Secure Your Pipeline | How Reservation Agreements Transform Sales with Bryan Mansell

Welcome back to another episode of The Elite Agent Masterclass.

Today, James Humphries-Stone and Jack Durkin are joined by Brian Mansell, co-founder of Gazelle, the man revolutionising the way agents secure sales and protect their pipelines.

Known for never shying away from controversial industry truths, Brian shares:

• How his Foxtons background shaped his approach to value
• Why agents need to stop thinking like agents and start thinking like the public
• The origins of Gazelle and how it solves the problem of uncertainty in property transactions
• Why reservation agreements aren’t just an extra layer – they’re a no-brainer
• How Gazelle’s process reduces fall-throughs from 28% to 5.4%
• The mindset shift agents need to make to sell with confidence
• Real life stories of how Gazelle secured chains, protected deals, and avoided renegotiations
• Why buyers will pay to secure their dream home when you frame it right
• How Gazelle is about to change the game further by potentially paying agents their commission at sale agreed stage

Brian unpacks why agents often project their own limiting beliefs onto buyers and sellers, and how changing your mindset can transform your conversion rates, pipeline security, and reputation as a negotiator.

💬 “Stop thinking like an agent. Think like the public.”

If you’re still sceptical about reservation agreements, this episode will flip your mindset upside down.

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Transcript

Welcome to another episode of the Elite Agent Masterclass. Today, Jack and I are joined by none other than Mr. Brian Mansell, head honcho over at Gazelle, changing the industry, but is a man that is a little bit shy and retiring when it comes to talking about controversial topics. So I'm hoping we can draw him out of his shell a little bit today. How are you, Brian? Yeah, well, I'm just getting over being called shy and retiring because that's not two words that normally are associated with me, but I'll take that. It's fine. I'm good, thanks. You boys all right? Very good. Thank you. Very good. Very good. So, Brian, we wanted to get you onto the podcast because my introduction was the complete opposite of the truth. You are quite open with your views on the industry and the direction of travel and the way things are done in the English system. And so we wanted to get you on because... At The Avenue, we've really embraced Gazelle and a lot of our partner agents have really started to move towards it as a fantastic tool to make sales more secure and speed the process up. But we wanted to get you on to talk about it from your perspective, starting from the perspective of what made you move towards Gazelle as an opportunity and then how it's impacting the industry from your perspective. So starting with what made you move there? Yeah, well, that's a question I'm asked quite often, and there isn't a single answer for it, I guess. It's a number of factors that led me down the path of coming up with Gazil. And in collaboration, I must say I'm a co-founder, so it's not entirely mine. It's mine and Duncan, who's a very intelligent lawyer. And he and I, as fate would have it, met in London, both on a similar attitude towards the industry. He had a conveyancing practice beforehand. um very frustrated with that with certain elements of it very good business and i came from the agency side so it's kind of like the two worlds collided and collaborated and came up with what we've what we've now got with gazelle um but the origins of this started back when i was asked this and made to think about it started back in my days at foxton's um i was there long time ago now um over twenty years ago and i went into foxton's from another agency and i will never forget my first day my job was to go and list houses in chiswick initially and i was asked um i asked the question so what do we charge you know what's the flexibility in the fees what can we play around with they went you what you want about so well you know obviously if we you know we want to get as high as i possibly can but what what scope do i have to renegotiate them but you don't have any it's two and a quarter percent sole agency like what i wasn't even getting that multiple agency what you're on about so there was no training it was like well you're either good enough to do it or you're not so off you go and literally i joke i don't joke i went out on my first appointment within two hours of joining foxton's and um had no real concept of how I was going to get two and a quarter percent. Of course, I fluffed it a few times to begin with. People quite like me. I was quite honest. And I've always been very honest and spoken. But ultimately, it came down. What I figured out eventually in the space of the first couple of months, I figured out that if I had the same conversation everybody else, I've got no chance. You know, and I was getting offered slightly higher fees, but nowhere near what I needed to get. So I thought I've got to change the conversation here and I've got to go in with a mindset of don't repeat what they've already been told or they're going to be told by somebody else. And we know that agents roughly say the same sort of thing. So I started talking about security, protection, looking after the seller and the transaction. And I started it off with a very simple question, which I'm not known for my listening ability, but actually I was pretty good at it back then. And the question I'd always ask when I'd wandered around the house, all the usual stuff, you're trained. And I used to ask this question, what concerns have you got about moving? And the very first person I asked that to was a lady in a flat in central Chiswick. And she said, oh, that's really interesting. No one's asked me that question before. Well, I guess I'm worried about if it will happen and I'm worried about, you know, if my buyer mucks me about and all this sort of stuff. And so I didn't have gazillion. But so anyway, over the over the years that followed that, I just really honed in my my approach to talking predominantly about the transaction, the key part. And it started to work really, really well quite quickly. And I was picking up a lot of instructions. At the time back then, I broke a listing record in the whole of Foxton's. We used to have a Friday meeting. I had to turn up and we were able to stand up and shout your numbers out on a screen for everybody, which was quite challenging. It was a very good motivational tool because you didn't want to go there if you had a shit week, right? So... But I did. I listed twenty six properties, sole agency in one week. And they were like, what the fuck? You know, on the set. And this was a Friday night when I announced my figures. And I kid you not, on the