Category: Help-U-Sell

Working with Friends vs Working with Strangers

With whom would you rather work?  I know, I know.  You probably just blurted out ‘Friends! Of course!’  That’s a natural response, one that is in line with conventional residential real estate thinking where your goal should be to build a 100% repeat and referral business within three years.  If you’ve ever been to a real estate sales training program or seminar (picture: Brian Buffini), what you probably learned were techniques for adding lots of people to your corral of friends and then extracting business from them.

But I just read an excellent (and short) blog post from our friend, Kirk Eisele (who I just invited to pop in here from time to time and contribute a post or two), that brings clarity to my own discomfort with that approach. (Stop now and read it HERE, then come back)

True Confession:  in my own real estate career I didn’t do a good job of converting my friends into customers.  I didn’t want my friendships to be about my business; or rather,  I was not good at keeping friendships about friendship while injecting my business into them.  The idea of constantly talking with everyone I know about real estate was not my style.  Allright:  I sucked at it.  And I always saw that as a failing.  Kirk’s post helped me see it not as failure but as honest recognition that I am a marketer at heart.  Of course, you already knew that.

I guess this explains in part why I fell in love with Help-U-Sell.  This is a marketing driven business system.  It is real and tangible and can be packaged and presented (marketed, sold) to consumers who quickly come to the logical conclusion that Help-U-Sell is a good idea.  It is NOT personality driven.  It’s not about who you know and whether they support your business (though we all need all the friends we can get), but relies on a solidly different and better apprpoach to the business for success.  Help-U-Sell is for Marketers . . . and for Connectors who can learn to market.

This is not to belittle the Connectors.  With quite a few notable exceptions, most of the successful real estate salespeople held up as models for us all are Connectors.  Some of our best Help-U-Sell brokers are Connectors.  But ALL of our Help-U-Sell Brokers are Marketers.  It goes with the territory.

The simple fact that you’re building a business based on sound business principals (as opposed to building one based on who you know) makes the business more valuable.  Richard Cricchio has built one heck of a Help-U-Sell business in Hawaii and though he is the voice of real estate in his weekly radio show, if he were to sell his company to a qualified candidate who follows the same plan, the company would probably not skip a beat.  If his business was built on family, friends, neighbors, past customers and clients, anyone buying the business would realize that once Richard went away, so would the business.

Back to that initial question I asked:  With whom would you rather work? Friends or Strangers?  Let me blur the lines a little:  how about Friends or Strangers and Former Clients?

I’ll take the latter every day.  Strangers and former clients make the decision to work with me based on the efficiency and effectiveness of my program.  Of course they have to be comfortable with me, but they don’t make the buying decision because of our long and rich history together.  On the other hand, my experience working with friends and family is, honestly:

they usually expect a deal,

one that usually impacts my income.

At the end of the transaction, though everyone is all smiles, somewhere in the back of the the Friend’s mind is the nagging question:  ‘Did he really give me a good deal?’  Meanwhile, that stranger I just converted into a client and a sale is delighted over the great service and low fee I charged.

How Do You Present Your Pricing Today?

Here is a blast from the past . . . well, from six months ago. I just re-read it and it occurred to me it’s an important message for right now. Please give this a little consideration, Help-U-Sell folks.

Help-U-Sell is certainly NOT a For Sale By Owner company.  Yes, it’s true:  in the late 70’s Don Taylor pioneered the use of the phrase ‘For Sale By Owner’ on the Help-U-Sell For Sale sign.  In time, that phrase morphed to ‘For Sale With Owner,’ but the intent was never for Help-U-Sell to be a stripped down FSBO package vendor.  Our vision has never wavered from the notion that Help-U-Sell is a full service real estate company.

Having said that (and fully embraced it without reservation), I think it might make sense to examine our Consumer offer – the one to Sellers, specifically – and how we present it.

Pictured below is the graphic that is often used with sellers as we talk with them about putting their home on the market.  It acknowledges that there are really three ways a home might sell and prepares the seller for the good news that we charge them, not on some arbitrary percentage basis (no matter how the house sells), but on a logical pricing model that varies depending on how it sells.  This chart forms the real heart and soul of most Help-U-Sell listing consultations.

*Note:  the savings in this example are versus an ordinary broker charging, say, 6% commision on a $300,000 home.

We use the first option, the ‘You Show’ option to talk about seller involvement in the sale process through holding open houses, showing prospective buyers through and talking the listing up at work and in the neighborhood.  If they procure their own buyer in this way, then the Low Set Fee is all they pay; which means  maximum savings.

