www.kwnb.ca 21

Modern Email Etiquette for Today’s Agents In today’s tech-forward culture, consumers are constantly inundated with promotional emails, alerts, invites, and social media blasts. As a real estate agent or a loan officer, how do you stand apart from the noise? What’s more, how do you stay relevant in a digital landscape that’s constantly changing?

For starters, there are a few timeless techniques you can apply to up your skillset when it comes email and digital communication: asking questions that 22

inspire conversation, politeness, and following up regularly—to name a few. Likewise, there are surely new tricks you can add to your arsenal to stay ahead of the curve. Let’s outline a few ways you can refine and update your email etiquette to compete in today’s virtual marketplace.

Make your subject line count Too often, we labor over the content of our emails without giving much thought to subject lines.

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Though email is no longer a new-fangled invention, there are certainly ways you can modernize its use and take advantage of its ubiquity.

However, these little headlines can go a long way in luring the consumer to open your email and ultimately click through to your website in search for your services. An enticing subject line should be short and sweet, ideally less than fifty characters.

You might also include the name of the recipient, and be up front (though concise) about the subject matter of your message. Remember: the first thing a client will see is your name and subject line—be sure to make this prime real estate shine.

Think mobile Research tells us that 79% of Americans check their phones within fifteen minutes of waking up. In fact, much of modern day correspondence occurs by smartphone. Accordingly, you’ll want to account for email readability on a mobile phone.

For instance, incorporating paragraph breaks for each new thought allows information to be parceled out in a palatable way for readers utilizing small screens. Also, any sort of graphic flair or links within your email should be shortened and streamlined for mobile consumption. Send yourself an email every now and again and access it from your phone—you’ll be able to double-check that all the elements of your emails are working well on a mobile platform.

Incorporate email tools There are excellent tools out there to enhance your email experience. With just a quick download, Top Agent Magazine

you can add spellcheck, a URL address shortening feature, or a delay option that holds emails for thirty seconds before they’re sent. Think about the possibilities! Haven’t you sent an email without including the attachment you intended, or realizing you sent correspondence to the wrong client? If that’s the case, a delay feature can help you save face and build in a window for error— just in case. Regardless of which tools speak to your email habits, there are plenty of add-ons out there that can revamp your digital correspondence style.

Use email to maximize your online presence These days, there are plenty of ways to communicate—email, text, phone, apps, and social media.

When you interact through email, consider it an opportunity to invite your client to follow you elsewhere online. Ensure that your email signature includes unobtrusive, streamlined links to your social media accounts, professional website, or review page. This will build in an opportunity for clients to engage with your brand, and you may even add an online follower for the long term.

Though email is no longer a new-fangled invention, there are certainly ways you can modernize its use and take advantage of its ubiquity. Keep these approaches in mind as you reenergize your email technique and fortify your communication in the digital era.

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