Category: Help-U-Sell

2010 – The Year In Review

2010 was a great year for Help-U-Sell Real Estate.
As we continue to re-tool our technology to lead the industry in systems for the broker and the consumer, we experienced a number of milestones.  The first quarter saw a buildup of excitement as we worked toward the rollout of the Help-U-Sell Broker websites in March.  They were introduced at the Tech Summit programs held in Sarasota and Las Vegas.  Brokers from across the country attended the events, got excited as they learned about the new tools, and enjoyed reconnecting with other Help-U-Sell brokers they’d not seen in many months. Rallies were also held across the country and weekly training and round table calls saw plenty of great ideas and content being shared amongst brokers.
Thank you for being part of this magnificent team.  There is no lack of passion in Help-U-Sell and that is an energizer for all of us.  Let’s all work to make each other proud in 2011!

Gains in Technology
During 2009 we moved our corporate website and email into our own control and onto our own servers. We also started working with focus groups to drive the direction of the new broker websites which were revealed at the Spring Technology Summits. Since then the broker websites have been tweaked and new features have been added.
Being able to build our websites to suit our brokers needs in today’s ever-changing internet world is just one of the many benefits of building our technology in house. This also provides us with the ability to support our products and not rely on third party vendors for maintenance and support.
Another huge benefit is the cost savings. Since these products are built at cost by Help-U-Sell and our in house development team, we do not pay any hefty profits to development companies or third party service providers.
The savings in technology cost has allowed us to offer broker websites, email and MLS integration and data hosting free of charge to our brokers, making Help-U-Sell  the first company to provide all these services to our offices in house.
The broker websites also come with a powerful Content Management System (CMS) which allows you to add and edit pages to your website. You can also easily set all the meta data for each page. This puts the power of customizing and editing your website back in your hands. Our support team is also available to help with localizing your website.
MLS Integration
In 2010 we mapped data from 41 MLS boards covering about 85% of our offices. In October we started pulling additional data fields from the MLS boards which will be vital for our January 2011 project of upgrading our search pages.  New searches will include include additional filters such as school districts, neighborhoods and counties, property views and additional types to name a few.
Tech, Roundtable and Training Calls
Early in the year, we expanded our regular twice a week broker teleconferences to three:  Tech Tuesday, Roundtable Wednesday and Training Thursday.  Each session was well attended, but the strain on brokers trying to make the various meetings was intense.
We elected a few months ago to combine the Thursday call with the one running on Wednesday.  Wednesday’s call now might be a Roundtable call, Training or a National Sales Meeting. The two hour long meetings (Tuesday and Wednesday) remain one of the principal ways we use to communicate with our team members in the field.   Rallies
A full schedule of rallies took place through the Spring, Summer and Fall.  Groups of brokers came together for updates, camaraderie and brainstorming in locations across the country, from Baltimore to Oakland to Minneapolis.  More are planned for 2nd and 3rd quarter 2011 and you are urged to attend. The information shared at the Rallies and the quality of broker-to-broker interaction is not to be missed.
NAR
In November, Help-U-Sell returned to the National Association of REALTORS Expo and Convention in New Orleans. It was the first time in three years we exhibited and we did so to announce to the world that we are ready to start selling franchises and growing the brand again.  We were well received, with a number of attendees from around the world showing interest in Help-U-Sell.
Help-U-Sell Stimulus Program
Finally, we worked through 2010 with the help of the Help-U-Sell Stimulus package.  Royalties for the year were reduced from the current 6% rate down to 5% on transactions closing between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31 for those offices that “opted in” on the Royalty Modification Program amendment.
We are pleased to announce that, given the continuing uncertainty in the market, the program will be extended through Dec. 31, 2011.  That’s right:  Royalties will remain at 5% through NEXT December!
New Members
Though we weren’t actively selling franchises in 2010, we did add a few new members to the Help-U-Sell team.
Roy Perry came in to work Elko/Spring Hill, Nevada.  Roy is a 30 year veteran of the industry and is off to a great start.
David Reading recently converted his office in Ventura, CA, recognizing that a strong brand and consumer offering could help him grow as the market begins to turn.
Long time Help-U-Sell Franchisee, Tammy Whitehead, returned to the brand after a hiatus of several years.  Her office in Riverside, CA is doing remarkably well and she continues to be energized every day.

