Category: Help-U-Sell

Planning for 2014 and Planning in General

We’re just a couple of weeks away from Thanksgiving, which means it’s time to start thinking about what you want to accomplish next year.  It’s a great time to be making a plan because, by all indicators, 2014 should be a good year, a year to grow, to expand.  A few things you might consider in your 2014 plan are:

Adding support staff.  But remember the Golden Rule of Help-U-Sell:  you never add staff until you are so busy you are missing opportunities.  Support staff should enable you to either do more business or take more time for other things.  If, four months after the new hire, you aren’t  doing either or both of those things, the hire was probably in error.

Expanding your geography.  Help-U-Sell is a geographically targeted business, remember?  Your vision is to own the real estate business in your target market and to take ownership one neighborhood at a time.  ASSUMING you have been following a targeted marketing strategy and have begun to  dominate in a neighborhood or two, maybe this is the year you move on to broaden the target, add a few more neighborhoods.

Taking a step up and back.  Perhaps 2014 is the year you not only add a buyers agent or two, but you also add a listing assistant:  someone who can meet with a potential seller, do a listing consultation and take a listing on your behalf.  Before you recoil in horror (nobody can do it as well as me!), let me remind you that Help-U-Sell is built on systems that work, not personality.  Your listing consultation is . . . well, just the facts, and a competent, well trained assistant can do the job as effectively as you, the Broker.  Taking a step back from the listing side of the business should enable you to take a step up to working ON your business, to planning your next expansion, to becoming bigger.

Supercharging your marketing.  How many tentacles do you have reaching out into the lead generation ocean that is the Internet?  Is this the year you step up to premiere status at Trulia and/or Zillow? You should, you know.  Is this the year you start doing Facebook and Google pay-per-click to drive traffic to your optimized website? Of course, if that is your goal, you will need effective lead capture landing pages, too.  Is this the year you electrify your web presence by creating a powerful, search engine friendly blog for your business? I know:  I’m biased, but I think this may be one of the best strategies you could employ to do more in 2014.

There are four ideas that may spur your thinking.  Before we leave the topic of planning for 2014, though, I want you to also rethink the planning process.  For generations we have heard, studied and practiced the 1-3-5 year planning ritual.  The detailed long term plan has always been held up as the be-all and end-all of planning . . . and I think that is a mistake.

Our real estate market shifts regularly and rapidly.  Opportunities fly in (and out), sometimes out of nowhere,  You have to be ready to grab hold of the next big thing while it is fresh and too often, a rigid plan and a stay-the-course attitude can make this difficult.  Here’s my prescription for planning, for 2014 an in general:

1.  Get clear on your BIG objective.  Why do you own this business? What are you trying to accomplish? How will you know when you are there? And what is your exit strategy?  These are big picture things, hardly detailed.

2.  What are the likely milestones you will encounter on this journey?  Typically Help-U-Sell brokers start out all alone, doing everything themselves.  The first milestone is the hiring of an assistant.  Then comes hiring of buyers agents.  Down the road, an expanded target market or a second office may make the list.  What are the 6 – 8 major milestones between you and your BIG ojective, in anticipated chronological order.

3. Now, focus on the first milestone.  What do you need to do today, this week, this month to move you closer to it?

That’s it.  

You now have a plan.  And it is a plan that doesn’t tie you up, that allows for new unanticipated opportunities, for side-trips and even small failures, without taking you off course.

I remember the camping/car trip I took from my home in Atlanta to Washington State’s Olympic National Park in 1973.  My friend and I knew our first big stop would be Estes Park, Colorado and the Rockies.  Each night we planned the next day’s segment.  It might be 250 miles or 1,000, might include side trips, stops and so on.  And we were free to change course during the day, too, so long as we ended up a little closer to Estes Park.  After Estes Park, the next milestone was Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and we proceeded in the same manner, each day taking us closer to the next milestone, each milestone taking us closer to our BIG objective:  Olympic National Park.

I believe that kind of thinking, that kind of planning, is the way to build a lean, rapidly moving, dynamic real estate company.

How To Rank: Be Credible, Relevant and Dynamic (and keep at it!)

2013 has been a breakout year for The Set Fee Real Estate Blog.  My number of visitors has jumped significantly and seems to increase every month.  Last month (October, 2013), was the biggest month I’ve ever had, topping 2,000 visitors.  By comparison, through 2011 and 2012, I mucked along at +/- 500 visitors a month.

The improvement in this site’s stats parallels the return to an increasingly normal real estate market, and while this is not the reason my hits are up, it certainly is a factor.  For more than four years, the notion that a home owner could save on real estate commissions was hardly at the top of anyone’s mind, and of course, that’s what I write about here.  Today, with home equities increasing and buyers buying again, people are interested in getting a good deal when it comes time to sell, so their search phrases are helping them find this blog.

I believe there are a couple of other factors – probably more important factors – in the increase.  First is simple longevity.  I’ve been at this since Fall of 2009.  Mother Google has been crawling my posts for four years and has found new material here almost every week.  She likes that.  There has been a consistency in topic here which also speaks to the search engines.   The focus of this blog is pretty concise.