Saturday morning, I had the owner and the MD of Fox's in my office going through my files to check that I wasn't bullshitting. was like okay you don't trust me but that's fair enough i get the culture it turned out that it was all verified because obviously i wouldn't lie about it it was all verified and they could not understand how i did that um so i went through my process and what i said and so on and then subsequently after that I was out training other valuers at Foxen's that weren't performing very well, helping them and so on and so on. And then ever since the rest of my career, before I came out to do Gazelle, I realized that what mattered very much to people, what they were happy to pay for was giving them value. And the value was not in the marketing and not in the photographs. That's the standard path of the course. It was actually in the nervous part, the transactional part. Once the offer is accepted, do I get that date? Do I move by that date? Does this happen? So the origins of Gazelle were very much there. and the fact that I am I can hate working for free so if I could get rid of you know forever then I wouldn't have to work as hard and I think it's a bit more money you know um so yeah that's the sort of the bit of the backstory the origins of it I guess so so Brian you and a lawyer partnered up to collaborate who would have thought yeah estate agents and writing um But for those that are listening as well, we know all about Gazelle, but could you summarise what Gazelle is and what that looks like and how it supports our industry? Yeah. So we created something, and this was the critical point, which I've now, six years later after doing it, discovered that was the right thing to do. And it was a bit of a guess at the time. But we built Gazelle for the public. So we literally said, right, forget the estate agent for now. If you are a seller and a buyer, what would be important to you, right? Not what's important to the estate agent, what's important to the seller and the buyer. And so what we decided to do was to find a way in which a buyer and a seller, without ever being questioned over their commitment, could actually show it by being asked a simple question. And the commitment that is given in the sale is the commitment of the seller and the buyer, not the estate agent, it's the public. So therefore, they should be the ones that decide. So the seller and the buyer, we create an agreement with the buyer, takes the house off the market when the offer is agreed. And both the seller and the buyer are signing up to say they're committed. And if we break the deal before exchange, we'll pay compensation by way of an apology to the other person. Because we recognize that our actions have a profound effect mentally and financially on the other side, because this is such a huge thing that people do. And so they opt into it. They agree a level of compensation, anything between two and ten grand. And then they can include their own terms of the deal. So anything that the agents brokered for them that's very specific to that deal goes into the agreement to give them another layer of certainty. And then the agreement runs for the period of the transaction until exchange of contracts when it stops. And it means that people, if you're a buyer, you've got a house that you love, that you're on, you're not being forced to exchange. So if something major is discovered that you didn't know about, you're not going to have to pay anything. But it gives you the comfort to know that once the house is off the market, it really is off the market and you're thoroughly protected against any perception of being gazumped. And for the seller, as importantly, you know that you've got a buyer that's committed, that's quite genuine, and is going to do everything they can to exchange. And if they can't, you're either compensated if they misbehave, or you're left with absolutely no doubt that it was not their fault, the reason that the sales collapsed. And this is what you need to do to remedy it for the next one. Remedy it for the next time. And so people genuinely are a lot calmer during the deal. And yeah, essentially that's it. If somebody defaults and doesn't pay the compensation they've said they're going to pay, we pay it for them as their guarantor and we chase them around the houses to get it back. but people don't do yeah yeah literally people don't do that they're very honorable and that's the beautiful thing about it is that if you are someone that is wanting to commit be it a seller or buyer you now have a mechanism to do that that um is not going to hinder your your purchase it's just going to give you a feeling kind of like exchange but a little bit of exchange light i suppose you know it seems it seems very fair to me Yeah. So obviously, again, we know this data and there are some questions that will come up that are sort of less specific to what we already know. But again, we want to make sure that we can convey how value adding this can be not only to the client, but equally to the agents, because ultimately the agents want the transaction to go through quickly as well. And so the industry's average right now for transactions falling through is... Twenty eight percent. Twenty eight percent. So so we're talking three out of every ten are likely to fall through. And for Gazelle. At five point four percent. Five point four percent. So that means that an agent simply introducing Gazil can significantly reduce the number of transactions that will fall through and therefore keep their pipeline moving much more fluidly, which in and of itself is a no brainer. Now, it's easy for me to say that because I've learned to embrace how the business operates and how to introduce it to clients and how to get clients on board with the concept being of benefit to both sides. Now for the agents listening in, because this is obviously agent directed. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the challenges that they present when it's like, okay, is it going to add an extra layer of friction to my seller? Or, okay, how do I get the buyer to buy into the fact that they've got to pay for something that if they went and bought the next house down the street, they wouldn't have to pay for? Because there too are probably the primary challenges that we probably hear. How do we address those? Yeah. well i mean obviously from my point of view it's quite simple because i've done this for a very long time and had thousands of conversations with the public directly certainly when we started gazelle so the first point i would met i would uh i would for the agent to understand the first point for the agent to understand is that this isn't your choice You're not being asked whether you think someone is committed or not. What you're being asked to do, and as an agency, what you've got to decide on if you're doing this is, do we think it's right to give our customers that opportunity to say yes or no? Because at the end of the day, it's their commitment that they are gonna give, not yours to decide whether they should or they shouldn't. So the first point is, that's the big question that the agent has to ask themselves. And that has challenges, which I'll come on to, but ultimately that's the question. Do we think it's right that our customers, and our buyer is the next vendor, right? Is a future vendor. That's always the way I've thought about it with sales. It's not worked for them yet, but the harder that you negotiate with them, the more likely are they going to sell their house with you when it comes around to it. And I've lived that experience, believe you me. So it's their agreement, okay? So you've answered the question as an agent, yeah, we think our customers would want to hear about this. And we, as an agency, from an ethical point of view, think it's right they're given that choice because it is a choice. So from a seller's perspective, there's numerous ways to introduce this. We've heard some, and obviously over the years, we've seen it progress and seen some great ideas from agents that have done it themselves. But literally, you're giving the seller the opportunity to say, I want you, Mr. Agent, to ask my buyer for me, would they like to match the commitment I'm prepared to give? Now, a lot of agents get hung up on, oh, it's six hundred quid and the reservation agreement, which is complete ridiculous. You don't need to get to that point yet. In fact, we'll do that for you. The point you need to get to is, as I've already said, do I think it's right? My customer hears about this. That should be a yes or go and sell fruit and veg. And secondly, when you do speak to the seller about it, ninety percent of the sellers will say, well, I'll do that. Yeah, I don't want to give my commitment. So what you've now got is your client's instructions. when it comes to the buyer we always recommend that the best time to do this is the earliest opportunity with the buyer it's certainly at the viewing stage is a good time to do it if you're keen on the house the seller of the property would like to offer you the chance to reserve this to secure the sale so you will never be gazumped they will give you a commitment that they will only sell this house to you exclusively now that's not bad news for a buyer to hear But of course, if your first words out of your mouth to a buyer is, oh, you've got to pay six hundred pounds to take this off the market. They're going to go tell you to go fuck yourself. Right. You know what you're on about. What are you on? What's this? The first thing I've heard is six hundred quid. I'm not paying that. I wouldn't. You boys wouldn't. so it's about a skilled introduction on behalf of your client and it i use the word skill it's not that skillful to say my seller is really keen to give you a commitment and if you're happy to match that commitment when you buy if you want to buy this house they're going to be very keen to hear from you and of course the buyer will then say well yeah but how does that work let me get someone from gazelle to run for it when you decide to make an offer and we'll have the chat with them you know that's quite quite simple And of course, the the six hundred quid that we charge is refundable if they can't buy the house. So the important thing is, if you or the seller can't do this deal reasonably, which means you've had no choice but to withdraw because it's beyond your control, doesn't cost you a bean. You get your money back. There's nothing to pay. So when you think about those benefits, what it then comes down to is, are you committed or not? Do you want to, when you offer on this house and get that accepted, are you serious enough to switch off your right move alerts? Because at the end of the day, all you are asking on behalf of your client is this. If you'd like the house off the market, my customer will do that. but they would like you off the market as well. And I'm yet to be convinced that that isn't fair. I think it shows motivation, doesn't it? And we've introduced it over the past about once or so, and I start to notice it both on the seller side and the buyer side. If the seller's showing willingness to want to sign into a reservation agreement, then it shows that they're seriously committed and they really do want to move. And then it's worthwhile taking it on the market and doing the marketing and doing the viewings and really going all the way for the seller to get them the best result. And the same for the buyer. If the buyer's willing to sign in, then it shows that they're committed as well. We've introduced it over the last one month. One thing I wanted to share on this was I had a few hesitations around it at the start. I think it was more around the delivery of it. I didn't fully understand the whole process and therefore, as an agent, it can be quite difficult to deliver when you don't fully understand it. The beauty of Gazelle is that your team and Megan's brilliant at this. As soon as we introduced the concept, and it only has to be introduced very, very briefly, We pass them on to Megan and she explains everything in much more detail. And then over time, the more we started to hand across to Megan, the more I started to understand it and the more confident we became around delivery. I checked yesterday. We've got about forty percent of our stock in our local business now signed up with Gazir, which just gets that commitment. We had a sale for three quite recently and it really stung us. It was a twenty grand fee and we were expecting that to come in and fell through two days before exchange we positioned it to the set but at the time they weren't ready to commit um and by the time we got the transaction tied up the buyer had then didn't feel like it was um it was needed to then sign into the residential agreement most buyers don't who aren't serious Jack, it's an important point because that leads me on to quite nicely what our other solution is, which you guys have just found out about. We've launched recently, which is the deposit. So this is designed specifically for that situation where the seller, for some reason, is not fully prepared to commit. And it's mainly because they don't fully understand what that means. And I get that it's. needs explaining to people, and we want to explain to people correctly and clearly so they can make an informed choice. But the deposit option is specifically designed for sellers that are umming and ahhing about commitment, not quite sure just yet, because they're not always committed when they list and they become more committed as the time goes on, especially if there's an onward purchase they're yet to find. So the plan B is simply in the case