What’s coming in 2011

Franchise Sales
As mentioned earlier, 2011 will be a year of Franchise Sales and growth for Help-U-Sell.  Ron McCoy has created a plan to reach out to the Realtor community that includes email marketing, targeting and even some print advertising.  If you know of a broker in a neighboring town who might be an asset to the organization, please share that with Ron McCoy.  We want to be careful in our growth to bring in the best brokers possible and you are in the best position to know them.
University
As we gear up for Franchise Sales, we’ve put more energy and resources into completing the new Help-U-Sell University.  The new program will be administered online and will include content delivered via multimedia modules with coaching follow-up all the way.  University will also be activity driven so that the new member can complete the learning process with business already taking place.  Jeanne Strayer, whom many of you know is working with us to complete this big project.
Rallies
We will be announcing a Spring – Fall rally series in the first part of the year and will be giving you enough time to make plans and travel arrangements.  Even if you are a couple of hundred miles away, most areas have a regional airline that makes it affordable to go to the meeting early in the morning and return home in the evening.
Retreats
Finally, we’re planning a Broker Retreat for late Fall/early Winter.  Though it’s been a few years since we held such an event, they were always well worth the investment of time, energy and money in the past.  Help-U-Sell Brokers from around the country will come into a location for a couple of days of meetings and fellowship.  We will have details for you by the end of first quarter 2011.
Technology
• We will be adding a free virtual tour service in January that will be added to Listing module in the OMS.
• There will be a Seller back end and tools accessed via the brokers website.
• We will upgrade the Advance Search function on HelpUSell.com and all broker websites.
• A new Leads Management Module is scheduled for March 2011.
• The Drip Email Campaign module is due in June.
• The new Help-U-Sell University will be available online.
• We started with re-branding the OMS and it should be completed before the new year.
Industry Update
From an industry perspective, things appear to be slowly improving around the country.  Interest rates and prices seem to have hit rock bottom, making this an excellent time to buy and consumers seem to be getting that message.  Retail sales are up, the stock market is improving and real estate seems to be waking up.  Just as most of our offices did better in 2010 in 2009, we expect 2011 to be incrementally better as well.

More

The truth about the real estate business is there are not enough transactions to go around.  If you were to take the total number of closed sides each year and divide them equally between all of the real estate agents and brokers in the business . . . well, everyone would starve.

I remember years ago, when I moved my office from one part of town to another, all the other brokers were friendly.  They acted like they were glad to see me and said things like, ‘there’s plenty of business for everybody.’  Then, of course, they went home to stick pins their voodoo dolls and hope for my demise —  because there’s NOT enough business for everyone.  I knew it;  they knew it.  If I was going to make it I was going to have to get more than my share. . . and that meant I was going to have to take it away from them.

Getting more than your share . . . more listings, more buyers, more sales . . . that’s what Help-U-Sell is all about.  It’s  a strategy for getting more and ultimately for becoming a dominant force in your local marketplace.

More.  It’s basic business.  All businesses, from the corner grocery store to the Fortune 500 multi-national live and die by their ability to get more and do more.  In business school we learn there are two measures of success in business:  Market Share and Profitability.  Market Share is about getting more.  Profitability is about being efficient.

In days gone by, doing more usually meant having more people, more feet on the street, a bigger operation.  But people are expensive, and building market share by hiring more and more people usually results in low profitability.

That’s why businesses over the past 20 years have focused on downsizing and on automation and systems.  Nobody wants a pink slip, but let’s face it:  General Motors builds a much better, safer, more fuel efficient automobile today with far fewer people than it did 20 years ago.

Sadly, the evolution of business has had little impact on the ordinary real estate world, where success is usually defined as having more salespeople than your competitors.  The broker’s job is not to sell more and more real estate but rather to recruit more and more agents (who in theory will take care of all that selling).  With per agent productivity hovering somewhere below five deals a year and commission splits still in the stratosphere, you might recruit the entire population of, say, Washington State to be your salesforce and still not make a profit!

It doesn’t have to be that way.  Just as other businesses have evolved to where doing more is a function of fewer people using systems to manage an ever increasing flow of business, the real estate business can evolve.  With the Help-U-Sell consumer offering and operating system, you can get more and do more with fewer people and lower cost.

Last year, I stopped into Chino Hills, California and saw Patrick Wood.  He’s in an attractive 750 square foot Help-U-Sell office in a strip center.  It’s a small operation:  just him, his assistant, Val and a couple of buyer agents.  But, together, they routinely out produce whole offices of ordinary real estate agents.  While the competition is closing offices and consolidating, Pat and his team are focused on getting more, doing more and building a business worth having.