While January  2013 showed a jump in visitors over what I was experiencing in 2012, I didn’t get my big growth spurt until April . . . and each month since April has been better than the month before.  So what happened in April?

Simple:  Marketing.  I invested $200 in pay-per-click, $100 on Facebook, $100 on Google.  The money was exhausted by mid May, but the effects were dramatic.  The bigger surprise, though, was the ‘halo effect’ of my tiny bit of marketing.  My growth spurt has been sustained.

There have been a handful of blog posts that have drawn A LOT of hits.  They are tightly focused on things consumers want to know and have clear titles that reflect the content.  Far and away the biggest draw has been ‘What Percentage Do Real Estate Agents Charge?‘  It lambastes percentage based commissions and makes a strong case for Set Fee pricing and for Help-U-Sell.

That post is followed rather closely by ‘How Long Must I Wait To Buy After A Short Sale?’ Interesting that both posts have questions as titles.  However, the significant thing is topic:  this is what real estate consumers are interested in today.  By the way, real estate sand is always shifting and I probably ought to update that short sale post.

Another high-ranking post is ‘The Ineffective Realtor (or what to do when your real estate agent sucks).’  Hmmm.  Clearly a large segment of our industry is letting consumers down or at least not living up to expectations (again).

The point is this:  if you are blogging, keep at it.  It takes awhile for the search engines to decide you are credible enough to rank high in search results.  Focus your blog on a topic and don’t stray off in a dozen directions.  Think like your target audience:  what kinds of information are they most likely to be searching for?  And make sure that topic is reflected in both your post and your title.  And, for goodness sake!  Invest a few hundred bucks in marketing!  The results will probably surprise you.

(Footnote:  The case for REALTOR blogging is simply this:  it works.  Only 12% of REALTORS blog and most of them do it poorly and/or inconsistently.  We all have websites, some good, some not so good.  Regardless, they usually have at least one thing in common:  they are static.  They don’t change.  The content is set.  That is not particularly attractive to Google.  She wants to see dynamic content that changes regularly but remains focused on a specific topic.  That’s what a blog is.  Your online lead generation efforts can be greatly enhanced by fronting a good blog.  You use your blog to help consumers find you and to help them understand your unique offering.  You link your blog to your static website for home search and for inquiry generation.  If you want help setting up and maintaining your Help-U-Sell real estate blog, get in touch.)

Welcome to Normal

REALTOR.com is out with its market data report and analysis for August and has pronounced that the national real estate market stabilized over the summer selling season and is now nearing normal.

Normal . . . Oh! how we have longed to hear that magical word.  Normal, where an adequate number of homeowners need to sell and an equally adequate number of home buyers want to buy.  Normal, where it takes 45 – 90 days to sell a home and where prices increase in the 3% – 5% a year range.  Normal, where smart marketing works, producing leads.  And Normal, where home sellers are very interested in saving money on real estate commissions.

Getting to Normal wasn’t easy.  We were mired in market sludge as the year began but starting sometime in February, something happened.  Home buyers who had been sitting on the fence for so long they had splinters, started to come back into the market.  By the Spring we had lurched forward to a new kind of craziness, in places reminiscent of the lunacy that preceded the crash:  low to non-existent inventories, multiple offers, over asking price bids, sudden stupid appreciation.

In my own San Diego neighborhood (Hillcrest/Bankers Hill) I remember looking at the MLS one week and seeing 3 active listings.  Three. The next week there were 15 as home sellers, hearing the news that crazy buyers were back in the market and that NOW was the time to sell, raced to get in on the action.  The effect was like pulling the emergency brake on an out of control car.  Everything stopped . . . for a few weeks.

The craziness subsided a bit and we eased into Summer with a little more sanity.

Now we’re into the last months of the year.  In a normal market, this is when ordinary Realtors go into hibernation.  Nothing happens between Thanksgiving and New Years Day, right? Of course, that’s ordinary thinking for ordinary brokers.

But you guys, you Help-U-Sell guys are anything but ordinary, remember?  By their standards you are just plain weird!  So this year, after you get home from Success Summit, do the weird stuff you did last time the market was “normal.”  Market like mad to the end of the year and hit January with a white board full of new listings and a pipeline overflowing with sellers who wanted to wait until after the first of the year.  Because each new listing is an opportunity to market for and get another and another and another, there is no better prep for the Spring Selling Season!

Have a great time at Summit this year, gang.  I will be there in spirit and look forward to hearing about all the great stuff that was shared!

Success Summit Is Next Week!

Dang! I wish I could be there!

If you are a Help-U-Sell family member, I hope you will be.  These events are like a shot of Vitamin B-12:  you come away energized, excited and ready to take on the world!

It is also the place to hear what’s working in today’s market, what’s new, where to invest your time and money.  I am remembering a couple of years ago, Nick Taylor joined us to talk about opportunities for lead generation that exist on Zillow.  A few Help-U-Sell people were already taking advantage of them but many more jumped on board after that meeting and it has produced solid results for everyone.  That’s the kind of business boost you can get from a Help-U-Sell Success Summit.

