Charging Less, Making More

The ability to go into the marketplace with a financially attractive offer for consumers AND walk away from the transaction with more dollars than your more traditional counterparts is at the heart of Help-U-Sell’s appeal to brokers.

Think like a traditional broker for a moment.

  • The success of the office is built on one thing:  your ability to attract and retain productive agents.
  • Your primary tool in accomplishing this is commission split — you know to be successful you need agents and to get them, you’ll need to pay well.
  • Unfortunately, the health of your bottom line is dependent on how many commission dollars you retain after splitting with your agents.

Put all of that in a hat and shake it up and you’ve got  . . . a mess!  Your formula for success is at war with itself! No wonder ordinary real estate offices suffer from embarrassingly low profitability if they make a profit at all (despite the fact that consumers think they’re paid way too much!).

Help-U-Sell takes dynamite to all of that nonsense.  First thing we do is demystify the listing process.  We toss out the notion that personality is what sellers buy when they list their property for sale.  Bunk! we say.  Listing is a logical thing.  If you present a system with a track record of success for a fee that is reasonable, most people jump at it.  Instead of two hour marathons where traditional agents warble on about how wonderful they are, listing presentations become simple, short and matter-of-fact:  here’s what we do, here’s what you do and this is what it costs.  Listing is so easy in Help-U-Sell that, well . . . even a Broker could do it.  That’s why we take the listing side of the business out of the agents’ hands.

We believe the listing side of the business belongs to the company, and the broker or an assistant (that’s different than an agent) takes all listings.  The agent’s role is on the buyer side, where we can afford to split commissions.  But, since we create all the leads for our buyer agents through our large number of listings and the power of our well-conceived marketing, we don’t have to give away the farm to get and keep salespeople.  We’re not asking them to call on FSBOS or Expireds, to knock doors or make cold calls to find listings.  We’re not asking them to master a slick listing presentation or memorize responses to two dozen common seller objections.  We just want them to take the prospects we’ve created and find them a property.   Good agents thrive at Help-U-Sell.

Back to the listing side;  here’s how the dollars break down:

Here’s where the ‘yeah-buts’ start to echo from the mouths of ordinary agents.  Yeah-but, with no listing agent the seller’s getting less than full service! Says who?  Full service is getting the property sold for the greatest walk-away dollars in the right time frame — and we do that every day.  Yeah-but, you get what you pay for!  When you list with me I’m going to actively market your property until it’s sold! Um, let’s see . . . ‘actively market‘ . . . I guess that means put a sign in yard and a listing in the MLS, which then syndicates to a couple dozen Internet sites, right?  In my experience that’s what ordinary agents do when they get a listing.  In my Help-U-Sell office, we have a comprehensive marketing plan, orchestrated, monitored and constantly improved by . . . ME.  It’s not just a bunch of agents running around willy-nilly, making it up as they go along on every listing they take.  I could go on with the ‘yeah-buts,‘ but we try to keep these posts to a ten minute read or less.

We are a very proud group, and rightfully so.  We’ve taken the fluff and snake oil out of selling real estate and converted the process to logical systems that get results.  We’ve done it in a way that saves consumers thousands of dollars and makes our brokers a nice profit.  Who could ask for anything more?

Day 12

If you attended the Tech Summit a couple of weeks ago, you’re working through the “11 Days to a Great Website.”  It’s a nifty doc that gives step by step instructions on how to customize and optimize your new Help-U-Sell website in 30 minutes to an hour a day over an eleven day period.  I just saw a real estate news story that made me realize there’s a 12th day.

RISMedia, in an article about declining consumer confidence in REALTORS, mentioned that 50% of Internet leads are NOT responded to . . . ever.   For those that get a response, the average time is 54 hours.  54 hours!  Yet, over and over, we read that a quick response is essential to successfully converting a web lead.

That’s a huge opportunity gap.  The entire industry is failing here and you can distinguish yourself and garner more business if you’re willing to devote 30 minutes today to systematizing your response to website leads.

First, understand how your website leads come about.  On your various websites — certainly on your new Help-U-Sell office site — consumers are given a number of ways in which to contact you.  These include:

  • Asking for more information on a property
  • Signing up for ‘First to Know’
  • Filling in the ‘Contact the Agent’ form
  • Registering and/or saving a property

In these cases, the leads come to you via email.  That’s fine, but you’re inundated with email and often don’t scan your messages well enough to see the leads;  you also have a spam filter that can toss almost anything into a black hole in your email client (i.e. Outlook);  and you’re rarely sitting in your office in front of your computer when leads come in anyway.

Here’s how to take control of that.  Go to each website that produces leads for you and act like a consumer.  Create a fake lead for yourself every way that you can create one on each website.  Then go to your email client and get your mail.  Where did the leads go?  Into your spam box?  Then adjust your spam filter to always allow these messages to go to your Inbox.  What do the subject lines look like?  How will you recognize similar messages as leads when they hit your Inbox?  Is there something in the subject line or in the ‘From’ address that is unique enough to permit you to create a rule that puts these kinds of messages into their own new folder in your email client?

Finally, and this is MOST important: How will you get these messages when you are out and about?  At this moment, the best solution is to have a Smart Phone and to configure it to get your mail frequently.  That’s easy with the Blackberry:  it is constantly connected to your email server and receives messages within moments of them being sent.  Other phones can be configured to get your mail regularly and frequently.  If you can catch that website lead on your phone and then get back to them within minutes of their request, you will be way ahead in converting it.  Your task is to call your moblie phone provider and find out how to configure your phone for this purpose.

Once that’s done, it’s time to think about how you will respond.  If you get a phone number, you’re going to want to call back immediately — but what ‘Item of Value’ will you be offering to enable you to continue the conversation with this lead?  If you only get an email address, what standard response can you craft now for use with these leads, and how will you quickly personalize it every time you send it?

This is not the new frontier, folks.  It’s today’s reality.  We’re going to have to take control of it if we are going to survive and thrive.

(On a completely unrelated topic — well, not completely, I guess — check out this great review of the new Help-U-Sell Mobi website, optimized for mobile phones.)

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