The second option, ‘We Show,’ is the place where we introduce the idea that one of the Buyer Agents in our own office may be working with a buyer for whom the home might be perfect.  If the seller opts we can include this option as well. (Notice, in this example, the broker charges a set fee on the showing side too and it’s equal to the listing set fee.  There are variations out there, but let’s remember: we are a set fee real estate company.  Shouldn’t the showing fee also be a set fee?)

Finally, option three has us putting the listing in MLS and having the seller be prepared to compensate an outside company and agent should they have a buyer and affect a sale.

Regardless of which options are selected at the time of listing, the seller will always pay based on how the house actually sells.  Even if we put it in MLS, if the seller ultimately finds his or her buyer, all they pay is the option one price: the Low Set Fee of $3,950 in the example.

There was a time when many sellers opted for  option one or one and two, choosing to stay out of MLS all together, thereby ensuring a large savings.  With the downturn in the market, however, this has become a rarity.  Most sellers, with the advice of their Help-U-Sell brokers, want to pull out all the stops when it comes to initial marketing and so go into MLS from day one.

All of this brings me back to option one.  I think it might be helpful to remember that a whole lot of marketing  happens in that option:

  1. A proper price is recommended.  Any truthful agent will admit that 75% of marketing is done the night the home is placed on the market, when the seller chooses a price.  Properly priced homes, marketed well, sell. Period.  Improperly priced homes don’t sell, regardless of how much marketing is done.   That simple Low Set Fee option comes with the credible advice of a knowledgable expert (you) on matters of pricing, terms,  fixing up, showing procedures and a multitude of others things.
  2. The brilliantly beautiful RED Help-U-Sell for sale sign is installed in the yard.
  3. Flyers on the property are created and made available inside the house and out.
  4. Directional Signs, Open House Signs, Sign-in Registers and other tools for holding an effective Open House are given to the seller along with expert coaching on how to hold a effective Open House event.
  5. The Buyer Agents in the office are briefed on the home so that they can talk intelligently about it when inquiries come into the office and do so in such a way that caller interest is maintained, even heightened.  And what do we do with these inquiries?  If the only option the seller has chosen is option one, we send them directly to the seller for showing.
  6. Dozens of photos and a virtual tour are created for the listing so that potential buyers can see it in its best light when deciding whether to proceed with a showing.
  7. The listing is input into www.helpusell.com and is available there for prospective buyers all over the world.  In addition, once on helpusell.com, the listing is syndicated out to dozens of other consumer oriented real estate websites for maximum web exposure.
  8. A QR Code for the listing is generated and made available for use on flyers and on the For Sale sign so SmartPhone enabled buyers can get the information they want, when they want it.
  9. A knowledgeable expert (again, you) is available to help with questions and concerns, to write any purchase agreement and to handle all the details of transactions processing and coordination all the way to and through a successful closing.
  10. And more . . . meaning that every office has other things they may do on an option one only listing.

Look at that list!  That’s a lot of stuff! And you know what?  That may be enough to affect a sale even in today’s tough market, a sale that could yield a very happy seller who saved thousands!

I’m not suggesting you abandon the MLS (although I am looking forward to the next generation MLS – the one that is not connected to your Board of Realtors and whose policies don’t restrict your business).  However, I’ll go back to what I said earlier:

A properly priced listing, marketed well, will sell.  Period.  And that applies no matter what the market realities.

Maybe it’s time to start offering this option more vigorously to our equity sellers who are willing to price right and are interested in saving maximum dollars.  It’s hardly ‘For Sale By Owner.’  It’s full of good marketing and advice.  And remember:  there is a direct coorelation between seller savings and seller delight; between seller delight and word-of-mouth advertising; between word-of-mouth advertising and the growth of your business.

 

 

 

 

 

Please Do The Analysis!

On today’s Power Hour Web Conference, I asked all Help-U-Sell brokers to do a little analysis.  I asked them to see just how accurate the big real estate aggregation sites (Trulia, Zillow, et al) are in their local marketplaces.  I asked that they search for homes for sale in a reasonable, manageable price range in their own Zip Code on, say, Zillow  and then to compare those results with the same search done on the MLS.  This is the same experiment the broker mentioned in my last post did – the one where she found 159 bad or questionable listings out of the 220 her search turned up on the aggregator site.  But I’m asking Help-U-Sell people to go one step further:  identify which listings on the aggregator site are not in MLS and then find out why.  Are they duplicates?  Old sold listings that have not been purged?  Are they FSBOs or broker listings not on MLS?  It’s probably an hour’s worth of effort but I think it will pay big dividends.

