Category: Help-U-Sell

How to Rule the (Real Estate) World in 10 Easy Steps

In chronological order:

  1. Go after Listing market share (Get more than your share of listings,  have more signs out than your competitors)
  2. Get Lisitng market share by offering a better deal than everyone else (it’s the low set fee, remember?)
  3. Use your growing Listing market share to build consumer awareness and interest.  (In other words maximize signage through seller involvement, exploit marketing opportunities for things like ‘arounds.’)
  4. Become expert on capturing buyer inquiries and faithfully track and follow-up with in-bound calls (there is no such thing as a ‘throw-away’ lead).
  5. Hire staff to help you take care of the large number of buyer leads your growing Listing market share is creating.
  6. Hold your staff (and yourself) accountable.  Not everyone is up to performing at the standard you set.  Your job is not to save them but to move them out and find someone who can do it.
  7. Start counting closed sides and comparing your results with the MLS:  your TRUE market share, the one based on closed sides, should be growing.
  8. Become the easiest company in town to work with.  That means know your stuff and play nice.  Just don’t stop being who you are.
  9. Study your bottom line (by the way:  it’s probably irrelevant until you get to this point).  What could you do to create more revenue and minimize expenses?  Where can you be more efficient?
  10. Look for ways to give back to your community.  It has enriched you, now find ways to make it better.

NOW:  Let’s take a closer look at Step 1!

(Un) Balance Sheet

Imagine an Ordinary (Traditional) Real Estate Office:  Acme Realty . . .

Average Sale Price:  $300,000

Average Commission per closed side:  3% ($9,000)

20 agents averaging 1/2 a closed side per month (some do more most do less — and the ‘average’ is way above what’s typical today)

Average Agent Commission Split:  70%

Expenses:

  • Rent:  $5,000
  • Utilities: $500
  • Office Equipment:  $500
  • Supplies:  $500
  • Admin:  $4,000
  • Management:  $7,000 (Most Brokers do this job 24/7 and never budget for it . . . which is voodoo economics to the max)
  • Dues:  $300
  • Conventions and Training:  $500
  • Insurance:  $300
  • Marketing:  $5,000
  • Total:  $23,600/ month

Production:

10 closed sides/month X $9,000 GCI per closed side = $90,000 GCI/month

Less 8% Franchise Royalty + Mass Ad Fund:  $7,200 (and you’d be crazy to start a business today without a recognized brand and support)

Less 70% to Agents:  $57,960

Net Operating Income (Company Dollar):  $24,840

Less Expenses: $23,600

Net Profit, Before Taxes:  $1,240 = 1.37% . . . which could easily be wiped out if the copy machine breaks or one of the closings falls through.

Is there any question that the ‘Ordinary’ real estate business is broken???

Un-Dumbing the Industry

I am very encouraged today.  A little elated, actually.  Yesterday, John Powell and I met with seven members of the Help-U-Sell family in San Diego and Riverside Counties.  Our conversation was free-wheeling but seemed to focus mostly on marketing and deal-doing strategies.  As we got into the realm of Short Sales I had to sit back, and I started to smile to myself.  These guys, the survivors, know their stuff!

Short Sales are complicated things.  There are dozens of lenders, each with their own requirements, varying industry and government regulations to consider as well as the vagaries of investors on the secondary market.  To work them and work them in a way that makes them worthwhile, there is a huge volume of information a real estate professional must know and manage.  The level of detail, understanding and street-wise know how I heard when these folks talked about what they’re doing was astounding.

It took me WAY BACK (I mean, way WAY BACK) to 1982, when interest rates edged close to 17% and the only way you survived was by knowing financing, contracts, and sales strategies inside and out.  We called it ‘creative financing,’ but it was really just knowing your business so well you could make things happen even under impossible circumstances.  It was a great time to be a REALTOR, a time of pride, because you knew if the person sitting across the table from you had a REALTOR pin on their lapel and an HP 12-C calculator cranked up, he or she was probably just as smart as you and the two of you were going to put that deal together.

The boom years were a fun ride, like the latest offering at Six Flags.  But, like that Six Flags ride, the pace was fast and the lines of people pressing to get in on the good thing were long.  Few practitioners took the time to learn their business. Most just gripped the safety bar and screamed.   We (as an industry) got dumber and dumber.  It was almost cartoon comical . . .

