Category: Listings

Can We Be Honest About Virtual Tours?

Well, they certainly are pretty, aren’t they? And they’ve become very easy to do, too.  You just take a bunch of pictures, load them into whatever tool you’re using, set them to pan and zoom and add a little light music and wha-lah!  You have an impressive goo-gah for your website.  Your seller will be proud!

And I think we’re all missing the boat.

First, if your pan and zoom virtual tour is on your website and you also uploaded all of the individual photos used to make the tour (and you should), why would anyone watch the tour?  A visitor has far more control just clicking through the photos.  Second, the kind of tour I’m describing here adds little in the way of search engine optimization.  Yes you can load up the description with keywords, but that’s only going to take you so far.

There is another way to do a virtual tour that is not only more interesting to website visitors but also far more interesting to search engines.  Begin by shooting video.  Yes, video – moving pictures, not pictures that move.  If you video tape yourself walking through the house describing easily overlooked features as you go, you’ll be creating something new and of value for your website visitor, not just a re-packaging of what ‘s already there.  Plus (and this is the most important part), when indexing your site, Google will actually transcribe your audio track, turning it into searchable text.  If your walk-talk is loaded with neighborhood references and key words, you will up your chances of potential buyers finding your listing online.

Shoot your video, pull it into your computer and do a little editing, add titles and even a soft music track if you want and then upload it to YouTube.  YouTube will give you a little code to embed the video into your listing so that it can be played right there.

Here’s another idea for using video on your listing:  why not let the Sellers lead you through talking about what they like most about the house?  I know that’s pretty radical.  But we Help-U-Sell folk have always championed the idea that things usually go well if buyer and seller are allowed to talk to one another. Why not start that process early by humanizing your seller on video?  Once again, Google is going to transcribe whatever you upload  which will be very beneficial from a search engine standpoint.

So far we’ve talked about using video to market your listings and make you more visible on the web.  But why not broaden the focus?  Why not take the half dozen or so key neighborhoods in your area and do a video profile of each.  Create a script, describe the demographics and amenities, shoot video of typical housing and area infrastructure.  When Google transcribes that kind of video, it’s going to find reference after reference to the local market and your ability to have people find you on the web will go up significantly.

Is there a learning curve?  Yes, of course.  The first such tour you do will be the hardest.  It will get much easier after that.  Here are your steps:

  • Get a video recording device.  You probably need something more than your cell phone.  Most decent still cameras today shoot video as well and mine (a Panasonic Lumix) shoots better video than my actual video camera!
  • Learn how to record, how to take video off your camera and onto your computer
  • Choose and learn some editing software.  Windows has Movie Maker and if you search you’ll find many more, some free.  I like Pinnacle Studio.  At $80 +/- it is feature rich and easy to use.
  • Go to YouTube.com and open an account.  Its free.
  • Shoot and edit your first video, save it to your hard drive (probably as an .AVI file) and then upload it to YouTube.
Mike Klein at Help-U-Sell Prescott has done a good job of using video.  He has several informative pieces about the local market and home buying realities.  He’s also using the pan and zoom tours I’m kind of bashing here.  And truth is:  they’d be fine if instead of just music they had a voice track loaded with carefully chosen key words.  Here is Mike’s YouTube channel:  Help-U-Sell Prescott
Although this is not a Help-U-Sell agent, here is an example of an off-the-cuff video tour.  I think scripting might have helped here, particularly in weaving in key words and neighborhood specific references – something that is very important for Search Engine Optimizaiton.

“What Am I Not Getting?” Commissions Demystified

We Help-U-Sell folk often get mis-tagged as ‘Discounters.’  We take umbrage at that notion because we don’t offer a stripped down version of ordinary real estate (which is what a discounter would do).  Instead, we offer a completely different model, a different approach, one that is more efficient and – surprise! – costs less.  Usually, the ‘discounter’ tag comes courtesy of our competitors who can be quite vocal in defending their turf.  But sometimes, on seeing how much they’ll save with Help-U-Sell, consumers also wonder how we do it.  They’ll say:

‘So, this looks like a great deal, but what am I giving up?  What am I not getting that I’d get with a ‘regular’ real estate company?’

The question is not what you’re not getting;  it’s why are they charging you so much for the same thing we do for a low set fee?