where you're not comfortable giving a mutual commitment, let's get a deposit from the buyer to hold the property. Yeah, that was exactly the scenario in this case. They haven't found their onward purchase, so we're hesitant around it. But then as soon as they did find the onward purchase, they wanted that commitment. So you mentioned the deposit. There's also something that we've been working with Megan quite recently as well, where we've been putting chain agreements in place. So it doesn't just have to be one buyer and one seller, does it? It can be a number of buyers and sellers throughout the chain. Yeah, we are constantly trying to find solutions. And when I first started Gazelle, I can't tell you the amount of numpties that said to me, it's never going to work. Because if it could work with change, it would have been done already. And I'm like, well, I didn't do it. So that's why we haven't done it yet. It's just a problem that needs to be solved. so and that's like a you know i'm not a dog with a bone with those sort of things right how do we solve the change situation we get everybody in a chain whether they're there on day one or they are they added in later on how can we get them into the agreement you know um and that's what we've been trying to solve and luckily we've managed to come up with a solution and we were the first i'm pretty sure the first business in the history of england property market that's ever done that ever had a complete chain all locked in together with everybody very happy to do it and the eye the irony is the bigger the chain the keener people are it's an interesting one and i think um it would be worth delving a little bit deeper into for context for those listening in because um the one thing i greatly admire and respect as to what you guys and girls over at gazelle have done is you are hearing the challenges that estate agents are facing and rather than going That's a you problem. You need to get better at that. You're kind of going, okay, that is a valid problem. Let's find a valid solution. So I think I said it when we had our recent call. I now am in a headspace with Gazil. We had hesitation, like Jack said. There were certain reservations we had around, okay, how do we deliver this? Are they going to embrace it? Blah, blah, blah. It's all limiting beliefs, which I'm not shy to admit. But What you've then done is, in my opinion, listen to the challenges and then basically turn them into a no-brainer fix. It is a no-brainer. Yeah, it's a very interesting point. I'm going to pick up on a different point before we come on to the chain thing, just to pick up what you said, because... you guys displayed the exact same characteristics as a lot of very good agents do you're naturally cautious about new things and you should be because there is so much stuff that's being punted at you i mean i cannot but i mean i ran a large agency and my god i was spending most of my day fighting off bloody business development tosses from different companies trying to get into my office to sell me some they've just that someone who's never experienced the problem thought that they could solve um and i spent most of my time doing that and this has come from a place of experience because every i'm pretty sure everything that our agents go through or the challenge they have i've experienced myself i've done this for a very long time and the market hasn't changed the reasons people buy and pull out and someone hasn't changed since i started in so you know they're normally the same sort of things But the point is, it's about mindset. Now, I know you just said limited mindset. It's not limited. It's cautious. But what's interesting is with estate agents, one of the traits I see an awful lot, and I've seen this for years, and I tried to train it out of a lot of the teams that I was privileged to lead, was stop thinking like an estate agent. think like the public, which is exactly what I said about how we started Gazelle, is I tried not to think like an estate agent, which would have been, no one's going to pay six hundred quid. They're not going to want to pay a cut of ground if their chain collapses. And if they can't find something, they're not going to be penalized. I was like, no. Think of it from the customer's point of view. And I won't name names, but I sat in front of a very large, I was about to say very large CEO. He's not that large, but a large company CEO. I should get those words right. And he was like, oh, yeah, well, I can see it working in a seller's market, but not in a buyer's market. Why is that? Well, you know, there's only one buyer on a property. But you don't know the mind of that buyer. And you're thinking that every member of the public thinks like you. Why? I was working in a housing market in nineteen ninety, which had fifteen percent interest rates. And every house I was selling had a mortgage that was greater than the value of their house. I sold houses. Now, if I thought like an estate agent, I would have shut shop and gone and done a different career. But the fact is, people don't choose the market in which they move in. They move when life necessitates it. Yeah. When something happens to them, that means that they need to move good or bad reasons. We all know that they don't sit. The average buyer does not sit looking at property industry. I watching the news about interest rates specifically things. Right. I reckon that in three months time, the interest rate might be cut by two point by a quarter of a base point. So I'm going to wait until I buy them. They don't do that. They buy because I'm pregnant, I've got to move, or I've got a new job, or someone's, God forbid, just passed away, which I've experienced recently, and hence why I moved, right? I wasn't going to move otherwise, and I didn't choose the fucking market to move. I did it out of necessity because of my life situation. But we still think that the public... Think like us. They don't. We're estate agents. It's such an interesting point that you make, Brian, because and I've used this story with a lot of the agents. When we bring new partners into the avenue, we go for an onboarding process. And so within that, we're then introducing them to reservation agreements. A lot of them have come from backgrounds where they've never even heard of reservation agreements, let alone a deal. Right. So and I use the story of my car. So I leased a car a couple of years ago through the business and going through the process of setting up the arrangement for the car. The person I spoke to on the phone, she was great. And she turned around and said to me, oh, and there's a two hundred and forty seven pound admin fee to set everything up. Now, if I then translate that into a state agency, if I'm turned to a customer going, there is a two hundred and fifty pound plus VAT reservation