Picture the agent and buyer standing outside the house that’s just been toured.  The buyer says, ‘So, if I put 20% down, what would my payment be on a 30 year fixed?’  The agent hems and haws, scratches his head and finally answers, ‘I don’t know . . . let me call my lender.’ That was 2005.

In the churning and collapse of our markets, the weaker ones, the ones who didn’t learn how to put a and b together to make c, fell by the wayside.  They didn’t have the depth of knowledge they needed to make it through this mess.  That’s why the ranks of REALTORS across the country are way down.  The survivors are a wonderful bunch of very sharp people.  Many are hanging on by their wits and their toenails waiting for the wheel to turn but from what I see, their grip is tenacious and they will make it around that bend.

Suddenly, the REALTOR is a hero again.

New Website Features

We just got finished with another Tech Time Tuesday webinar with Robert Stevens.  Robbie shared some new functionality on the Help-U-Sell Broker websites that I think we should highlight here.  But first, some basics:

Your listings get on to your (new)  Help-U-Sell office website in one of two ways.  You either enter them manually via OMS or you input them into your MLS and it comes to your office site via the IDX feed you have set up.  (Note:  we are talking only about your new Help-U-Sell office site, the one that Help-U-Sell corporate hosts and maintains.  We’re not talking about your New Home Page website or your Point2 website or any other you may have.)

Generally speaking, your Help-U-Sell office website offers more capacity for images and greater functionality than most MLS’s, so once the listing comes into your website via IDX, you may elect to edit it in OMS, add pictures, virtual tours, or tag it as Help-U-Sell Homebuyer Stimulus eligible.  Here’s where the new functionality comes in.

In OMS, in the Listings area, when you access your listings, you’ll see a coded icon at the far left of the list of properties.  A grey circle with an ‘A’ in it means ‘Automatic’.  These are listings that have NOT had any changes made to them after they came over via IDX.  Because there have been no changes made, a price change input into MLS will automatically be reflected on your Help-U-Sell office website.  Note that in these cases, price will be the only change made in MLS that will update your Help-U-Sell office website.  Changes to status or comments made in MLS will not be reflected — and you’ll need to enter them manually in OMS to change your listing on your office website.

If, however, you make any change to your listing after it comes over via IDX — change the price or status, add pictures, edit comments, correct an error — the icon code on the left side of your list of properties will change to a red circle with the letter ‘M’ inside, ‘M’ standing for Manual.  From that point forward,  a price change input into MLS will also need to be input manually in OMS for the change to reflect on your Help-U-Sell office website.

I know this is a little confusing but it all gets down to the system you orchestrate in your office for listings and listing maintenance.  As a Broker, I would simply add a step to any change in a listing:  after making the change in MLS, make it again in OMS.  That way I will know that everything is up to date.  If, the change you’re making is a price change, when you get into OMS and see that the listing in question has the grey circle ‘A’ next to it you may decide to wait a day for the IDX feed to make the change.  (Me?  I’m going to make the change in OMS right then and there so that I know it’s done and it reflects immediately.)

Generally speaking, IDX feeds come in once a day, often in the wee hours of the morning.  So a price change made in MLS on Tuesday afternoon will likely come over until Wednesday morning (again, we’re assuming this is a listing tagged with the grey circle ‘A’, with no changes having been made in OMS.).

The other great bit of news on today’s call had to do with content creation and management on your office website.  You’re now able to add new pages of content to your new Help-U-Sell office website by going into the content manager in OMS.  This exciting development means you can go hyper-local with your office website, highlighting some of the nuances that affect your marketplace.  Perhaps your State or Municipality has a special program to encourage home ownership;  that might deserve its own page.  Perhaps your office is participating in a big local charity event; that might be another page.  Remember that every page of your website is indexed by the search engines so each page represents an opportunity to attract more visitors to your site and to generate more leads for your business.

The new Help-U-Sell office websites continue to  grow and improve . . . it’s an exciting process.  If you’re not tuning in to Tech Time Tuesday each week, you’re missing out on some great stuff.  Thanks, Robbie and team!  We appreciate the great work your doing for us.

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