See, the aggregators are getting slammed right now for having bad or stale data.  It is my belief that the housing information available on your own Help-U-Sell website with an IDX feed from the local MLS is far more up to date and accurate than anything a national site could offer.  What I want to do is document that – locally, office by office.  We can then start talking with consumers about this and (hopefully) switch them off the national sites (where they are vulnerable to any agent)  and on to our own.

Please, Help-U-Sell Brokers: Get Busy!  Do this book work and share your results with me.  And if you’d like a little inspiration, check out this article from today’s Inman News

 

New Websites – New Capabilities – And a Video Primmer

The introduction of the new Help-U-Sell Broker Website Templates on March 1 has sent everyone into a dither, trying to decide exactly how to best maximize results from the new platform.  Aesthetically, they are certainly a step up:  more modern, cleaner, easier to navigate.  But the issue is:  how do you use this magnificent new beast to lure potential customers and generate leads?

First, understand that your existing content will transfer – so if you’ve done a good job of  1. Personalizing your content 2. Locallizing your content and 3. Optimizing your content, you can rest easy that what you’ve done will not be lost.  If you haven’t done those things NOW would be a good time to get started and here’s a link to a marvelous document, ’11 Days to a Great Website’ that will walk you through that process in manageable chunks.

This is a great time to revisit what you’ve done, freshen up your content as well as your look.  Remember, the key to getting found and noticed on line is LOCAL CONTENT:  frequent references to the local marketplace, neighborhoods, even local events.  Perhaps you could build a new page or two with information about upcoming events or planned development.  One of the best ways to ‘get local’ is to create custom searches by neighborhood or area or even type of property.  Tony Tramontano in Sarasota can help you create custom searches like  ‘Apache Springs Homes For Sale’ or ‘Downtown Highrise Homes for Sale’ and then embed buttons for the searches in your home page.

The thing that most people seem to be jazzed about right now is the use of Video in your website.  Understand, just as Dorothy had the ability all along to go home, just by clicking her heals, you, too have had the ability to create and embed video in your website.  We seem to be at some kind of watershed or something now, though, and everybody is working on it and doing it.  Good idea!  I’ve had so many conversations this week about how to produce website video that now I’d like to give you a very thin (but still helpful, I hope):

Primmer for Creating Video for your Website

1.  Budget a little money – you’re going to need some equipment.  While the onboard camera on your laptop might be good enough, the built in microphone almost certainly will not.  You might try using the laptop camera, but go to radio shack (or Frys if you want a better selection) and buy a lapel mic.  Also get an extension cord so that you can use the mic 6 – 10 feet away from the computer.  Your laptop should have a mic in jack, probably right in front that you can plug into.  The only trick will be to tell what ever software you use to record that you want to use THAT mic, not the one that’s built into the computer.

2.  If you’re not going to use your laptop camera – and you might get better results if you don’t – you’ll need to shop for a video camera, too.  When I do video, I use a stand-alone webcam, the Logitec Pro 9,000.  It’s got a high quality Carl Zeis lens and even has a decent built in mic (though you will still get that amateurish room ambiance with it).  I attach it to the top of my laptop and use the screen for my notes or script.  Of course, when using this webcam, I also use a lapel mic and plug it in just as described in step 1.  The other camera option is to buy an actual video camera but here is the key:  the camera MUST have a jack for an external microphone, and that’s pretty rare.  To my limited knowledge, NOBODY has come up with an onboard mic that will give you good enough quality to make the impression you want to make.  An external mic is essential (how many times can I say that?).  And, by the way, while I’ve had good results using my Logitec USB webcam with a separate lapel mic, my results using a video camera and plugging in an external mic into the computer have been . . . not so good.  I think it’s too much data for a typical computer to handle all at once.

3.  Lighting becomes the next big issue, and the good new is:  bright sunlight is good.  If you have a nice window in the room in which you are shooting and it’s a sunny day, you should be fine.  But for darker places or night time work, you’re going to need lights.  You can find really good deals on fairly substantial lights online, but you’re not building a studio.  Instead, I’d suggest you simply play with the lighting you can find around your office or home.  I’ve even done video using clip-on lights I bought at Home Depot with high wattage bulbs.  You want to use lighting to eliminate shadows on the wall behind you and across your face.

