Month: September 2010

How To Do It: Step 5 – Staffing

(This is an elaboration of ‘How To Rule The (Real Estate) World In 10 Steps“)

You have taken a lot of listings.  Your Listing market share is growing.  The public is starting to recognize your identifiers and understand your offer.  Your phone is ringing with potential buyers.  You are literally as busy as you can possibly be – there is no time left to do more.  It’s time to hire.

I believe your first hire should be a highly organized assistant.  You want this person to take over everything that does not involve direct buyer and seller interaction (beyond telephone inquiries).  That means working with the MLS, with Help-U-Sell, with all of your websites.   It means getting all of the paperwork done and keeping all of the logs, leads and files organized.  It probably means keeping your schedule and keeping you on track.

A license is essential — this person will be handling buyer and seller inquiries.

Look for someone who has experience managing a mountain of detail and working with customers primarily on the phone.  Mortgage processors are good candidates as are Transaction Coordinators.

Teach this person how you want things set up.  Let them figure out parts you haven’t considered.  Spend serious time role playing buyer and seller inquiries with them.  Bear in mind that at some point you’ll hire more office help and may have each member of the team specialize in something.  This first hire may eventually be your Transaction Coordinator or you Client Coordinator (the person who handles all in-bound calls and manages all of the buyers and sellers).

At the same time, start looking for a Buyer  Agent.  Note:  the assumption here is that you have listings, your phone is ringing and you’re capturing Buyer leads and storing them in a Buyer Pool Book.  The Buyer Pool Book is essential because it gives the great opportunity you have tangible form.  It’s real, it’s physical.  Your potential recruit can see it, touch it, consider what life with it would be like.

You have a great offer for the consumer – that’s why everything’s working so well.  You need to also have a great offer for the agent, one that’s better than what anyone else is offering.  Here are the key ingredients of that offer:

No prospecting for listings.  You will handle all of the FSBOs and Expireds, the door knocking and mailing.

No pressure to get listings.  All you want them to do it take care of the Buyer Leads you’re creating.

No listing management headaches.  No angry seller calls, no withdrawn listings, no pressure to communicate with sellers.

Razor sharp focus on one simple aspect of the business:  taking a buyer lead and converting it to a sale . . . then going back and doing it again and again.

They’ll have no marketing expense, no desk fee, none of the bills traditional agents have to pay.

Yes, you’re going to pay them a lower split than your competitors, but you’re going to eliminate a huge chunk of the job description the other guys will burden them with.  You’re also not going to ask them to go out and drum up business.  That’s the job of your marketing.  They’re going to come in, choose a lead, convert it, and then come back and do it again and again.

You should start practicing today to demonstrate why 50% with you is better than, say,  80% with your competitor.  You do it on paper with a calculator.  Take the average gross commission on a closed side in your area, multiply it by the agent’s anticipated annual production (National average is less than 6 closed sides a year), apply your competitor’s split to the total and then deduct all of the fees and expenses the agent will have to pay.  Now, take your average commission per closed buyer side and multiply it by your minimum standard (which should probably be 2 closed sides a month). Apply the split you’re offering and deduct any expenses they might have with you — they should be minimal but might include E&O on each deal or REALTOR dues.  You should be able to demonstrate a big positive benefit in your favor.  They’ll have a focused, manageable job description, will do more business, will worry less and will  make much more.

When we talk with traditional brokers about Help-U-Sell, one of the things they can’t conceive is how we’re able to charge less and make more.  We have to put a pencil to it and show them how we deliver more dollars to the bottom line on a set fee listing than they do on the same listing at 6%.  You have to do the same thing with a potential agent.  Show them how splitting for less with you will delivers more dollars to their pocket than splitting for more with your competitor.

Then pull out the Buyer Pool book.  Tell the recruit what it is and how it gets filled.  Thumb through it and talk about a couple of the buyer leads that are inside.  Describe how they’ll use it to stay constantly busy.  You have a minimum standard of production, but with leads like this and no worries about the other side of the business, they ought to be able to double that.

Finally, show them Science to Sales.  It’s going to be their blueprint to success.  Truth is, after a couple of weeks in S2S, they’ll know more than 80% of the agents in the marketplace, and knowledge is power.