Of course there’s an explanation.  It makes no sense from a consumer or business point of view, but it is an explanation.  It starts with what you’re paying for when you engage a real estate professional.  You could make a list several dozen items long but it boils down to just four things:

  • Marketing
  • Securing the Buyer
  • Representation
  • Managing the transaction details
At Help-U-Sell our brokers take responsibility for three of those four items.  Marketing, Representation and Managing the Details are all the purview of our brokers and though they might delegate bits and pieces out to qualified assistants, they don’t generally assign those tasks to agents.  The Help-U-Sell low set fee pays for those three things, and if the seller locates the buyer for his or her property that’s all they pay and it’s usually a huge savings over a percentage based commission.

How often do sellers find their own buyers?  You’d be surprised.  It’s not unusual for a seller to go to work two weeks after listing, learn of a co-worker transferring in for whom their house would be perfect.  It’s also not unusual for one of the neighbors to drop by with friends and family in tow.  We help our sellers find their own buyers by coaching them on doing their own open houses and letting them help distribute property information.

The ordinary broker charges a steep percentage based commission because his business model involves  paying four different people to do the same thing we do with one.  He has to be prepared to pay his company, his listing agent, the selling company and the selling company’s agent.  So the seller ends up paying not one, but four commissions!

And here’s where it gets really interesting.  Where we allow for the possibility of a seller finding his or her own buyer, in ordinary real estate, the four commission commission is the commission:  you pay the full fare no matter how the house sells.

What’s fun in this is that our listing brokers usually make more on a sold listing charging a low set fee than their competitors who charge a bloated commission.  The Help-U-Sell broker doesn’t have to split the dollar four ways!

The four commission situation is at the heart of the ordinary real estate world.  It probably won’t change anytime soon because there are about 1 million licensed real estate brokers and agents who depend on that model for their livelihood.  The industry will change when enough consumers find out they don’t have to do it that way.

Here’s a nice footnote to this discussion.  We haven’t talked much about the fourth item, locating the Buyer.  Yes, we allow our sellers the option of finding their own buyer and if they do they will experience maximum savings.  If one of the agents in our office finds the buyer, the seller pays the set fee plus a showing fee – which still ends up being much less than the four commission guys will charge.  If the seller wants, we’ll even put the listing in the MLS and offer it for sale through outside brokers.  If one of them brings the buyer, the seller pays our set fee plus whatever commissions will be necessary to take care of the selling agent and broker – but that’s still just three commissions, not four and it almost always costs less than what an ordinary broker charges.

Best of all, regardless of whether the seller elects to offer the house for sale through our agents or even through the MLS, if in the end he finds the buyer himself, the low set fee is all he pays.  It’s a great system.

ADDENDUM (The next day)
I’ve been asked to ‘demystify’ this post.  At Help-U-Sell we all understand what I’m talking about – but sometimes those on the outside need a little more explanation.

When you hire an ordinary real estate agent (who will likely charge a percentage based commission), you’re agreeing to pay not one, but four commissions:
  • 1 for the listing company
  • 1 for the listing agent
  • 1 for the selling company
  • 1 for the selling agent
You’ll be charged the same percentage based commission regardless of whether it takes all four commissions to get the job done, with any un-allocated overage going to the listing company and agent.


When you list with Help-U-Sell you get flexible pricing based on how the property sells.  Your low set fee covers marketing, representation and managing the transaction details.  If you locate your own buyer – which happens more than you think – you pay just that:  one commission.

If one of the buyer agents in the Help-U-Sell office locates the buyer, you pay two commissions – the low set fee to the Help-U-Sell office plus a showing fee that will compensate the buyer agent.

If an outside MLS agent brings the buyer, you pay three commissions:  the low set fee for the Help-U-Sell office, plus a commission for the selling company and agent.

With Help-U-Sell you may pay one, two or three commissions depending on how your house sells, but never four.

With ordinary real estate you pay four no matter how your house sells.

Make sense?

Why Percentage Based Real Estate Commissions Are Nuts

Here’s a rough draft of a video we’re working on for part of the new Help-U-Sell University program.  The goal of the piece is to give new members an understanding of the power of Set Fee pricing.  I think it has broader appeal, though.  What do you think?

Help-U-Sell Marketing

I’ve been stewing over Help-U-Sell Marketing and how to present it powerfully to a potential Seller.

By nature it is already powerful compared to what goes on in ordinary offices, where marketing/advertising has largely become the responsibility of individual agents.   It didn’t use to be that way.  A long time ago, real estate companies created, orchestrated and paid for marketing to benefit their agents.  But back then, agents were usually paid 50% – 60% of the earned commission.  Today, most ordinary brokers start newbies out at more than that and 75%-80% splits are not uncommon.  When ordinary companies gave in to the pressure to pay more to their agents, they had to cut somewhere to make up the difference, and marketing budgets took the biggest hit.

