Exploring alternatives to the Status Quo in real estate
Who remembers this? What is HUSKA? Why is it important?
History Lesson: One legendary Help-U-Sell Broker – who later became a Regional Director – used the ‘word’ to motivate and elevate her fellow brokers. I believe there may have even been pins with the word on it. (If you have one, I’d love a picture).
That Broker/RD was Kris Hazard, who now lives in Hawaii.
And now, what does HUSKA mean or stand for?
Help-U-Sell Kicks %*S$!
Thanks John Powell and Maurine Grisso for remembering!
Get In Gear!
Help-U-Sell Brokers, Friday is the last day to order your EDDM postcards in bulk for the next 3-4 months!
Your cost during this special Co-Op period is roughly HALF what it would be at any other time!
If you don’t order NOW, you’ll either be without or pay twice the cost until the next flight of Co-Op ordering is announced!
Go to: http://www.husmailnow.com and look for ‘Office Co-Op’
For help, call me or Mike Paholke at Excel.
DO IT!
How often have you heard it? ‘Recruiting is the LIFEBLOOD of your real estate company!’ ‘Recruiting is the broker’s single most important job!’ ‘Recruit! Recruit! Recruit!’
Seems like we’re not even in the business of selling real estate anymore. We’re in the business of providing a place where real estate agents can work.
If your business is driven by agents . . . that’s a definite case of the tail wagging the dog!
It wasn’t always that way. Fifty years ago, real estate brokers were the business. They worked hard to market themselves and become fixtures in the local community. Sometimes, when they had more business than they could handle, they’d bring on an agent, to help.
But everything changed in the 70s when the franchises blossomed. They showed brokers that every time they added an agent they increased the office’s reach into the community and expanded the office’s sphere of influence. It was the birth of modern recruiting.
In the 80s, with success defined by the number of licenses held by the broker, recruiting warfare spread across the land. Once someone figured out how to pay agents 100% of the commission on a sale, commission split became the only thing that mattered. Splits rose higher and higher and company dollar fell lower and lower.
The contemporary residential real estate broker is little more than a beggar. He begs agents to come to work for him and then begs them not to leave. He sweetens the deal with the only tool he has: commission split. With the lion’s share of the Gross going to pay agents . . . well, they don’t call ’em BROKErs fer nothin’!
It doesn’t have to be this way. You can build your business on the power of your marketing rather than the number of bodies that occupy space under your roof. But you must take control.
IF you can execute those six steps, recruiting will stop being your reason to exist and become an essential activity, undertaken when necessary. Armed with what every good agent wants, a steady flow of leads, you will be in a position to choose the agent you want to hire. There is a big difference between choosing and begging and, as we all know, beggars can’t be choosers!
By now you are probably wondering what planet this happens on! Understandably so. The ordinary real estate world has been flowing in the same direction for so many years that, for it to right itself now would be about as difficult as having the Titanic maneuver around that iceberg!
Thankfully, the infrastructure for this real estate revolution is already in place. It is a consumer focused, broker-centric business model called Help-U-Sell Real Estate. For forty years we have been on the cutting edge of keeping brokers in control, and of delighting consumers in the process. We build our businesses through careful marketing (and we market like nobody else), not by endless recruiting. We deliver a full service experience that saves consumers thousands of dollars every day.
We organize our offices very differently than our ordinary counterparts. A broker controlled environment operating on less revenue per transaction would have to. Many brokers, struggling to make ends meet in their 6% offices, can’t imagine how Help-U-Sell Real Estate is able to charge less and keep going. But here’s the truth: through proven systems and efficiencies, through careful control of leads and accountability, through staff specialization and division of tasks, our brokers usually return more dollars to the bottom line on a typical transaction than ordinary brokers do. That’s right: we charge less but make more.
If that sounds too good to be true, we’d love to talk with you and show you how it works! Or have you talk with some of our current members.
Let’s be honest. For forty years – probably less, depending on when you entered the business – you’ve watched us and thought we’d be gone like dust in the wind in a matter of months. But we’re still here. We’ve never gone anywhere. Obviously, we have something that works. Isn’t it time you found out what it was?
The lifeblood of our business is leads . . . but how do you get them?
It’s harder today to generate a lead than it ever has been. As the real estate business has grown up, the flow of easy leads into the office has dried up! And while the Internet has lowered the cost of marketing a listing, the cost of generating a lead has gone UP. Offices with active marketing programs easily spend $100 – $150 to generate a single lead. When you factor in typical conversion rates – something like 8 to 1 – the cost to generate a bona fide buyer or seller can approach $1,000.