Hiring agents for Help-U-Sell can be challenging.  You probably won’t be able to get a traditional agent with more than 18 months in the business to hear your message.  Really – something happens after a year of having the traditional model pounded into them.  A tough layer of thick skin forms over the ear drum and they just don’t hear you . . . and they don’t get it.  You may hire this agent but more times than not you’ll learn that they can’t make it in your world.  They’re already spoiled.

You’ll have the greatest success with an energetic new licensee you can raise up in the family.

This does not mean you should not pursue experienced agents . . . just target them carefully.  Look for ones with a year in the business, give or take a few months.  You’re looking for good people who are becoming disillusioned.  It happens around this time.  They came into real estate looking for a dream job and are starting to understand that the traditional business is a bit of a nightmare.  They’ve probably amassed a sizable bill in their time in the biz and have little to show for their efforts but frustration.  This is an experienced agent who can hear you and who can still ‘get it.’

And regardless of time in the business, talk with any co-op agent you think is workable.

Your Buyer Pool Book will dictate when you add another and another buyer agent.  Now that you have an assistant, you should be able to capture more leads and the Book should be growing.  When it’s big enough to support more than one, hire again . . . and again.

An important shift happens when you start to hire.  Up to now your focus has been on taking listings, doing deals, surviving (and getting by on little sleep).  None of that changes.  What changes is your image of the role you have in this company you’re building.  Previously you were a deal-doer.  Now you are a lead generator.  You still do deals, you still do most of what you were doing before.  But now you recognize that the success of your operation depends on your ability to keep leads flowing to the competent buyer agents you have on the team.

One final note about recruiting.  I’ve talked a lot about how to ‘sell’ Help-U-Sell to a potential recruit.  You have to be able to do this.  But remember: the interview is not a selling situation.  It’s not a listing appointment where you want to convince the other person to choose you.  It’s an educational situation.  You’re going to educate your potential recruit about your business  model and if it appeals to them, they will make the decision to join you.  Please don’t do what your traditional counterparts do, which is to beg. In their world the recruit is the ultimate symbol of success.  It’s not about selling real estate for them, it’s about how many people they can convince to come work for them.  You’re different.  You are absolutely about selling real estate and you’re hiring so that you’ll be able to do more.  If the candidate is not obviously right for the job, you’re not going to hire.  If the candidate can’t see the value in your program, that’s ok – and you’ll part as friends.  But you won’t hire.  The recruit isn’t the prize in our business he or she is in the traditional office.  For us, the recruit is help, enabling us to list and sell more real estate.

OK?  Now on to‘How To Rule The (Real Estate) World In 10 Steps

Ha Ha Ha Ha (or Ja Ja Ja Ja in Spanish)

Enough time has passed since I saw the article that I can now talk about it without anyone remembering it or the people who made the bonehead statements.  One of the industry rags did a story about differentiation in the real estate business and how important it is to be unique, special and different.  It’s something we at Help-U-Sell know a lot about.  To make the point, the writer interviewed a couple of ‘shirts’ from two companies on the A-List.  They both went on and on about how important it is to be different and then pointed to what made their companies special:  quality service.  It was a real ROTFLMAO moment for me! (Google it)  Quality Service is not a differentiator!  It’s and expectation!  It’s an expectation the consumer has.  You either meet the expectation or you don’t and if you don’t the consumer goes elsewhere.  It’s one of  those things that companies who have nothing special to offer hold up and point to as what makes them special . . . which is exactly what happened here.

Real estate is not Nordstroms.  If you don’t like your house you can’t just take it back to the Realtor and exchange it or get your money back.  And I think the whole Nordstroms – Quality Service thing is misunderstood anyway.  Pundits point to that example and conclude that excellent service will make people love you and cause them to come to you rather than your competitors.  I don’t think it’s the service at all.  I think it’s about the money.  We love Nordstroms because we know we’re not going to lose if we make a mistake with our money.

If you want to differentiate yourself in a way that causes consumers to choose you over your competitors, you do it with dollars, the consumer’s dollars.  You have to offer a better deal.  Then you have to meet their expectations which include quality service.

