The South Australian property market is a "perfect storm" of challenges, according to Carmela Cricelli with low supply and high demand driving up costs and competitiveness.
Working for one of South Australia’s biggest conveyancers, Carmela is a team leader at Eckermann’s, and is in the perfect position to see how rising interest rates and cost of living challenges are creating challenges for both conveyancers and clients.
Sally Hamilton recently sat down with her to hear her insights on team management and business performance, the importance of being personable and how being adaptable to different communication styles keeps her large team motivated.
1. Prioritise People
A team leader's main responsibility is to keep their team motivated and engaged. Be personable, adaptable, and actively listen to your team members to foster a supportive and welcoming environment.
“Knowing that they can come to you, they can trust you and that they can sort of greet you with no judgment is so important,” Carmela said.
“Communication is really important and so is adapting to different communication styles. There’s not one communication style that is the answer for everyone. Knowing your team, knowing their personalities and also active listening - that's also really important.”
2. Embrace Integration
Eckermann’s were one of the first adopters of Realtime Conveyancer. Carmela said moving away from outdated and manual systems had a revolutionary and positive impact on their business.
“We came from a system that was quite outdated, quite clunky, quite slow. We had no integrations previously, so that world of integration was so foreign to us, but also so exciting,” she said.
Carmela said the integrations with platforms like PEXA, MovingHub, Stewart Title and Scantek were used by the team daily, eliminating manual processes that new team members found confusing.
Modern, integrated software can streamline your business, improve efficiency, and make your processes more logical for everyone on the team.
3. Look at how tech can transform broken processes
One of the challenges of a legacy business is that it often has processes that exist “because it’s the way they’ve always been done,” Carmela pointed out.
“The way we used to do things did not make sense in many instances,” she said. “We would have new team members start and we would tell them our process and they would be like, “But that doesn't make sense.” And we're like, “We know. But that's how we have to do it because we don't know how to do it any other way.”
Sometimes, great tech can help radically simplify these processes - and you have to be open minded to the change.
A great example was the way Eckermann’s did financial balancing.
“The Realtime financial auto balancing and auto financing system is absolutely out of this world,” she said. “It made us realise that the way we were doing it manually was so backward. From start to finish, there's so much in that platform that has helped us, helped our team, put us a step ahead of the game and enabled us to really see what our future looks like.”
4. Look for ways to delight clients
With the market changing and clients expecting transparency and control, conveyancers need new tools to support their clients directly.
Eckermann’s were quick to adopt the Pathway to Settlement app from Realtime which Carmela said had set them apart from competitors.
“We feel like it really sets us apart from our competitors because it’s an extra feature for our clients which is incredible.”
For Carmela, the additional security and transparency that it offers clients has been a huge win, while also reducing the communication load and risks for the team.
“Having a tracker where clients can see straight away where their settlements are and having the ability to just take a photo of a document that we need and uploading it into the app to then straight away come across to us in our matter - it’s huge,” she said.
“But the biggest thing is having a secure location for our clients to be able to upload their financial details to then stem across to our platform and our clients’ matter, knowing that they have been in full control of doing that.
It also had major risk reduction benefits, she said.
“It definitely enables us to reduce our risk in getting those bank account details wrong if they were to just provide them to us via another method.”