So at brand X down the street, you have dozens of little agents whizzing around willy-nilly ‘advertising’ on Craig’s List here and a homes magazine there, and dropping an open house ad in the local rag when the seller gets antsy.  There’s no coordination, no maximization of the power of INVENTORY, no grand design to marketing, and the results are negligible.

At Help-U-Sell, marketing is the purview  of the Broker.  It is an office responsibility.  Our brokers do deep research into the local marketplace so that they can make informed decisions about where, when and how to market.  They design, implement, monitor and constantly refine a coordinated marketing plan that generates a strong flow of buyer leads into the office.  New listings are simply plugged in to the marketing program and marketing featuring any of the office listings will benefit all of the office listings.   It is the strong flow of leads that causes our listings to sell.

We used to talk with potential sellers about the components of the marketing plan:  ETMs, Brags, Weekly Lists, Bootlegs et.al.  and while I’m sure those things are important today, I think sellers want to hear more and more about the Internet.  Since everyone knows that buyers are all over the Internet looking for houses, sellers want to know what you’re doing to get their property noticed in that arena.

I think saying you syndicate to 28 websites and sharing a graphic of what those websites are is helpful.  But it’s not a differentiator.  Most main line real estate companies are syndicating in similar fashion.  (By the way:  this does not mean you shouldn’t talk about it and show the graphic.  You should.  It’s still impressive.)  I think what’s more important is to show how you’ve maximized your web presence to be most attractive to the Internet buyer.

Here:  have some fun with this:  Open Google and type in ‘ Sell Real Estate’.  The top few responses are paid ads.  But after that, Help-U-Sell is often the first main-line real estate company that shows up.  Every time I’ve ever done it we are in the middle or near the top of the first page.  Of course there’s a reason:  our name is Help-U-Sell real estate!

But if you’ve done your homework, if you localized and optimized your website, if you’ve bought good domain names to point to your website, if you’ve created new pages of localized content for your website and so on, there should be search strings that have your office appearing near the top of the first page.  Why not spend a little time trying to discover what they are?  Then start sharing those search string results with sellers when you sit down for a listing consultation.

Want to see someone doing a very good job of this?  Go to Google and search for ‘Santa Rosa Homes.’  See who the first several results are.  Now try ‘Santa Rosa Real Estate.’  Maurine Grisso has created several websites, each targeted at a different kind of consumer in her marketplace, each optimized and localized;  and she’s further boosted their effectiveness with a little pay-per-click.  She goes onto to the Internet and casts a net made up of all the places a home buyer might find her, and comes back with leads.  This is great stuff.  And it’s the kind of thing sellers want to see today.

Help-U-Sell for Sellers

Home sellers love Help-U-Sell.  Not only do they save with our low set fee pricing, they also experience a freedom of choice in the process that they didn’t know possible.

For us, one size definitely does not fit all, and sellers may opt to go into the MLS (and offer a commission to a selling broker) – or not; to hold their own open houses (thus increasing the probability they will produce their own buyer and save the greatest amount of money) – or not; or to offer a selling fee to the Buyers’ Agents in our own offices – or not.  The best part is:  no matter what options they choose, in the end, they will pay a fee based on how the sale was made.  A seller choosing to go into MLS and offer a co-op commission who then finds his or her own buyer will pay only our low set fee, not the set fee plus the optional fee to the outside broker.

While commissions and Set Fees are negotiable, many traditional real estate firms charge as much as 6% of the selling price.  On a $300,000 sale, that could be $18,000!  With the Help-U-Sell System there are at least three ways a home could sell:

Note:  the ,950 Set Fee used in this example is just that: an example.  Set Fees vary from office to office and market to market. Set Fees and Commissions are always negotiable.

So, what does a seller get for the Low Set Fee?  Marketing power (listing on HelpuSell.com and dozens of syndicated sites, signage and inclusion in our ongoing local marketing) along with our negotiating and transaction management skills.  Many times this is enough to create a satisfactory sale.  Sometimes the additional involvement of the buyers’ agents in our offices and/or the MLS is required.  In any case, sellers almost always save over what they’d have to pay a traditional broker to sell their home.

With tightening markets and falling prices, Help-U-Sell makes even more sense today.  Our fee model enables sellers to price their property more competitively and retain more of their equity.  It’s a great solution!

Download a PDF of Help-U-Sell for Sellers

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