I swear, sometimes I think the whole industry (with a few exceptions) is trapped in an elevator moving down, floor by floor.  They’re leaving a revolving restaurant at the top of the skyscraper where they just had a delicious meal of too many baked beans, frijoles and broccoli!  Good luck with that. . .

How To Do It: Step 4 – Ace The Buyer Inquiry

(This is an elaboration ofAnd HERE)

This is the arena.  It’s where all of your marketing dollars and hours of business building activity come together to produce either a potential client or a lost opportunity.  It is the pivot point on which your entire business turns.  And yet it gets little more than a passing thought from most brokers.

I’ve sat in lots of real estate offices and listened to many agents handle an incoming call and have generally been sickened, saddened and disgusted by the experience.

‘Brand X Realty,’ says the duty agent, ‘How may I help you?’

‘Of course, just a moment . . . let me look it up.’

‘That home is priced at $189,500 . . . would you like to go see it?’

‘Well there are others a little less expensive I could show you.’

This is the point at which the ‘agent’ holds the receiver out and stares at it for a moment, shakes his or her head and hangs it up — just like the caller did, a moment earlier.

Listen: I know of no better skill to polish than those required to handle a buyer inquiry if your goal is to improve your bottom line.  And if that’s not your goal, you need to get busy getting publicity for your firm because you’ll be the world’s first official non-profit real estate company!  Step 5!E.   And HERE.

This is a pivotal point in your quest to Rule the (real estate) World, too.  You’ve used your wonderful consumer offering to get more than your share of listings and now the listings are creating inquiries.  You have to capture those inquiries and convert them into leads and then into clients to move to the next steps:  staffing, accountability and closed sides.  You’re not ready for the next step – staffing – until you do this because you have nothing to offer a new recruit unless you have a buyer pool book and you get that by effectively handling inquiries.

There is a set of simple telephone techniques that work together to produce favorable results with incoming buyer calls.  Mastery of the techniques — using an ‘interrupt’ to gain control of the call; never answering a question without asking one to keep the conversation going and earn you more information about the caller; taking advantage of opportunities to demonstrate the value you bring to the transaction, and so on — is very important.  But what’s just as important is attitude.

Funny.  I have a really good friend who will turn 78 in a few weeks.  You’d never guess his age because he looks a lot younger and acts even younger than he looks.  I’ve been thinking of buying an ocean Kayak and a few weeks ago, he agreed to rent one with me — a tandem — to see how it performed.  We put it in the bay and had a great time paddling about, playing with the sea lions.  What I didn’t know until later is that he’s terrified of water.  He never learned to swim.  When I heard this, I suggested maybe he ought to go down to the Y and learn . . . and the other day he had his first lesson with his coach.  I think buried in that verbiage is one of the secrets to staying young, but that’s not the point.  The point is what the coach told him.

He said that, while technique and breathing are very important in swimming, what’s most important is your attitude about water.

That’s true with the buyer inquiry, too.  You have to know, without ever having to think about it, that the person on the other end of the line needs you.  They may have amassed an artificial barricade between you and the need, but it’s there.  You also have to believe right down to your marrow that And HERE.  Honestly, that’s what makes you good on the phone.  It makes you purr with confidence and competence.  You become an irresistible force and you own the call.

So, how do you get to that glorious state?  You have to know your stuff.  You can’t fake it.  You have to know what’s on the market — which means previewing regularly.  You have to know all the ways to buy a home today — which means learning about financing and contracts and keeping up on what’s new.  You need to be comfortable getting down to that caller’s wants, needs and financial capabilities and mixing that information with what you know to produce . . . the dream house.

I know of no better way to build this knowledge and confidence than by doing (really doing) the training exercise our great founder, Don Taylor, created, Step 5!.  It is absolutely what a new agent should begin on day one.  If they do they will have tangible business  in 30 days.  But it’s also what you old dogs should do if you’re running out of steam and fire.  Science to Sales is activity based and if you do the activities you can’t help but create new business.  Plus, no matter how much you already know, you will uncover some real gems while working through the program.