This year, I know Ron, Robbie and crew have a spectacular program set.  There have been so many great enhancements to the websites recently:  Savings Chart, Testimonials, Market Snapshot and so on . . . but a little bird told me you should be prepared to be knocked off your feet by what you see at the Summit.

If you STILL haven’t made your reservation, let me challenge you.  Go to the Summit (it will probably cost you about a single Set Fee).  Then track your numbers of new listings and sales from the day you get home to the end of the year.  If you don’t get one more listing AND make one more sale than you did in the final 2 months of last year, then . . . I will give you a free phone consultation focused on your business and what you can do to kick it up to the next level.

I’m serious:  you really need to be there. 

 

Why NOW Is The Time To Become A Help-U-Sell Broker

Welcome to 2013, the year the real estate industry stopped staggering and returned to swaggering.  We all knew it would take a recovery in the housing market to initiate a recovery in the overall economy and this is the year the home-buying public decided it was time to make a move.

But what about you?  What’s your next move?

If you are a real estate broker – a savvy one –  you have to be on the lookout for the next trend, the next twist, the next thing that will give you a competitive advantage over others. Up until the late 70s, about the most innovative thing the industry did was create the MLS. But with the advent of the franchises, the real estate business began moving at locomotive speed, with giant competitors looking for new and better ways to grow.  Unfortunately, it has been a one-track itinerary for that locomotive:  recruiting.  The industry so overwhelmingly decided that the way to grow is to add more and more people that today we hardly question why recruiting should be a Broker’s single most important activity, why recruiting is the ‘Lifeblood’ of the real estate business.

Here is a tip about change:  it will the innovators who question what everyone else holds to be true who will ride the next big wave in the real estate industry.

Let’s go back to basics.  Our business is built on the idea that people who want to buy real estate and those who want to sell it need qualified, knowledgeable help.  That’s what the real estate industry is about, our reason to BE.  But notice: nowhere in that statement is there one word about recruiting.  Yet recruiting has become the only acceptable ‘HOW,’ the only strategy for accomplishing the goal of helping consumers.

The message on the Brokers’ internal billboard glows with self-congratulatory phrases about ‘providing an environment where talented people can thrive,’ and ‘serving the community with the most knowledgeable and professional agents in the business.’  But here is the more honest, though somewhat cynical paradigm that underlies that business model:

As a Broker I know that almost anybody with a license can sell a few houses.  Everyone has friends and family who would be willing to give them a shot.  While I am actively seeking super agents, I know that half the people who enter the business will do 4 – 6 deals from their personal network, and quit.  That’s ok:  I’ll take those 4 – 6 deals.  Those agents aren’t costing me much and I can almost cover my overhead on their production.  I also know that 35%-40% of those coming in will stay in the business but will muck along at 6 – 8 deals a year, each personally making $25,000 – $35,000 a year but making $20,000 to $30,000 for me.  20 of those agents and I’m doing ok.  40 and I’m great!  Because I know most people won’t make it, and that many who do will eventually move on to what they perceive as greener pastures, I accept the fact that I must constantly recruit to replace those who leave. My job as a real estate broker is to provide comfortable space and acceptable systems for my agents.

Is that the kind of real estate universe in which you want to live?  Because that’s what’s out there whether it calls itself Keller-Williams, Re/Max, Century 21, or Local Independent Realty.

If, on the other hand, you are ready to shake things up a bit, to return to the business of actively seeking customers – not agents, then you owe it to yourself to take a look at Help-U-Sell.

Step one is to set your prejudices aside.  You have been marketed a picture of Help-U-Sell that keeps you at a distance.   Here are the underpinnings of that false picture:

How can they make any money?  I can barely make it charging full fare and here they come charging half what I do.  What a stupid idea!

They don’t do anything for their sellers, that’s why they charge so little.  You get what you pay for.

Its a pure come-on.  They give away the listing side to get the buyer side and then sell OUR listings for full buyer-side commission.  I think we should automatically cut their buyer side commission when they sell our listings!

Help-U-Sell?  They’re still around?  I thought they went bankrupt.

That’s all just REALTOR-speak.  Don’t let your competitors make up your mind for you.  Do your own investigation.  You’ll discover:

  • Help-U-Sell is not just some discount real estate ‘service.’ It is a completely different way of approaching the real estate business, a different business model.
  • Help-U-Sell fess are lower because the business model is more efficient.
  • Help-U-Sell brokers deliver more dollars to the bottom line charging less than their ordinary competitors who charge much more . . . really!
  • The Help-U-Sell bulls-eye is the consumer.  That’s what we are all about.  We love agents, but they are part of our business model, not the target of it.
  • Help-U-Sell takes the broker out of the role of administrative support for agents and puts him or her back in a role of entrepreneurial leadership.
  • Help-U-Sell is not a do-it-yourself FSBO company but rather offers full-service to consumers that looks very much like the full-service ordinary brokers offer.

If you are attenting the California Association of REALTORS EXPO this week or at the National Association of REALTORS Conference next month, stop by the Help-U-Sell booth.  Talk to our people and discover why this 40 year old twist on the real estate business might be your ‘next big thing.’

 

 

 

 

 

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