Help-U-Sell is simple.  It is a handful of carefully constructed systems that work together to produce a predictable result:  a successful business – one that does more than its share of transactions.  The systems are vastly different from what’s common in the ordinary real estate world, and the two simply don’t mix.  Evaluating your Help-U-Sell business on the criteria of your agent-oriented competitors is like trying to tell how tall you are by stepping on the scale.

It’s 2011.  It’s once again time to know who we are, what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.  Simplify.  Focus on systems:  systems for generating leads, systems for capturing, incubating and managing those leads, systems for staffing, for listing and for managing transactions.  And remember:  it’s all about more.

ETM Angst

Working with Jeanne on University today, we got into the marketing plan.  I explained that for the past several years, the Help-U-Sell ETM (Entire Target Market Mailer) had fallen from general use.  It was that M part that was causing pushback:  Mailer.  Mailing thousands of marketing pieces regularly enough for them to have impact was proving cost prohibitive in the down market.  Some altered the delivery method, replacing the stamp with a poly bag that could be hung on a door knob, but by-and-large, most just quit doing them.

I understand this.  One of the guiding principals of Help-U-Sell is that we constantly evaluate the cost of our marketing pieces against the leads they produce, and if the ETM was not producing leads and the cost was high, the right thing to do would be to move on to something else.  After all, there are market realities at play here:  John Powell told us if he did a blanket mailer in Tucson, a large portion of them would arrive at vacant houses; other brokers asserted that the ETM was not effective in a short sale market.

It all made sense until Jeanne responded to my statement.  ‘If most brokers are not doing ETMs ,’ she asked, ‘How is that message getting out there.’

Bam!

She had reminded me that the ETM is not just a marketing piece.  It’s a message.  It’s our identity.  It’s one of the principle ways we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace.  We can’t simply abandon that without an effective and more efficient replacement.  To do so would drop us into the soup and mire of mere discounters!

Remember the message?

  1. We are HERE
  2. People use our service
  3. It works and they save money

Remember how we get that across in an ETM?

  • Pictures and descriptions of homes for sale
  • At least 1/3 of the listings feature a ‘Sold and Saved’ banner
  • At least 1 customer testimonial with photo
  • The Easy Way (probably on the back)
  • Our Guarantee

All of these elements work together to stake claim to a small piece of mental real estate between the ears of the consumers in your marketplace:  that we are different, that we get the job done, and we represent savings. 

I really want to hear from you:

Are you doing a regular ETM?  If so, how, how often, and what results are you getting?

Are you doing something similar but delivering it in an alternate way?

Do you have ideas about how we might adapt the ETM to today’s reality?

If you are not doing an ETM, how are you getting the message out there?

Help-U-Sell in a Nutshell

I am working with Jeanne Strayer — whom most of you know — on the next generation Help-U-Sell University.  Jeanne is a nationally recognized Instructional Designer and Educational Technologist.  She’s brilliant and comes with the added benefit of having worked with Help-U-Sell for a number of years; so she already understands us.

As we wrestle with content, we’ve identified a need for a concise description of Help-U-Sell, who we are and what we do.  We got a bit of a start on that with the ‘Help-U-Sell for Sellers,’ ‘Help-U-Sell for Brokers’ pieces we created for the NAR Expo (they are posted below).  But those pieces didn’t quite accomplish what we wanted; so here’s a first attempt at Help-U-Sell In A Nutshell.

  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.  In fact, the superior offer makes taking listings much easier.
  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.

There are four critical areas that underpin this vision.  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. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  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 a small, 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 your 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 Don Taylor, about a year ago.  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.

NAR: Arrival Day

Ron McCoy and I arrived in New Orleans today, armed and ready for the National Association of Realtors Convention.  We are here to man the Help-U-Sell booth, to proclaim to the world that we are very much here and to kindle as much interest in our brand and unique operating system as possible.  In short:  we are here to conquer the world!   (Or at least take one more step forward in that process).

Ron arrived early and was able to get into the exhibit area and see our booth: he tells me it’s primo.    I got a first look at the final brochures we worked so hard to get ready in time for this show.  They rock.

So tonight there wasn’t much to do other than anticipate . . . and eat dinner!  We went to the French Market Grill where Michael, the bartender I’ve known from many previous visits, holds forth.  We ate catfish and jambalaya and some kind of corn slop-sui that tasted like the Brunswick Stew they make up in heaven.  It was delectable to say the least.

Tomorrow we meet 30,000 fellow Realtors, all looking for an answer, a new idea, a better way.  They need look no further than our beautiful double-wide booth.  There has never been a better time for Help-U-Sell.

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