Before delving deeper, let’s define terms. An Inquiry is a call for information. It may come on the phone, in an email or in response to an Internet ad. Inquiries do not become Leads until that person surrenders his or her contact information. So a Lead is a person we have the ability to contact.
Most potential Leads are lost right there: in the conversion from Inquiry to Lead. Real estate salespeople are so notoriously bad at this that at least half of all Inquiries simply evaporate without ever becoming leads. Smart brokers demand performance in the conversion process, insist on practice and role play, and track it over time. Smarter brokers hire specific personnel whose sole function is to respond to Inquiries and convert them to Leads.
There are several cultural factors that have caused that great river of real estate buyer and seller leads to go dry. They include:
An explosion of readily available information. With the Internet, Zillow, REALTOR.com and dozens of other portals, there’s very little a potential customer can’t find on his or her own. In short: they don’t call you anymore, because they don’t need to.
A steadily waning trust factor. We have become obsessed with privacy and anonymity. So often, the innocent sharing of an email address of phone number has led to endless scamming and unwanted solicitations. People today are far less willing to give up their contact information than they were even 10 years ago.
The genericization of the real estate industry. A couple of decades ago, there was a perceived difference in the consumer offering of some real estate companies. That perception is gone with the last millennium! Today, there is not one whit of difference in the consumer offering of almost any real estate brand. There is endless innovation in how real estate companies attract and retain agents, but for the consumer it’s basically 6% (or 5% or 7%), put you in the MLS, put you on Zillow, hold an open house and pray. When everyone is offering the same thing, something extraordinary has to come through in an inquiry response before contact information is exchanged.
So how do you become a lead generating machine in this environment? It’s actually pretty easy.
Step One: look at your consumer offering. What are you offering that is utterly different from what everyone else is offering? And, forget the industry buzz terms like ‘Excellent Customer Service,’ and ‘Professionalism.’ Those things are important, but to the consumer, they are an expectation, not a differentiator.
Remember that one of the first things any consumer shops is price. If your pricing model is the same as the 3,000 other Realtors in your Board . . . well, that’s hardly standing out in the crowd, now is it? And does your pricing model make sense? Does the person in the $250,000 house pay less to sell it than the person in the $300,000 house? If so, why? Spoiler alert: answers like, ‘That’s just the way we do it,’ don’t fly.
The pricing of any consumer good or service is a value-for-value exchange. In a value-for-value universe, your fee should have some relation to the cost of the goods or services you are providing. So, if the person in the $250,000 house pays, say, $15,000 to sell but the person in the $300,000 house pays $18,000, where are you spending the extra $3,000 in the home marketing process? You’re not? Well, then, both of those homeowners should be paying the same thing, don’t you think?
Assuming you do step one correctly – meaning you devise a superior pricing model for your company and a dynamite consumer offer – you move on to:
Step Two: which is to market the heck out of it.
Bear in mind that it is your company that makes the consumer offer; it’s not the agents. They may make the offer on the company’s behalf, but it is the company’s offer.
Over the past 40 years, residential real estate companies have shifted the cost of marketing (which is how we communicate the consumer offer) in large measure to agents who demanded increasingly lofty commission splits. The logic was solid: I can’t afford to pay you 80% unless you start paying for your own marketing. But we’ve learned that, generally speaking, agents won’t invest in marketing regardless of split. The end result of shifting marketing to agents is agents running around willy-nilly, making this promise here and that pledge there, with no coordination from the broker and no clear or consistent offer being made to consumers.
So, you have to take control of your marketing, which means you’re going to have to budget a significant portion of your gross for it. Then you go into your target market strategically and consistently with your marketing message . . . and soon, like the swallows returning to Capistrano, the inquiries start to flow in.
By this time, the next step should have already happened. It will happen while you are doing step two.
Step Three: Take control. As you take control of your consumer offer and of your marketing, you will take control of your company. As lead generation becomes your responsibility, as you begin to hold your staff accountable for the disposition of those leads, as your unique consumer offering is constantly and consistently conveyed, your company will shift from being a place where agents work to a thriving business machine with growing market share and value.
Sound like a lot of work? A lot of risk? It is. But if you want to control your business (rather than be controlled by it), it has to be done.
Thankfully, there is a shortcut.
