Category: Help-U-Sell

A Reminder for Help-U-Sell Brokers

Back to Basics:

Help-U-Sell is a marketing driven company.  Everything begins with marketing.  Marketing is how we gain market share, how we grow, how we increase profitability.  Contrast that with what the Ordinary Broker does;  he attempts to accomplish those things through recruiting.

We market to SELLERS.  Because our seller offer is so far superior to what Ordinary Brokers have, our biggest marketing challenge is to simply inform home owners that we are here and can save them money.

We love buyers – really, LOVE buyers – but we find them through our listings, not through our marketing.  Every new listing creates a dozen opportunities for buyers to connect with us and the more listings we have the more buyers we connect with.  (I know, ending a sentence with a preposition . . . but we are communicating here, not teaching grammar).

Which is not to say we don’t market our listings to buyers; of course we do.  But this is mostly a process of plugging our listings into established channels like the Internet, the MLS, our ongoing marketing and so on.  Our strategic marketing, our aggressive, proactive marketing is to SELLERS.

There are four messages we want to communicate to potential sellers in all of our marketing:

We are HERE

People use us

It works

They save money

We use three tools to communicate those four messages:

The Easy Way

(or the Smarter Way – though as a Help-U-Sell purist, I prefer the Easy Way)

Sold & Saveds

Testimonials

If you have marketing pieces out there (i.e. websites, Facebook pages, EDDMs, brag cards, newspaper ads (what’s a newspaper?), etc.) that do not use those three tools to communicate those four specific seller messages, you’re doing it wrong and missing the boat.

Help-U-Sell is a wonderful business model that produces outstanding results IF you do it right and do it with consistency.  It is so simple that it’s easy to second guess it and start making changes.  Most of the changes I see make the model look more like what Ordinary Brokers do . . . and that’s certainly madness.  I mean:  who in their right mind would want that? 

Get back to basics!  Start marketing . . . to SELLERS.

 

Great News to Start The Year!

Once again, The Franchise Business Review  has included Help-U-Sell Real Estate in its annual list of Franchisee Satisfaction Award winners.  It is our third straight year to make the list.  The list is created after surveys and interviews with current franchisees  and looks at franchisors in a variety of industries.  Making it onto the list means, basically, that our member franchisees are happy with their decision to affiliate, with the guidance and support they get and with the results they achieve.

We aren’t the only real estate franchise to make the list, but there were a few conspicuous absences.  Century 21 didn’t make it.  Neither did ERA or Re/Max.  Keller Williams didn’t make it, nor did Real Estate One.  A dozen of lesser known franchises also missed the mark.

I worked for the other guys in the distant past, always in franchise support, training and business consulting.  The pressure to sell franchises was so great that at times it seemed the only bulls-eye that mattered.  The emphasis on franchise sales (and the absence of anything truly different in the operating system) pushed salespeople into selling fluff, not stuff.  Franchisee dissatisfaction began shortly after Orientation as new franchisees realized that they’d bought very little.

We don’t have that problem at Help-U-Sell.  First, while franchise sales is important, it’s just one bulls-eye and in fact, is not even the most important one.  Secondly, we don’t have a big Franchise Sales department with an unlimited budget.  Most of our franchise sales originate with our existing franchisee base; our members bring in most of our prospects.*  And finally, what we have to sell is stuff:  real, tangible, results producing stuff.  It is different from what they other guys have, works differently, and works better.

A couple of posts ago, I invited curious outside brokers to pick up the phone and call a Help-U-Sell broker – any Help-U-Sell broker – to find out about us.  I made the invitation honestly because I know every broker in our system would wax poetic about the power of the brand, the operating system and the support.  It’s nice to have that belief validated by The Franchise Business Review.

*By the way, Help-U-Sell brokers:  you do know that you are rewarded when the franchise sales prospect you bring in becomes a franchisee, don’t you?  Ask Ron McCoy for details . . . maybe on next week’s Power Hour.

Your Future in Real Estate

It’s time to get serious about your career in real estate.  The market is rebounding, homes are selling and it looks like we are in for another multi-year cycle of appreciation and normalcy in the marketplace.

Now is the time when great careers and great real estate businesses are made.  It is your moment, your time to shine, your best shot at major success . . . IF you are positioned to take advantage of the opportunity.  What does that mean?

If you are an agent working for an ordinary real estate company, be it franchised or independent, you are competing against thousands of other agents just like yourself, with the same tools, same information, same offering, and same pricing.  The only edge you could possibly have in that fishbowl – the only things that might set you apart from the pack – are your personality and your work ethic.  So, let’s assume you really apply yourself next year.  You work harder and smarter and you polish up that smile . . .  and you go from doing 18 deals to doing 25.  That’s very nice, but it’s hardly the stuff of real estate greatness.