agreement fee. The way I reacted to that admin fee that she presented to me was like, OK, that's cool. That's just part of the process. That's what I've got to pay if I want this car. That was talking about a three hundred pound, three hundred fifty pound a month car, not a five hundred, six hundred million pound house. And so I try to explain it in exactly the same way of you're dealing with the public. They don't do this day to day. They don't think the way you're talking. It's just that you have preconceived ideas around how they may think. yes that's true and actually it's a very good point about car insurance because i looked at when i considered that when we started gazelle which was i don't get car insurance because i know i'm a driver exactly i'm insuring myself against other people being stupid yeah uh you know which is what all of us probably i'm speaking for the entire global population when i say we don't go oh i'm really really bad at driving so i better get insurance because i hit someone we don't think like that we think the other way that it could happen to us so and that if you think about that in context to property transactions here it's the same principles you know i know i'm going to be all right at this and unless something happens i can't control i'm not sure about them i want to believe that they're honorable i'd love to believe they are but thirty percent aren't and and i say thirty percent we talk about the fourth rate let's let's be honest how many sales that don't fall through experience major renegotiation challenges or major problems or delays and people just get like batshit crazy in the middle of it and they come to you because you're stood right in the middle it's it's a really good point. And that's the point that probably doesn't get talked about is the reservation agreement protects against renegotiation, unreasonable renegotiation. So that's something else that is quite prevalent. We had one this morning, okay, where the seller was asking, sorry, the buyer had a survey, asked for a thirty thousand pound price reduction. We got involved. That was now, that's now five thousand. Yeah. Now, without the agreement, what the, I mean, I really do, oh, I've got a delivery, someone just walked past my window. My dog's going to go nuts in a minute. No, he hasn't. That's unusual. Anyway, where was I? Yeah. So the fact is that without us, What you guys face, what I faced as an agent is you get that phone call from the buyer who you thought was lovely. And I've had the survey back. They've just passed out because they think the house is completely falling down because they don't understand where a surveyor comes from in terms of their position, which is all about like lawyers protecting themselves from being sued. There we go. um shit uh i've got the world's smallest dog but he's the loudest little bastard mine's the same anyway um so yeah what people do is they um i've got completely lost can you shut up it's a point of this sorry you might want to edit that bit out because i'm shouting at my dog it's staying in it's staying in he comes back i'll show you he's tiny little thing but he's right he's like he does not shut up anyway we had um we had this the the other day actually so um coming back to because i think a lot of agents will think it's great for the sellers but what is really in it for the buyers and i spoke to someone yesterday actually they were looking to arrange a viewing and asked about the seller's onward position um because essentially we're you know it's like people will know it's not a crazy market with loads of procedural buyers but what we're finding is there's lots of buyers in the market that just haven't sold their own properties yet so this particular house i shared with the bar we have got an offer but the the buyer hasn't actually sold their own property yet and so it's still very much open to viewings the buyer turned around and said well if we make an offer and it's lower than the other party but the other party then during during us making that offer and having it accepted they then sell their house Where does that leave us? What position does that put us in? Because they could quite easily go back to that other party and decide to sell to them if they're going to get an extra ten, twenty, thirty thousand pounds, whatever that looks like. So it was a really, really easy introduction then to the buyer to let them know we have got something in place for that that can really help you. Yeah, that's a good point, Jack. And actually, back to this mindset thing. So my attitude was, from my own point of view, when I found the house that I don't live in now, I bought and sold. But the last time I bought a house, I went into this house, saw it, and thought, oh, my God, this is perfect. Holy shit. Three kids, massive garden, right place. They could walk to school. Oh, my God. And it was the only one for sale on the road. The estate agent would not have had a clue how motivated I was because I'm like, it's all right. Road's a bit noisy, you know, but I'll let you know in a couple of days. I've got a few more to look at, you know, the old and literally they went off. I sat in the car. I was like, right, we've got to buy this house. We've got to get this house. And it was like, the point is, and that's back to mindset, right? You didn't know because I wasn't going to let you know. But there are hundreds of thousands of people every month trying to buy houses that see the house and think they love it. And they are nervous about securing it. But more to the point, if a buyer goes into an offer first with a commitment behind it, that is going to carry a lot of weight with that seller. The old days, and I'll tell you a story about Bears to Eves in Selsdon. Not Selsdon, just around that area, Croydon. Long, long time ago, I was going out as the MD. I was going around. I sat down. I was in the office. I used to go around the offices all the time. Sat down, heard the manager answer the phone and go, yeah, okay, I'll put that offer forward. Yeah, no problem. Filled his little sheet out and put the phone down. And I didn't say anything, and I will never forget this. His next phone call to the seller went... I've got some bad news. The offer's nowhere near what we want. So I'm going to work on getting it up, but I've got to put it forward under the regulation. I've got to let you know, but I will be back to you when we've got the guy up. I was like, literally like sheep hook right around him. What the hell? Why have you just said that's bad news? What you've done is you've just made the seller completely think this buyer's a bastard and I'm not going to accept an offer. And you probably, you know, you may have even snookered your own sale ability here. That's not negotiating. Negotiating is I've got good news. Our marketing has found a