Finally, role playing the buyer inquiry should be like brushing your teeth.  You do it so often that you don’t even think about it.  There is no discomfort, no hesitation, no embarrassment.  You create an office culture of constant improvement through the three P’s:  Practice, Practice, Practice.

So set a goal today:  You want to get contact information and earn the right to continue the relationship with 5 out of every 10 buyer inquiries you receive (of course, this means you’re going to have to fastidiously log and track incoming inquiries!).  Then get busy studying and practicing.

On to Step 5!

How To Do It: Step 3 – Build Consumer Awareness

(This is an elaboration of ‘How To Rule The (Real Estate) World In 10 #asy Steps‘)

I see your signs everywhere!

That’s it:  the magic phrase that tells you you’re doing a good job with this task.  What the consumer is really saying is:  ‘I see your LOGO everywhere,’ and there’s a lot behind getting to the point where you’ll hear that phrase.

First there is the Logo itself.  It has to be striking, memorable and it should reference something the consumer already has anchored deep within his or her brain.  I mean:  there’s no mystery why Prudential, when deciding to get into the real estate business, put the Rock of Gibraltar on its sign.  The Help-U-Sell logo has this kind of ‘stickiness,’ simply because it has been around and hasn’t changed in 34 years.  Regardless how many agents, offices or listings we have at any given moment in time, people have seen the logo and when they see it again it is familiar, and it sticks.

Second is the Brand and the niche the company owns in the consumer’s consciousness.  The logo has to stand for something unique and special and that should already be established.  For Help-U-Sell it is savings.  We occupy that niche in the consumer’s mind:  savings.  They see our sign and instantly recognize it as something they’ve seen before and immediately equate it with savings.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to accomplish those two things?  It takes years of careful message management to get to the point that people recognize your logo and know what you stand for.  Most companies never get there and many never have a chance.  Try getting your generic widget company that makes and sells widgets just like every other widget company to occupy a unique niche in consumer consciousness.  It can’t.  It’s just another widget company.

I want to take a minute to acknowledge the design aspects of logo and brand building.  Our founder, Don Taylor, spent serious time, energy and resources choosing the colors for the Help-U-Sell Brand — particularly the red.  Not only at the company’s inception but also 30 years later when the look was overhauled, Don had signs made using various shades of red.  He and others spent time testing the effectiveness of each shade in making the logo ‘Pop’ from as far away as possible.  Today we have a red and a sign and a logo that is recognizable from a great distance.  It is an identifier that is so strong that it isn’t even read by consumers — it’s just recognized.

So, building consumer awareness is about making as many consumer impressions with your logo and company identifiers as possible.  If you’re just starting out (or just restarting), how do you do that?  Here’s a short list:

Get listings.  Each listing is worth a yard sign and a certain number of directional signs (which must include your prominent logo or their just . . . directionals, not awareness builders).

Show your sellers the benefits of seller involvement. Each seller with a set of six open house directional signs (again with your identifiers), putting them out every week multiplies your number of consumer impressions dramatically.  Seller involvement gets even more powerful when many sellers in your target market hold their homes open at the same time, blanketing your area with your identifiers.

Use blitz signs. Cheap and disposable, these little gems can be put up almost anywhere.  Realtors usually have difficulty embracing this idea because they are stuck in a paradigm that says you don’t use a sign unless you have something to sell.  But we’re not worrying about selling here; what we’re concerned with is building consumer awareness, and that’s a function of making as many logo impressions as possible.  Your competitors won’t like it, but in this case that just means you’re on the right track!  If you listen to them . . . well, you might as well just let your competitors design your marketing plan for you!

Get a car wrap.  It’s not a car, it’s a billboard. And yours is blank.  Get a big, bright, simple wrap and the effectiveness of all your marketing will increase.  Wrap a unique, special, fun or cute car and it will be even more powerful (bugs, cubes and classics lead the way).  Sure, you should drive the car, but some of its greatest power will come when you simply park it in a place where thousands of consumers in your area will see it every hour.  A good car wrap can go a long way toward curing a lousy office location with sign restrictions.