For 40 years, Help-U-Sell Real Estate has been perfecting the kind of business model described above. Our consumer offer – Sell Fast for a Low Set Fee and Save Thousands – is unique and very attractive to consumers. Our marketing system is a system. Like the consumer offer, it is unique in the industry and produces stellar results. Nobody markets like we do and nobody generates a steady flow of leads into the office like we do.
Couple this with a robust technology platform that we built and own and free expert coaching and support; and Help-U-Sell Real Estate could be your path to local market domination.
If you’d like to know more or simply have questions, feel free to contact us. Much can be learned at our website, helpusellfranchise.com or at one of our regularly held informational seminars, but nothing is better than picking up the phone and having a conversation.
Caution: One of the biggest snags brokers encounter when trying to understand how Help-U-Sell Real Estate works happens when they try to imagine the pricing model fitting into their existing operation. It doesn’t work. If you did that, you’d fail. We are not a stripped down version of what any other real estate company does. We are a completely new and different approach to how to run a real estate company, one that allows us to charge less and make more.
Just as almost every seller who is aware of us feels they must find out what we do before choosing a listing company, you too should find out what’s different and special about Help-U-Sell Real Estate before you map out another year of your future. Get in touch today.
I had a very interesting call with a Help-U-Sell Broker today. She was talking about her preference for working with Buyers, which is fine. Buyers are great.
However, the Help-U-Sell edge, our identity, is our low set fee offer to home sellers. It’s great to love buyers but your primary marketing thrust should be to find and list sellers. It is our LISTINGS that create the buyer leads that flow through the office.
‘What is it about the listing process you don’t like?’ I asked. ‘Is it the presentation and dealing with pricing issues or is it the followup and the communication?’
She prefaced her answer by saying, ‘Oh gee . . . this is going to sound really bad, but . . . what I really don’t like is . . . the whining!’
Sellers whine because they want a higher price or they want more or better marketing or they don’t think there’s enough activity or they don’t know what you’re doing and on and on. It’s just what they do.
Because that’s how ordinary Realtors pre-frame the relationship.
Think about it. In the ordinary real estate world, every company has the same tools. Every company has the same consumer offer (6%). There is no difference between companies beyond the color of their signs. In that world, sellers make their choice of listing agent based on personality. The key question becomes, ‘Do I like and trust you? Are you warm, friendly and accessible.’ Being the listing agent begins to look like becoming a friend.
An there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that . . . except that it erodes your power as a business professional. If the basis of your business relationship is personality and accessibility, people are going to be comfortable whining to you . . . which is to say they don’t really believe in what you’re doing and think if they will get better results by putting pressure on you.
Help-U-Sell is different. We charge less and we charge differently because we have marketing and back office systems that get the job done quickly and efficiently. While we all have wonderful personalities, that’s not what we sell on the listing consultation. We sell our step-one, step-two systems. A business relationship based on systems is much more business-like.
Here’s an example:
I have a financial adviser who manages my paltry retirement account. He’s a friend and was for years before I moved my account to his firm. He’s a delightful guy and he clearly knows his business backwards and forwards, but . . . when I went to his office for our first meeting, he quickly introduced me to his two assistants, each of whom has specific functions and then excused himself.
The message was clear: we are a business based on systems. We don’t make it up as we go along. I have competent personnel who manage my accounts with my supervision. This frees me to focus on creating more business and making sure the system works as designed.
Here’s the thing: I still talk with my friend who happens to be my financial adviser, but I would never ask him about the details of my account. He trained me during that first meeting that my questions can all be handled by his team, and that’s the way they do business. (It was helpful that the assistants were knowledgeable and impressive.)
That’s how you need to behave on the Listing Consultation. It’s not about you (although they’re going to love you). It’s about your systems. You’re not a loosey goosey real estate person, running around like a chicken with your head cut off, available 24/7 to handle every issue that may arise (real or imagined).
I’m suggesting that you become more business-like when you do a listing consultation. Yes, be warm and friendly, but stay focused and on track. Your Help-U-Sell office is a machine based on systems. When we plug a properly priced listing into this machine it spits out successful sales and happy sellers! Your sparkling personality is nice but it’s not what gets the job done.
So: start having your sellers come into your professional place of business for the listing consultation. Fine tune your consultation so that you can get through it in 30 minutes (+/-). Take a few minutes explaining the process and how things will go – and maybe create a graphic to illustrate it. Pre-frame your listing relationship as a business relationship. Let all of those ordinary Realtors sow personality and reap the whinies!