buyer that has started the offer process. And they've started at this level. How do you feel about it? And it's just about a different way of speaking because at the end of the day, we've got words and the words that come out of our mouth will determine the actions and how people are going to feel, right? So true. So now with a buyer from Gazelle, we've seen this so many times. In fact, there's a testimony on our website to this. This gives this buyer the opportunity to, without question, show the seller they are serious, that they are honourable and they can be trusted. That carries nine grand's worth of value to a seller. And I say nine grand specifically because we have evidence over the years of people, especially in the height of the market boom after lockdown. We've got buyers that have made lower offers, couldn't get to the price the seller wanted. They were a bit of a Mexican standoff. And then they've added in an agreement to say that I can't quite get to your price, but I can do this. Sellers jump to the offer. We also had a testimony that's on our website about a guy buying a cottage down south somewhere on the coast in Cornwall. He was one of three buyers. He was at four hundred grand, which is the full asking price. There was a four ten and a four fifteen offer. Four ten and four fifteen wouldn't do an agreement. The four hundred would. The elderly lady selling that property sold it to him at four hundred grand. I can vouch for that as well. We've just had one similar where one of our sellers went to view a house, they had twenty-five viewings on it, ended up having eight offers, eight or nine offers in total, all from procedural buyers, either first-time buyers or cash buyers. And our seller said, look, we couldn't potentially miss out on this because we've sold ours to a first-time buyer, but we're in a chain. So we put the reservation agreement in place and spoke to the agent and the seller got their offer accepted. simply because of the reservation agreement if they weren't the highest offer but because the reservation was in place um yeah yeah and this this is the point about listing now right which i'm deadly serious about back to my original point when we started this in that this is a value proposition because you know what you're actually able to say to people is that you know the you're going to give them certainty that is extremely valuable Generally, but let alone in the housing market. People want it in life, certainty. Absolutely. We were saying jokingly the other day, there's three things you can be certain about in life. Death, taxes, and actually your exchange. Wrong marketing campaign for now. But it's true, though, isn't it? Because if you're a genuine buyer and you really want to buy something and you love the place you've seen because it ticks all the boxes and you're going through this absolute rigmarole, this anxiety of, you know, for the next four months. Oh, my God, I hope they said it to me. I hope I'm not gazumped. Now, back to mindset. We know as estate agents that gazumping isn't rife. Right. But that's not the point. The buyer doesn't. The buyer believes that it could happen to them. They have a fear of missing out. And when it comes to buying a property, a home for most people, for their family and their career, their life to move forward, then it's a massive thing. And actually... Yeah, sorry, James. Sorry, but I was just going to say that I think that's a massive... You made a point earlier in this conversation. It really has sat with me because I then made the reference to the car leasing admin cost. And that is that estate agents that are listening into this right now need to spend more time Thinking about how the homeowner and home buyer may be feeling, because if I sit in that for a moment, me personally, I have my other half Haley and we have two young children who Stanley and Margo, five and three years of age. And if we were moving house right now and I wanted our next family home detached with a double garage and all the trimmings, lovely garden, blah, blah, blah. And we go and see that perfect house. I don't care how many other houses might be available that are for sale similar. I want that one. And that means that I've got to pay what is actually in the grand scheme of the sort of money we would be looking to spend a relatively nominal amount of money to lock it in to make a commitment, but also get the same commitment in return. I don't care what anyone does to challenge me on this. I'll pay the money. Yeah, that's that's yeah. One of my worries as a buyer would be, what if the seller changed their mind and just stays? I love the house. They surely must love the house because they've been living there. So it's such a great house. What if they change their mind and decide not to move? I don't want to lose hope on getting that property. So as an agent, you can have self doubt. And as I shared at the start, there was question marks as to whether it was going to work. But like you said, Brian, putting yourself in the buyer or the seller's shoes. I would want that commitment as a seller or a buyer. So surely the rest of the general public do. And anyone listening in their right mind would feel the same way in my view. If you really, really for a minute get inside your own head and imagine if I were moving house right now and I found the perfect house for me, my other half, my family, my kids, the school catchment, whatever. And I had to pay three hundred, four hundred, whatever, five hundred pounds to lock it in. But being safe in the knowledge of that homeowner isn't going to dick me around. I'd pay the money. And so from that perspective, the only thing I wanted to circle back on Brian, because I do think there's been so much value in what we shared. And I think those listening will kind of, I hope take a moment to reflect and go, Hmm, that makes a lot of sense. But there's a piece we were going to touch on and we've moved into a slightly different. Yeah. the the chain agreement because i think there'll be people listening in because i don't know about anyone else but i'm talking to a lot of our partner agents right now who are involved in more and more chains there's very few one one party either side it's yeah so how would that look yeah so the chain agreement is relatively simple so we would handle this for you so let's take the avenue as an example you've got a seller that has declared they're buying on okay And we'll work on that one to begin with. So you would pass us the information of the seller because you've introduced them and they came to talk to Gazelle. So we'll have a chat with them about their sale, but also about their related purchase. And what we would ask them to do is simply give instructions to the agent that they want to buy through. Because back to my point originally that the Gazelle