Blanket your target market with your identifiers and your message.  For years, direct mail, inserts in super market circulars and Penny Saver ads were an essential part of the Help-U-Sell marketing system.  They still are, but economic considerations have ratcheted them down a notch or two.  When the consumer pulls the mail from the box and sorts the junk from the bills, and your identifier passes by their eyes on the way to the trash can . . . that’s an impression.  And even that’s positive.  If they are thinking of selling, they may even reach down to fish your message from the trash – and that’s golden.  This kind of impression making doesn’t have to be expensive.  Door hangers and postcards under windshield wipers are a great alternative.

Use media.  If you have the budget, consider a set of radio spots or cable tv ads.  Don’t do this unless you have lots of signs and other identifiers in market.  You don’t start building consumer awareness on radio and tv, you enhance the awareness you’ve already established.  What you can do at start-up and beyond is work with the Internet.  Using YouTube, Facebook and other non-traditional platforms to build your local identity is inexpensive and effective — if you know what you’re doing.  Tami Patzer at Help-U-Sell Headquarters in Sarasota can get you started down this path.  She can usually get you on the first page or two of a Google search result in a matter of minutes.  If you’re not intrigued by that possibility, call your doctor, you may be dead.

Find sponsorship opportunities.  Who needs uniforms (that will include your logo)?  What stretch of highway needs adopting?  What charity walk/run event needs sponsors?  Why not invest in a portable canopy in glorious Help-U-Sell red with prominent logos and make it available to anyone doing a bake sale, rummage sale, parking lot promotion?  Remember: it’s about impressions.  Go make some.

Now, you’re three steps in and your phone should be ringing.  This is the point where the brand awareness you’ve created can begin to perpetuate itself.  So you have to get ready to answer the phone!  And that’s whatHow To Rule The (Real Estate) World In 10 #asy Steps is about:  the Buyer Inquiry.  Check in tomorrow for that.

How To Do It: Step 2 – A Better Deal

(This is an elaboration of  ‘How to Rule the (Real Estate) World in 10 Easy Steps‘)

Before we get on to Step 2, I want to clarify something about Step 1, which had to do with building listing market share.  If you get 20 listings this month, spread out over a 50 mile radius of your office, that’s nowhere near as powerful as 20 listings within a 3 -5 mile radius.  We’re not talking about taking any listing anywhere — that’s not what this is about.  This is about quickly creating a market presence that feeds you and perpetuates itself.  You do that in a compact target market.

I believe there are 3 areas where you might take listings:

  • 1 is your target market, where you spend time, money and effort to get listings.  It’s probably a 10 minute drive around your office, maybe smaller.
  • 2 is the area directly contiguous to your target.  It’s probably no more than 20 minutes from your office.  You’re not going to actively market there (until you’re ready to expand) but you’ll naturally get some inquiries and you won’t turn them down.
  • 3 is a much broader area where friends, family and former clients who refuse to work with anyone else have property.  Every once in awhile you’ll probably have to take one of those, but any listing that takes more than 30 minutes to get to from your office is probably a distraction from what you’re doing and should be avoided. Think about it:  showing a property like that or meeting with a seller to review price will take 30 minutes there and back – that’s an hour – plus however much time you’re spending at the property.  You easily could shoot an entire morning or afternoon taking care of one simple task, a morning or afternoon that could be spent getting another listing in your target market.  And though we all like getting paid when that distant listing sells, we’re probably not going to take advantage of the marketing opportunities the sale affords because, frankly, we’re not building anything there right now.

The word is FOCUS.  Clear?  Great:  on to Step 2 – the Better Deal

You can’t run into the market shouting ‘I do everything the other guys do and get paid just like they do, and that’s why you should list with me!’  There is no differentiator there, nothing to sell.  If that’s the consumer offer, my neighbor, 2 doors down is probably a better deal.  At least I’ll have peace in the neighborhood.  Now you might fluff that up with some fancy or hi-tech language, but consumers have become pretty savvy and are not nearly as susceptible to hyperbole as they were 20 years ago.

Neither can you run into the market shouting, ‘I do everything the other guys do and charge a lower commission than they do, and that’s why you should list with me!”  All you’re saying is that you’re the same old thing, just discounted.  If your competitor is charging 6% and you’re charging 1.75%, the consumer does the math and decides you’re a cut rate alternative, like the dollar store.  The question they will have in the back of their heads is:  what are you NOT going to do for me?   What am I giving up?