This is not the time to increase your production by 30%.  It is the time to increase it by 300%.  And you won’t do it by doing the same things you did last year and the year before, only doing them harder.  It’s time to look for a better way to do the real estate business.

If you are a broker, get ready.  You have been able to rein back outrageous commission splits a little in the past few down years.  But with the market heating up, even your most mediocre agents will be looking for more, and you know if you don’t give it to them, the office down the street will.  You can expect your turnover to move higher in the months to come which means, if you are going to maintain current levels of production, you’re going to have to kick up your recruiting game.

I gotta tell ya:  I don’t envy you at all.  The success of your business is dependent on your ability to get people to come to work for you and then, to get them to stick around; and your only real tool for accomplishing either of those objectives is split.  And what the heck does any of that have to do with helping buyers buy and sellers sell real estate?

Clearly, it is time for a new game, a new model, a new way to do this business.  A way that results in incredibly satisfied clients, busy agents with healthy bank accounts and brokers who are functioning as successful entrepreneurs, not mere support for their sales staffs.

And you know what the way is:  It is Help-U-Sell.  Here’s why:

As a Help-U-Sell broker you will go into the marketplace with a consumer offer that is not only fundamentally different than that of your competitors, but also superior to theirs from a consumer point of view.  You’ll accomplish the same results the pack of ordinary agents and brokers will but you will save people thousands over what they’d pay anyone else!  It is an offer that is so compelling that, once word is out in the marketplace, potential sellers usually want to at least talk with you before making a listing decision.  And we find we get that listing about 90% of the time.

It is a focus on marketing and marketplace intelligence that more closely resembles what Home Depot does than what ABC Realty does. And because Help-U-Sell marketing is systematic and focused, it produces a steady stream of buyer and seller leads into the office.  These are leads the office has created, leads the office owns, leads the office will assign and track.

It is agents who want to come to work for you because you have the one thing nobody else can give them:  leads.  It’s agents who have had a close brush with burn out from the gigantic job description they tried to manage at an ordinary real estate company.  They will see the streamlined, focused job you have for them as an opportunity to do more, make more and have more fun doing it.

It is a smaller, tightly knit office team that is outperforming companies with 10 or 12 times the agents.  It is an team with one goal – yours, with one direction – yours, one purpose – profitability.  It is very different from an ordinary office where the broker begs people to come to work, begs people to stay, begs people to attend sales meeting, begs people to do the prospecting they promised to do and so on.  Aren’t you getting tired of all that begging?

And finally, it is a bottom line that is beyond healthy, that is growing and expanding every month.  This is the great truth ordinary real estate brokers and agents have the most difficulty understanding about Help-U-Sell:

Even though we charge consumers thousands less, we deliver more dollars to the bottom line per transaction than our ordinary competitors who charge much more!

I know you don’t believe me, but go ahead:  call a Help-U-Sell broker – any Help-U-Sell broker – and ask them to explain it to you.  I’m sure you will be surprised at what you hear.

The Help-U-Sell ship is sailing, and it’s going to do more than it did between 1998 and 2006 (the rough dates of the last up cycle in real estate).  And if you are serious about your success, it is time to fly a new flag on your own ship, to find a new and better way to do the real estate business.  For goodness sake!  Do it in a way that is different from what everyone else is doing and that is better for consumers and for you bottom line.  Do it with Help-U-Sell!

*Unlike other franchises who will give you a list of their 12 happiest franchisees to call, I have no problem telling you to talk with any Help-U-Sell franchisee.  We are a multi-year winner of the Franchise Business Review’s franchisee satisfaction survey.  Year after year, our brokers affirm their delight with the business model and the power of the team.  So go ahead:  pick a Help-U-Sell broker – any Help-U-Sell broker – and let them tell you why joining this team is a very smart move.

 

The Secret to Help-U-Sell Success

The secret to how Help-U-Sell works isn’t a secret at all.  We’ve never tried to hide it.  Though it is very simple, it is so different from the way ordinary real estate works that our competitors dismiss it and assume we’re not telling the whole truth; so we continue to hide in plain sight.  Here’s the easiest description of how Help-U-Sell works I can create – it’s just four steps:

  1. Help-U-Sell begins with a superior offer to home sellers.   We go into the market offering a service very similar to what ordinary brokers offer, but we charge a logical set fee (rather than a percentage commission), which can save the seller thousands.
  2. The superior offer enables the Help-U-Sell broker to take more than his or her share of listings in the target market.
  3. More listings means more signs and better marketing, and  ultimately, the large listing inventory generates a strong flow of Buyer (and Seller) inquiries into the office.
  4. We capture those inquiries and turn them over to Buyer Agents who are carefully groomed and trained (via Science to Sales) to convert them into sales.  As listings increase, as the flow of leads increases, as we add Buyer Agents to handle the flow, production snowballs.