agreement is for the public, it's not for the estate agents, is to go to the estate agent they're buying through. And if they haven't yet made an offer, make a committed offer. You know, I'm making you an offer on this property and I'm prepared to give you my commitment with a reservation. And to demonstrate that I've already got one on the side of my property. The agent is then under regulation, compelled to pass that information of that offer to that seller. Every single time that happens, the sellers, unsurprisingly, are keen to know more. And simply, our details are given to that estate agent, whether they work with us or not, and then that is passed on to the seller or the seller's information is given to us because they've given permission for it to be passed to us. And we then have a conversation. And as I said, chains, think of the chain, the more popular this is. What we then do is let's say, for example, you've now got three people, you've got a buyer seller and another seller, right? Three people in the chain. So we would create an agreement. Again, they would all choose the amount of compensation they want to have. Most people go with four grand on a three link chain because it means that the recipients who are going to have the compensation paid and split between them will both get two thousand pound each. but they're all on the hook for four K, which actually makes the agreement that much tighter, because there's a bit more money in it than the average that we do, which is just about three K, but we don't charge extra for it. So the normal cost of a four grand reservation agreement between two people in Gazelle would be split three ways. So that actually works out to be less than a two grand agreement between two of them. And again, the same process works in reverse with the buyer. The other thing that we do to encourage sellers who are with you that are in the market as a chain buyer, who may be competing with buyers perceived by the estate agent as a better position, i.e. nothing to sell or cash, which actually means certainly cash that they're going to muck around most of them. So that buyer then in the chain, your seller, sorry, who's a buyer? This is going to be my edit all this out. Sounds complicated. So I'm now going to make an offer on a property. i can do so and we'll give even if this if the guy above is not sure we'll do it for free we'll do that free reservation above if needs be We had one like this where there was four properties in the chain, five parties throughout the chain. One was with a different agent, two were with us, and the one at the bottom was actually a private sale, which as soon as I heard it was a private sale, that made me nervous, hence wanting to get the reservation room in place. But in actual fact, we were given that seller's details and he was happy to sign in. The whole chain signed in. I think we got it through in about sixty four days in total, which for a chain like that, is an amazing turnaround. We were worried it was going to take more like six months, but with a reservation agreement in place on a chain like that, it worked really well. Actually, there's something else, and I'll tell you this, because this happened today, right? So this is not a downside, but it's a positive side to why having this introduced works really well. And this is a true story. This happened this morning. So we were given a chain deal to do this morning. It was four people. The bottom of the chain was not involved with the agency that we were working with. And the information that had been passed from the agent at the bottom to the agent that we're dealing with, and then he's got two links above that, was that the person selling the house is using the funds that they've sold. They're buying cash, right? So the chain agreement is issued on that basis. This buyer gets that information through and then rings us, not the estate agent, rings us and said these words. It says in the agreement that there's a mortgage clause and I'm getting a mortgage. I'm moving the mortgage from this house to the next house. Does that affect the agreement? Yes, it does, because you've declared yourself as a cash buyer. Well, I'm not getting another mortgage. No, but you are getting a mortgage because your current house is on that property. So by buying another house and moving your mortgage, you're getting a new mortgage on a new house. So it's still a mortgage. But they've been presented as a cash buyer. So we've now given that information to the agent and the rest of the chain and obviously trained them on how to question people correctly. That's part of the course. I mean, wow, come on. But the fact is that all the rest of the chain are now happy. I mean, it's a ball late because we've had to redo the agreement, but we've done it. because we've got the right it's got the transparent picture which was not declared at the beginning now you can argue it was an innocent misrepresentation or maybe it was a malicious one nobody knows that's with the person who didn't give the information about or they weren't asked we don't know but the point is because the agreement was presented it flushed that out which meant that everybody had full transparency on the actual position so there's lots of positives there A hundred percent. A hundred percent. It's been a really insightful conversation. I think there's been more that you've shared actually for our agents, our partner agents, that'll be really, really valuable. But I think for the wider public to be able to hear that, um and to hear some of what you've shared the way you share it as well um it just makes sense so anybody listening in that thinks how buyers won't agree to that start thinking like the buyer yes there might be several options on the same estate for sale but if they want that one particular house they will enter the agreement um i went i went earlier sorry what's the what's the alternative You stay with the current status quo, which is shit because you are putting your house on the market. You are accepting an offer on average, fifty days or whatever, and then you are expecting it to go through in a couple of months. It's going to take four. So if you think about the starting point to wanting to move to the actual finishing point for those fifty percent of people that actually end up getting there is six months. And during that six months, the only time you know it's happening is ten days before it does. That is a totally uninvestable business model. So high risk, it's ridiculous. It's broken, isn't it? And I think that's I also wanted to share our initial experience earlier and our hesitations around it at the start, because I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people out there that have similar hesitations. But I would highly, highly encourage anyone that's listening to reach out to