When you go into the market shouting, ‘I do everything the other guys do but have a completely different business model and charge in a completely different manner and that’s why you should list with me!’ you’ve said a mouthful!  In the back of the consumer’s mind is:  How does that work?  What do you do?  And you know, with Help-U-Sell, if any seller ever asks, ‘What do you do?’  you’re 80% assured of getting the listing.   The offer is so appealing that you’re almost always successful.   You’d probably have to make a mistake or not want the listing to fail.

So what is this better deal you’re offering sellers? It’s the BIG THREE:

Set Fee Pricing.  It says ‘I set my fees logically.  Just like any other business, my goal is to cover my expenses and make a reasonable profit, not a killing‘ (Who died?  The consumer!)  Really:  if you convert your set fee into a percentage, you take all the differentiating power and logic out of it.  You just become another discounter and the consumer question is:  What am I NOT going to get?  None of this means you should have only one set fee.  If logic dictates that you have 2 or even 3 (logic being things like marketing time and expense), you should have them.  But if your ‘set fee’ is graduating every $50,000 in price, it’s not a set fee at all.  It’s a percentage commission in a very bad disquise.  As we used to say Down South:  that bird won’t fly; that dog don’t hunt; that cat won’t flush.  (Sorry, cat lovers — couldn’t resist!)

Menu Pricing. This comes into play twice.  First, when the seller chooses the services he or she wants — open  houses?  MLS?  showing fee?  Second, when the house sells and the seller pays for ONLY the services that produced the sale.  This is a big differentiator (and if you haven’t noticed, anything that differentiates you from the stale traditional model is GOOD).  With your competitors, one size fits all.  No matter how the house sells — whether in the MLS through another broker or not, whether the seller happens to find his or her own buyer or not — the percentage based commission is not going to change.  Think about that for a minute . . . is that stupid or what?  If that made sense, every time you took your car in for a tune up, you’d be charged for an overhaul (just in case);  every time you ordered an entre in a restaurant, you’d be charged for an appetizer and desert (cause you might just get one).  The Seller Savings Comparison (it’s in the Download Library) is something you should be able to work in your sleep because it is the tool you use to present this wonderful consumer benefit.

Seller Involvement. Yes, this is a big consumer benefit.  Over an over, the research indicates that sellers are quite happy to take on some of the less challenging aspects of selling their home, especially if there is a potential financial reward for doing so.  If we first present Menu Pricing and then demonstrate how a seller increases his or her odds of saving the greatest amount of money by participating, they almost always say, ‘Heck yeah!  Save $6,000?  I’ll hold a few open houses and keep my flyer box stocked!’

There are lots of other components of the consumer offer, but these are the three that will cause sellers to pursue you.  If you’re working with a seller who is so intrigued by the Big Three that he or she wants more and more detail, you might also talk about:

Targeted Marketing.  It fuels our program.

Broker Control.  It brings sanity back into office operation so that we can offer our incredibly good pricing deal and still make more money than our competitors.

Focused Job Descriptions for Office Staff (including Buyer Agents).  Like Broker Control, this is something that makes it all work.

It’s going to be a rare seller who’s going to want to know all about the second set of three . . . and if you run across one, call me because they’re probably a good candidate for buying a franchise!  And if you’re getting into that level of detail in a listing consultation you’re probably spending too much time.  Help-U-Sell makes perfect sense and so it doesn’t take long to explain.  This is significant.  I remember working at brand X and training agents to make elaborate and long listing presentations.  The presentations were long because it takes a long time to justify a commission that makes no sense, or to wear a seller down, whichever comes first!  If you’re presenting Help-U-Sell effectively, you should be done with that part of the presentation in 10 – 15 minutes.  Pricing should take another 15 – 25 depending on how realistic your seller is, and coaching the seller on how to prepare and participate will take longer: 20 – 30 minutes.  You should be in an out in about an hour.  I’m not kidding.

Tomorrow, unless I get hit by a bus, we’re ‘How to Rule the (Real Estate) World in 10 Easy Steps:  building consumer awareness and interest.

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