Category: Help-U-Sell

The Joy of John (and Maria)

I am in Tucson working with John Powell on a revision of the Help-U-Sell Operations Manual. While it’s not particularly out-of-date at its core, there have been many changes in the industry since the last rewrite. The down market has fostered innovation and brought a slew of new strategies to the model, and the explosion of Internet marketing has spawned new wrinkles that need to be explored. So, we are updating.

The project has given me an opportunity to spend time in John and Maria’s office and it’s been such an eye opener. You will recall that the Powells opened this office in mid-2008, in the worst real estate market in history, in one of the hardest hit areas in the country. From a dead start they turned the corner and were in the black in five months. Now, a little more than a year later, they just put their 18th sale for the month on the board. They have two support staff and four agents. I was blown away by the level of activity I saw. Everybody was busy all day long.

I tried to get a handle on why this office was humming along so well when so many others are struggling and I think I gained a little insight. First, there is acknowledgment and complete acceptance of reality. There is no whining about how bad the market is or how tough short sales are or how difficult lenders have become. That’s just reality. It’s the ballpark where we play, and it’s beyond our control.  Now, therefore, what are we going to do to make our business work here?

There’s a crystal clear focus on what we’re doing. Short Sales and REOs are a large part of the market, so guess what? . . . we go after short sales and REOs. We study, study, study the short sale process, we take classes, we get certified as short sale experts and then we deliver. We have a much higher success rate with Short Sales than our competitors and word spreads. We go after REOs the only way we can: we do BPO after BPO and register, register, register on all of those websites. But then we do something our competitors don’t do: we call the asset manager a day or two after we submit the BPO and ask, ‘How was our BPO? Did it meet your needs? What can we do better?’ Over time, this additional conversation becomes a relationship and THAT’S where that first REO listing comes from.

I can see, for John and Maria, the business is simple. There’s not a lot of confusion, clutter and doubt about what they’re doing. They generate leads, develop business, work it well and ask for more. This contrasts with so many offices I see where the business is hugely complicated, where confusion and doubt play a key role. There’s none of that here.

Jeff Gets Brawney

Jeff Braun, Help-U-Sell broker in Union Grove, Wisconsin, has been in coaching with Ron McCoy for more than a year.  The weekly sessions last an hour, max, and are intended to give Jeff an ear and an opportunity to think through the challenges he faces in his specific marketplace.  Those challenges include a smaller market, lower average sale prices, and fewer transactions than many Help-U-Sell brokers enjoy.

Last month, Jeff and Ron decided a price reduction campaign was in order.  Jeff had the listings — more than 30 — but they weren’t selling.  So he systematically went to each seller seeking a reduction . . . and was successful with nine.  Today, as a direct result, he has 10 pending transactions and is on cloud nine.  His plan is to now go back to the many who resisted the first time around and show them what happened with those who did reduce their price.

In this case:  Better Prices = More Sales = Better Market Visibility = More Listings = More Leads = More Sales.  It’s a great snowball effect.  Congratulations, Jeff!

Did You Stop Marketing? Or Did Marketing Change?

Help-U-Sell Marketing was always intense and usually direct mail oriented.  You carefully chose your 15,000 +/- households and then hit them over and over with ETMS and Brag Cards, Free Weekly Lists and Save Thousands ads.  The price tag for all of this was large but the pay off (if you chose your target market wisely) was huge.  I talked with a former franchisee last month who described his operation as a machine.  He set up his marketing and hired an assistant whose job was to handle the in bound seller inquiries and book him five listing appointments a day.  That’s all.

And it worked wonderfully . . . until the housing market began to unravel in late 2005.

Suddenly sellers were faced with declining values, a weakening economy, cutbacks, layoffs and a tightening credit.  Buyers weren’t buying and sellers couldn’t sell.  The power of that wonderful marketing machine faltered too.  By 2007, you could spend thousands of dollars each month on marketing and get very little return.  Offices that hadn’t worked buyers, who didn’t develop a client base, who never learned how to talk with an expired listing or a for sale by owner — in other words:  the ones who had relied on marketing driven listings alone to generate revenue — began to fail.

At the same time, the survivors began to emerge.  Sharp, scrappy and determined, these brokers had the guts to look at the new reality with new eyes.  The realized that, just as the market had changed, so had the consumer.  Those brave souls who ventured into the market were doing their homework and doing it online.  Buyers were in control and spent months on the Internet, looking hat houses before they were ready to ink a deal.  Putting two and two together, smart Help-U-Sell brokers realized that marketing to sellers was no longer efficient and went after buyers where the buyers were hanging out:  the Internet.  They invested in websites, search engine optimization, social networking, blogs and more.

They also went back to school.  They remembered that every real estate transaction was about solving problems, a buyer’s problems and a seller’s problems.  But the problems had changed dramatically from the days when five listing appointments a day could make you a star.  Buyers were having difficulty getting financing and sellers were upside down.  We had to learn mortgage lending to identify those  buyers we could help  and we had to learn short sales to minimize the damage to our sellers.  Help-U-Sell brokers became navigators, pointing the way for buyers and sellers to make it through the new maze of market realities.

Direct mail marketing didn’t die — it just went on hiatus.  We used the break to learn how to work with new tools to generate leads and, with perfect timing, new Help-U-Sell websites bloomed on the Internet.

Today, the real estate market is starting to wake up.  I know this because investors are in an absolute feeding frenzy and have been for almost a year.  Investors always set the bottom of the market — when they come out to play up ticks in activity and value are not far away.  Just as the market improves, we also have to start ratcheting up our marketing.  Brag cards are a great way to start — even if they are hung on doorknobs rather than delivered in mailboxes.  A carefully targeted Penny Saver or super market mailer campaign might also make good sense.  Remember:  we survived the downturn by adapting.  We changed the way we marketed.  We will flourish in the upturn by doing the same thing.

The Internet was (and continues to be)  all about reaching buyers.  It’s time to start reaching sellers, too — and nobody knows how to do that better than we do.

Reporting in OMS

Just a reminder:  This is ‘Learn How to Report Using OMS’ week.  Every day at 9am, Pacific (12 noon, Eastern), we’re doing 15 minute webinars on how to use the new system to report transactions.  I wanted to do this because I kept talking to brokers who weren’t reporting because they just hadn’t taken the time to learn how (!).  Others were sending in spreadsheets and sometimes even hand scrawled notes (!).  Here’s why it’s important to report using OMS:

  • It preserves your information so that it is available for office management reports.  Today we only have a couple of reports that mostly list what’s been done.  As we move forward, however, more and better reports with valuable KPI information will be available and will become a strong tool in monitoring the progress of your business and planning.
  • It’s quicker, easier and more accurate than any other method you might try.
  • It is required.  Really:  it is the only acceptable method of reporting.
  • It’s fun!  Ok, maybe I exaggerate.

There are a couple ways to learn how to do this, the easiest being:  attend one of the webinars this week.  If that doesn’t fit your schedule, a guide is on the Download Library under Technology Summit Documents, in the OMS Manual folder.  It is the ‘Sales Module’.

You received an invitation in your email this past weekend with the webinar login information.  If you can’t find it, contact anyone at Corporate or email support@helpusell.com and we’ll get you set up.

(In case you missed it:  OMS stands for Office Management System.)

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