Brian, because we haven't really scratched the surface on what Brazil can really do for agents out there. And it really is changing our business. the pathway and the plans that we've got to get more clients involved in reservation agreements and really is going to change the shape of our business not just for us but for our partner agents as well do you want a bit of an exclusive so this if anything may prove how confident we are that this is not something now once agents experience it that they ever go back to a time without it We are so confident in our agreement and our process that we are not launching yet, but we are nearly ready to do it, is that we are going to give estate agents the opportunity at sale agreed stage to get their commission for the whole deal. Wow. Now, if you'd have said that at the beginning, people would have been listening for the absolute entirety. You might chop it up and make a little intro that includes that. Wow. That goes to show the confidence level that you have in the product you're promoting. And as I said midway through this conversation, you have created a no-brainer proposition in what you shared with us a couple of weeks ago. That now just makes it lunacy not to go for it. Yeah. From an agent's perspective. yeah it does um there's one more thing i wanted to leave with you for your listeners um and this might be very beneficial to the public as well and it's something that i talk a lot about with new agents that are joining gazelle or and particularly ones that have been hesitant because and they're not they're not our agency group are all brilliant people and they're not normally hesitant as i said earlier on from because they're limited they're hesitant because they're unsure it's new it's quite can be quite complicated to think about but actually This is the point. And I actually had this conversation with a group of negotiators literally last week. And I simply said to them, because they were all nervous. The session I was doing for one of our agents was that our negotiators are nervous about introducing this. When should they do it? And what's the best way to do it? And what I actually said to them is what I used to train in is when I was in charge of agency, because it was what was trained to me many years ago. And that is when you're on a viewing. It is irrelevant whether you've got any other offers on that property or you've any other viewings on it, whether you've had them in the past or they're booked in. When you're asked the question, is there other interest in this property? The answer is always yes. because there is a vast amount of people online looking at your properties. Now, if you're on Rightmove or Zoopla, you've got access to the MI reports that can show you the number of visits, clicks to that property. So that, to me, should be a staple piece of information that is taken out by negotiators acting on behalf of the seller to demonstrate without any subjectivity last week there were six thousand people looking at this property so whilst there might not be any offers today that you're competing with we expect that to change because what and if you think about this for a moment it should be fair for the buyer to know that because they're looking at a property and they their natural list of ten questions they're told to ask by someone online is um Is there other offers? Is there another property? What's the other interest? Because they want to know where they stand. Are they competing? Should they go quick? Well, they should always go high because that's the purpose of negotiating, right? Not polite order takers, negotiating. So you should be transparent as an agent with buyers viewing properties or showing interest about how many people are looking at this house online. Because they're not said to you, how many people have physically been in to view the property in the last twenty four hours? They're saying, what's the other interest? And you're just giving them the truth. And in some cases, print it out. It's interesting. Yeah. And it's an interesting spin because it's also fair. Anyone that hears that and thinks that's a manipulation of the reality or anything like that, I feel needs to probably address their own attitude towards it because the numbers are true. They've not asked you who's physically being to see. They're asking who else is interested. Well, there are thousands of people seeing this house online. We share that with sellers, don't we? But we don't share that information with potential buyers that are looking at that property. Precisely. But it's relevant. And obviously it's up to the agents. But for me, this is all about transparency. That's another piece of key information that should be intrinsic to the ability to negotiate on behalf of the client. Now, I came from a school a long time ago, and one of the reasons I got two and a quarter percent was that I used to use the term, we will shake the change out of your buyer's pocket. Now, you might not want to use that term, but I used to use that in my way of summing up in my simple head, which was to give a visual impression. I wouldn't do it visually, but to create the impression in someone's head that we're literally, get your wallet out and so on and so on. but what it proved to me a was it shows value because that's what my job is to negotiate the best possible price for my client but secondly i learned that people who experience a tough negotiator when they're when they're trying to buy will one hundred percent of the time want that person fighting their corner when they come to sell I bought a house, I won't name the agent, the house that I bought, know this, how much I loved it, I would have paid thirty five grand more for that house, which I had, but I was never asked. Wow. I was happy as Larry. I did not use the same agent to sell my house that I bought it through. You'll definitely look for them when you're looking to buy your next one though. And hope to God that it's on the market with them. But that for me is what a great place to end the episode because actually... Quite often, again, mindset's the... Gazelle was the topic of conversation. Reservation agreements were the topic of... But I think underneath all of that, mindset was a very, very strong theme that people need to take away. And to look at it through that lens, if you don't negotiate hard, if you don't introduce a reservation agreement as an opportunity to lock the sale in, if you don't do these things, it is a representation on you as to your skill and ability to protect that person if they come back to you in the future. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So Brian, it's been a real pleasure and thank you for taking the time. Thank you for sharing so candidly, you know, no holding back. And until next time, thank you very much. Thanks guys. Cheers Brian.