4.  As you set up, experiment with video aspect ratio.  Today everybody is shooting in HD size:  16:9. It’s a rectangular frame.  But the old-style square frame might be better suited to your video.  If you are going to be looking into (or through) the camera and talking, you  probably don’t need that wide view that takes in lots of blank wall on either side of you.  So look in your recording software for an ‘aspect ratio’ setting and see what looks best.

5.  If you are using your laptop camera or an external USB camera (like my Logitec), it will come with software for recording and this will be fine.  If you’re using a stand-alone video camera, you’ll be recording right onto the camera’s media (whatever it is) and then transferring it to your computer for editing.

6.  I have tons of editing software:  Adobe Premiere, Pinnacle Studio Ultimate, Adobe Visual Communicator, Camtasia (which is more for screen captures) and even more.  You don’t need any of that stuff.  Go online and download a copy of Windows Live Movie Maker. Bring your video into it and do what little editing you’re going to do right there.  You’ll certainly want to add a title up front and probably a caption under your face identifying you . . . maybe even a phone number at the end.  You can do all of that quickly and easily in Movie Maker and can even create fades at the beginning and end.  Actually, you can do a lot more, but since we’re talking about short video clips – 1 – 2 minutes, max – you’re going to do them in one take, so cutting, splicing and all that harder stuff will not be necessary.

7.  A note about music:  it can be nice playing softly in the background, but it shouldn’t be playing on your boom box when you record yourself.  If you want, add music in the editing phase.  You’ll pull it into Movie Maker and attach it to the video right there.  BUT:  DO NOT PULL IN THE MUSIC FROM YOUR FAVORITE CD.  It’s copy protected and you will be inviting a heap of hurt if you do it.  I have software that generates royalty free music and even will create pieces that are exactly as long as I want.  But you can also do a little web surfing for ‘Royalty Free Music’ and will find quite a bit.  Of course if your video is short and sharp enough you  probably don’t need any music at all.

7.  Probably the most important thing you need to do is GET COMFORTABLE.  Remember:  few are really going to remember the details of what you’re saying.  What they will remember is how they felt about you and how you made them feel.  So, no matter what the script, you want to look comfortable, engaging, friendly and professional.  The only way you’re going to get to that place is by practice, practice and more practice.  When you make your first few videos, set aside a couple of hours for recording, even if it’s just a 90 second piece.  You’ll want to shoot it over and over and over again.  Pretty soon, you won’t be looking at your notes.  Pretty soon you’ll be speaking your words with sincerity rather than reading them off a screen.  And here’s a little content tip:  I know you love what you’re doing and you’re very passionate about it.  That’s good – it’s your excitement and passion that will make people want to work with you.  But when you are genuinely passionate about what you do, there is also a tendency to excitedly tell everything there is to know about it.  That would be a big mistake.  Your script should be no more than 2 minutes in length and less would be better.  You should simply hit the highpoints:  You are a set fee realtor.  That means big savings.  It also means full service and powerful marketing.  You’ve been in the business for x years and helped x consumers save approximately x dollars.  and so on.

8.  I know this all sounds complicated, but it’s not.  It does require an investment of time and money, though and as always, you have to ask yourself, ‘is this the highest and best use of my time?’  So before you go do all of this, investigate what resources exist to do the production of your video(s) locally.  It may be cost effective to go into a studio or have a crew come to you for a few hours, rather than spend a few days trying to figure all of this out.  You might even find a film or television program at your local University, Community College or High School where you could get your video done inexpensively.

Here’s your checklist:

1. Decide if you’re going to shoot it yourself or have a professional do it for you.

2. Regardless what you decide in , script it, keep it short and practice, practice, practice.

3.  If you’re producing it yourself, decide which camera you’re going to use.

4.  Find an external lapel mic that will work with your video camera or computer.

5.  Choose the software you will use to record your video.

6.  Choose the software you will use to edit your video (probably Windows Live Movie Maker).

7.  Make a decision about background music and if it’s a yes, find royalty free tracks.

8.  Practice and rehearse until you look comfortable on camera. That’s the most important thing.

And FINALLY:  If you’re not on Tech Time next Tuesday (9am Pacific time) you better have a good reason!  We’ll be going through the easy migration process of getting your new site live.  As of now there are six brave souls who have done it.  Next Tuesday you’ll get a real time course in how to do it, too.

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