That’s it.

The mechanics are easy.  What’s more difficult – especially when dealing with people who have grown up in the ordinary real estate universe – are the attitudes required to make it all work.  There are four critical areas that underpin successful implementation of the Help-U-Sell system.  These are essential areas of focus on which the whole program depends.  If these elements are faulty, Help-U-Sell will not perform to its potential.  They are:

  1. Broker Control.  The Broker is the business, and the business is the Broker’s.  The Broker is in the business of selling real estate.  This contrasts with ordinary brokers who, by and large, are in the recruiting business. The ordinary Broker recruits to expand his business; every agent added increases the Broker’s reach (well . . . in theory, anyway).  Help-U-Sell Brokers rely on their marketing and office systems to expand their business.  Agents come in to help the Broker handle the large amount of business the office is generating.
  2. Systematic Marketing.  Because the broker is in control, he or she creates and manages a marketing plan for the Help-U-Sell office and for all the office listings.  The marketing plan is constantly fine tuned and eventually becomes a relatively stable, almost fixed expense.  When we take a listing, we don’t create a whole unique marketing plan for that one listing — that’s what ordinary real estate agents do and the result is thousands of agents running around willy-nilly with almost no marketing coordination.  We take the new listing and simply plug it into our existing office marketing program which produces results for all of our listings.
  3. The Buyer Inquiry.  This is the single most important moment in a Help-U-Sell office.  It is the place where we take the power of our superior offer and our marketing and convert it into leads, prospects, clients and sales.  That’s why we work so hard to make sure our people are handling the inquiry – whether from phone or Internet – effectively.  Really:  if you want to improve your production and your bottom line, I know of no better way than to improve the way inquiries are handled in your office.
  4. Buyer Agent Job Description.  Help-U-Sell Buyer agents focus on one single but very important aspect of the business:  they convert Buyer leads generated by the office into closed transactions.  They don’t prospect for listings, don’t call FSBOS, don’t go on listing appointments or orchestrate marketing.  It’s an easily managed job description that enables the agent to do many more transactions than he or she could at an ordinary office.

As I read this I am struck by how much of it deals with Buyers and Buyer Agents and Brokers hiring Buyer Agents.  The Listing and the Seller side of the transaction are mentioned only a couple of times.  But we are Help-U-Sell. Doesn’t that indicate that this description is a little twisted?  Not at all.  At Help-U-Sell, the listing side of the business is pretty simple.  It’s easier to take listings when you have a superior offer and our systematic approach to marketing gets listings sold.  It’s the buyer side that requires the greatest shift in attitude by the largest group of people.

I am reminded of my first ever meeting with our founder,  Don Taylor.  He smiled as only Don Taylor can smile and said, ‘People forget, but Help-U-Sell was always about the buyer.’

Let’s try to remember that.

You And Apple

Let’s think about how you market yourself, and let’s think about it by looking at Apple.

How did Apple – the second generation, Steve Jobs led Apple – get so big?   Three Things: (Simplifying a lot)

Positioning, Posturing and Validation

Positioning:  while Microsoft (the competition Apple identified and went after) kept pitching practicality and a computer in every household, Apple went after elite and hip, even artistic.  The ‘Here’s to the Crazy Ones’ commercial is brilliant and effective.  The positioning wasn’t ‘we are just like them only better,’ it was ‘we are completely different and so are you!’

Posturing:  While Microsoft focused on the unseen aspects of personal computing (operating systems and software), Apple controlled hardware as well, which gave them the ability to create a style.  There is no Microsoft style.  There is a Sony style and an HP style . . . and an Apple style.  Apple went after style with class and consistency: all Apple devices look somewhat similar.  I guess there is good style and bad style but I also know that effective styling is a matter of marketing. (I mean, look at what the fashion world has us believing is cool today:  it’s a kind of homeless chic! We’ll pay hundreds for an outfit that makes us look like we live on the streets!) So, Apple used its elite and hip positioning (coupled with consistency of design) to create a style that people were proud to wear.

