The most expensive word in Cape Town property right now is ‘no’

A while back I phoned an agent about a house I knew was right for my buyer. I offered them 90/10. Ninety to them, ten to me. I said, ‘I know you've just taken it on and I am happy to offer a minimal split to get the right property for my buyer and a clean sale for your seller’.

They said no.

I have to say, I was quite flabbergasted. I just sat there afterwards going, okay. Right. Because at the end of the day I wasn't after the listing. I wasn't after the seller. I was looking after a buyer and I wanted that buyer in the right property, and I was happy to hand over almost the entire fee to make that happen.

So what exactly did that agent protect? Ten percent of a commission they hadn't earned yet, on a house they hadn't sold, to a buyer they didn't have.

That's the whole argument, really. But let me back it up properly, because I know how this sounds coming from someone who bangs on about collaboration at every opportunity.

I didn't invent this, I imported it

I've been in this industry 23 years and I fell into it, it wasn't a career choice I thought of. Most of that time was in the UK, and the UK works differently. Agents are on salaries. There's a valuer, there's a manager, there's a system. In London the big houses will hold something closed for a period and then open it up on a central system with a set share, and everyone knows the rules going in.

Then I came to Cape Town and it's commission only. Nobody's paying you a salary while you build a pipeline. So when someone tells you to protect your commission and not give it away, I understand exactly where that comes from. It's not stupidity, it's survival, and anyone who dismisses it has probably never had a thin month.

I'm not going to pretend that a way. It is a commission-only environment and it does lead to some sticky situations. Fine. But I think we've confused protecting your income with protecting your listing, and those are two very different things.

The scoreboard

I'd rather show you numbers.

We're six and a half years old. In that time we've done well over fifty collaborative deals. Six of them this year alone at the time of writing, three in the last two months. Revenue in our last financial year was up just over 100 percent. We doubled it. Every year before that we'd grown about 50 percent, so this wasn't a slow build, it was the year the collaboration thing properly compounded.

A few of the recent ones, so you can see the shape of them. A house in Bishopscourt agreed with another agency. I was representing the buyers, a South African couple coming home from America who wanted to be in Bishopscourt or Constantia. Then a house in Bishopscourt Village itself, listed at R9.25 million, sold inside a week with two contracts out and a third circling, and that one came to us because another agency gave us the lead-in. They didn't have to do that. Six months before, a house down the road at R11 million, close to asking, three contracts out. I kid you not, I could have sold that house three times over.

I'm not putting those numbers out to show off. I'm putting them out because when I say collaboration works, I want it to be a claim you can check rather than a nice sentiment.

I say it in the client's house, before the mandate

Here's the bit that actually makes it real, and it's very simple.

Every time I sit down at a property valuation, I tell the client: mandate Hardie Property, and if another agent phones me tomorrow and says I've got a buyer, please can I bring them, the answer is absolutely, yes, bring them. I say it before there's a signature on anything. I share from day dot.

That's not a policy document, it's a sentence. But saying it out loud in front of the seller changes everything.

I'll go further than that. I've got a penthouse coming to market and I put out a teaser reel on it the other day, knowing full well a couple of agents would recognise the building. And they did. I don't mind that at all. I'd love them to bring me their buyers before it's even live. Why would I not want more of the right people through the door?

There has been exactly one property in the history of Hardie Property that I didn't open up, and that was because it was genuinely sensitive and in the media and I had to control the flow. One. Out of everything.

Share when it's busy and they can't help reciprocating

This is the part most people get backwards.

Sharing when you're quiet is easy. Everyone shares when they've got nothing on. What changes how you're treated is sharing when the market is absolutely flying, which is where Cape Town is right now, because in a busy market agents very often won't share. They don't need to. They've got stock and they've got buyers and they're stretched.

So if you can show that you share in a busy market, it becomes very difficult for people not to reciprocate. That's it. That's the mechanism. It costs you a bit of fee now and it buys you a position in people's heads that money can't buy later.

And it does stick. Agents in this city now know that Hardie Property always collaborates. That's not me saying it, that's what comes back to me from clients, from other agents, from people we've never worked with. A British couple I valued for in Hout Bay recently, who found me through Instagram, said the thing that stood out to them was that it's very obvious you collaborate with other agents. That's a buying decision made on the back of how we treat our competitors. We also sold that house and another agent  brought the buyer.

Markets do this

Here's the part I'd ask you to actually sit with.

It's all very well and dandy that the market's amazing at the moment. It's incredibly buoyant in Cape Town and it probably will be for the foreseeable future. But markets do this. They always do. And at some point it's not going to be so rosy and it will be tough.

And who are you going to want at that point?

You're going to want the other agents to come to you and bring you buyers, bring you tenants, whatever it is you need. And you cannot build those relationships in a downturn. You can only spend them. The relationships you build now, or built in the past, are the ones that carry you.

That's why I call it the long game. Not because it's noble. Because it's the only version of this business that survives a bad year.

Say thank you in public

One more practical thing, and it's not a nicety, it's part of the machine.

Thomas Doyle and the team at Revo Property took us through The Rockefeller in the city centre recently, purely because we've built up a superb relationship and we do a lot together. Arthur at Tyson sat through a second viewing with me at Old Cape Quarter with buyers who'd flown down from Durban. Neither of them had to give me their time.

Name people. Publicly. When an agent does right by you, say so where other agents can see it. It costs nothing and it tells the next person what happens when they work with you.

So try it once

I'm not asking anyone to overhaul how they run their business off the back of an article.

Take one property. At the next property valuation, say the sentence out loud in front of your seller: if another agent brings me a buyer, we'll work with them. Then honour it. See what comes back.

It's all swings and roundabouts, isn't it. What goes around comes around, and in a city this small it comes around a lot faster than you'd think.

Onward and upward.