Validation:  In addition to its hip and cool marketing, and its style,  Apple nurtured an army of users to broadcast loudly how much better their devices worked than Microsoft’s (again, Microsoft made no devices, really, just software).  While Windows syste ms were famous for crashing (remember Vista?) and prone to attack, Apple users went on and on about their never-fail systems.  Whether on Internet postings, Facebook, Twitter, or verbally at the office or the soccer game, Apple users waved their stylish devices and proclaimed them (and themselves) to be superior.

We could go on about this bit of history but let’s stop and think about your business now.

How are you positioning your Help-U-Sell company?  Are you trying to fit in?  Trying to not upset your friends at the Board?  Imagine how that would have worked for Apple!  You have an identity and it is very different from the rest of the pack.  It is SAVINGS.  Just as Steve Jobs knew that everyone wants to think of themselves as cool and hip, Don Taylor (our founder) knew that everyone wants to pay the least possible for good service.  That’s why we are positioned as the company that saves consumers money selling real estate.  Savings begins with a streamlined, broker-centric operation coupled with set fee pricing.

I believe you can undermine the brilliant positioning of Help-U-Sell as the company that SAVES.  I’ve seen it happen over and over when a broker looks at what everyone else is doing and wonders, ‘why not me?’  Here are three underminers that will erode your position:

Having more than three Set Fees.  Of course, in theory, ONE should be sufficient.  But we’ve learned that properties on the low end of the market need special pricing and, sometimes, those at the top do as well.  But five fees?  Or a fee that graduates every $50,000 – $100,000?  That’s just a tired, old-fashioned commission in a very bad disguise.

Hiring agents on commission splits to take listings.  That’s what your competition does, and it does not work at Help-U-Sell.  If your Set Fee Pricing is correct for your market, you cannot afford to split commissions on the Listing Side with anyone.  Once your company is established and you are too busy to do the listing business yourself, an assistant (someone paid a set fee or salary) may start to help on the listing side.  Remember:  your competition pays huge splits to agents to go out and get listings because they rely on agents to market their business.  YOU market your business.  YOU create the leads.  Your commissioned agents are there to help you take care of the leads you have created on the buyer side.

Mixing percentages in with set fee pricing.  Something like:  Our set fee is $5,950 (but if we bring the buyer it’s a flat 3 1/2 % and if it’s sold through the MLS it’s 4%).  Your identity is SAVINGS, and the way you get there is through set fee pricing (and a broker-centric business model).  When you mix in percentage commissions in your pricing you just look like a bait and switch come-on proposition.  The only place percentages belong in your pricing is on their side, when an outside broker brings the buyer.  Then it’s their nonsensical percentage based commission the seller sees on the HUD-1, not yours.

Just as posturing for Apple was about how that company marketed itself, so your posturing is about how you tell your story to consumers.  You are a geographically focused, target marketing business.  You study the broad market, pick neighborhood targets where you anticipate the highest rate of return and market to those specific targets.  Compare that with what the broker down the street does.  Remember s/he delegated the marketing of the company to the agents and expects them to go out and take whatever listing they can get in whatever location.

Your posture is not just where you market, but what you market.  While your competition is advertising ‘charming’ bungalow in ‘immaculate’ condition in ‘park-like’ settings, you’re marketing the fact that you saved John and Mary $8,325 in commissions when they sold their home.  Think about that for a moment. They are marketing for buyers.  You are marketing for sellers (because you know that if you have enough sellers, enough listings, the buyers will flock to you).

Validation:  This is really why I wanted to write this post.  Yesterday I saw Richard Cricchio posted photos of four ‘Sold and Saveds’ on his company’s Facebook page.  Bravo!  ‘Sold and Saveds’, along with our customer testimonials (the ones you ask for at every closing), are how we validate what we do.  If you are not blanketing your marketplace with proof that people use your service, it works and they save, you are cutting your effectiveness (and your bottom-line) greatly.  I was struck by Richard’s ‘sold and saveds’ posting because it was graphic.  I didn’t have to read much of anything to get the message that he’d saved people money.  Others have used Facebook for ‘Sold and Saveds’ (and I applaud them, too), but Richard’s post had great impact.

Recap.  Positioning:  what is your identity?  Posturing:  how do you market that?  Validation (Your silver bullet):  How are you getting people to crow about the good service you provided (and the money you saved them)?

I think it fascinating that while Apple built its success as the anti-Microsoft (just as you will build yours as the anti-6% Realtor), they somehow missed the fact that the BIG competition was Google.  Easy to miss, I think.  At its inception, Google was just a search algorithm cooked up by a couple of grad students.  Who knew that from that, they would someday own the Internet, have the number one browser, and have more devices running their operating system than any other?

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