Category: Marketing

Do-It-Yourself

Most people don’t want to attempt the sale of their own property without professional help.  That’s smart.  There are so many things that can go wrong, so many landmines on that path; and these are BIG things that can cost a lot.  Still, when the alternative of paying, say . . . $15,000 or more in sales commissions is considered, some elect to brave it on their own.  And sometimes they’re even successful.  Most of them, however, say they’d never do that again!

The problem with Do-It-Yourself is the definition of ‘it.’  What is it you are going to do yourself?  The whole thing?  Pricing? Preparation? Marketing? Screening? Showing? Open houses? Contracts? Arranging financing? Handling details? Solving problems?

Frankly, I don’t like that definition of ‘It.’  It’s too big.

But, what if we defined ‘It‘ as simply being those things any capable homeowner could do for him or herself?  What if we pull out all of the technical aspects of selling a home, all of the tasks that take specific knowledge and experience, and shortened our list of ‘It‘ to:

  • Showing the home (I know:  50+ years of REALTOR-speak has conditioned us all to believe we can’t do this well, but, come on:  who knows your property better than you?)
  • Holding open houses

Now, that’s an ‘It‘ I can live with! Especially if it means ‘It‘ can save me big bucks!

And, guess what:  it can.

You see, one of the many things Don Taylor, the founder of Help-U-Sell, questioned about the Ordinary real estate business way back in 1976, was the role of real estate agents in the typical office and the expense associated with having them.  Instead of a real estate office with 50 or 100 agents stumbling around doing half a dozen deals a year each (which, by the way, is a true picture of what an Ordinary real estate office is:  that’s  normal for them), he wanted a handful of agents, focused on a specific job description, doing four or more times the average production of agents elsewhere.  To realize this vision, he looked at the list of things agents have to do in a real estate sale – which is similar to our big list of of ‘It‘ above – and tried to pare it down.

He recognized that most agents spend huge amounts of time opening doors for people and sitting in open houses.  Overheard at a REALTOR meeting:

What did you do last Saturday?

What a day!  I had to show one of my listings in the morning – someone called and wanted to see it.  I drove 30 minutes to get there, waited another 30 minutes  . . . and they didn’t show up.  So, that was my morning.  Then I had an open house in the afternoon, which meant I needed to start an hour early putting out signs and making sure the house was ready to show .  And then it rained all afternoon, remember?  Hard!  I sat there for four hours with my lemonade and cookies and didn’t see another living person.  

Gee, why didn’t you just close up shop and go home?

Believe me, I wanted to, but I promised the seller two open houses and this was the day they chose, so I was stuck.

Don decided that a typical homeowner – carefully prepped by a sharp agent – could easily show his or her own house and, with a little more preparation, hold an open house.  That would save a lot of time in a typical agent’s career – and saving time saves money.  Whose money, you ask?  In Don Taylor’s mind, it saved the homeowner money.  After all it was the homeowner taking over these simple tasks that steal agents’ time.  With a seller participating in this fashion he would need fewer agents and could charge less.

There’s more to how Help-U-Sell brokers are able to charge less and still make more than their Ordinary counterparts.  There is a ton of difference in how Help-U-Sell offices approach the business – marketing, lead capture, incubation, transaction processing – but for now, we’ll stay focused on this one aspect:  Seller Participation.

Think about it for a moment.  You’re a home seller.  It’s a beautiful Thursday afternoon.  You’re home, working in the yard.  The house is neat and clean . . . what the heck!  Why not put out the Open House sign and a few directionals.

Meanwhile, Ms. P, always looking for her dream home, takes a new route from the grocery store and finds your open house.  After a bit of friendly chatting, you get her name and contact information (your agent prepped you well), and take her through the house, which she loves.  She wants more detail and might want to make an offer.  You hand her your broker’s card and tell her he will be in touch.  You wave goodbye.

You call your broker, who calls Ms. P, has her come to the office to answer her questions and have her pre-qualified for a mortgage.  Then he brings her back to the house for a more in-depth tour.  That evening, he comes back with her offer and earnest money check.

You found the buyer yourself.  There was no outside broker or agent involved.  When the sale closes, you’re only going to have to pay your Help-U-Sell Low Set Fee.  It is a successful sale – and you saved thousands of dollars in commissions!

That’s a Do It Yourself I can live with!

 

Google Adwords and Analytics for Real Estate

On the Help-U-Sell Power Hour today, Ron McCoy talked with the group about the importance of monitoring website performance using Google Analytics.  It’s a fairly simple process to set up, especially for Help-U-Sell brokers who have an easy to use field in their website back-end for the Google code and a tech support team to help.

What Google Analytics will tell you is:  how many visitors find your website over a given time, how many pages they visit, how long they stay, where they came from (location and referrer), and so on.  It’s great information that can help you evaluate and upgrade your website.

Once it’s set up and running, once the website is localized and optimized,  Analytics is great for monitoring the effectiveness of your marketing.  In today’s online universe, much of your marketing should drive consumers to your website.  If that’s the intent of a marketing piece, you should see a spike in visitors when it runs.

I look at Analytics for The Set Fee Blog every day.  Day in – day out, the numbers are fairly consistent.  My traffic goes down a bit when I go through a dry spell and don’t post for days.  It goes up a bit when I post something that strikes a chord with readers and they share it with others.  But I can also see increases when I market the blog.

I ran a campaign a couple of weeks ago using Facebook Ads.  For $100 (I’m on a budget!), a little side panel ad questioning why real estate commissions are so high appeared on the Facebook pages of consumers who have expressed an interest in real estate.  The ad made about 300,000 impressions and garnered about 100 ‘clicks.’

Analytics for the period showed a nice jump in visitors, page views and time on site.  Of course those 100 people were in the mix, but so were all the people with whom they shared the specific post I linked the ad to:  Real Estate Commissions Revisited.  My Analytics traffic was up enough to convince me (once again) that a few hundred dollars tossed at Facebook Ads once in awhile is well worth the expense!

Here’s an idea for you.  You probably have a card or coupon for $100 worth of free Google AdWords in your desk drawer or in your email.  I say probably because I have several just because I have a real estate license and a corporation.  If you don’t have one, just call Google or send them a request for one (they give them away like candy).  Tell them you want to evaluate the effectiveness of AdWords in driving traffic to your website and they’ll give you the credit.

Then decide what kind of traffic you want, buyers or sellers.  Me?  I want sellers because listings are what’s in demand in my marketplace.  But that’s a problem, too, because I really don’t have a good seller capture page on my website.  So I need to work with Robbie and Peter in Sarasota to build that page.  It ought to look like an ETM . . . OR, hey, maybe it should look like THIS , but including a contact form, too.  The page ought to tell what I do for sellers and include testimonials from happy customers.  Once that’s done I will have a page to drive sellers to.

Now I can go to Google AdWords and create an ad.  But what should I advertise?  Hmmm.  How about:  ‘How to sell your San Diego home and save thousands’ or something similar.  Since you have $100 to spend, set the budget at something like $12 a day – that will get you about a week’s worth of placement.  And then start watching Analytics.  Do you see an increase in traffic to that landing page?  Now, check your own office analytics (your incoming call/inquiry logs):  of the traffic that gets to your landing page, how many actually contact your office.

This little exercise will not only get you familiar with Google Analytics, it will also help you evaluate the value of Google Adwords.

As an aside, given my limited experience, I like Facebook Ads a little better than Google AdWords because their targeting mechanism seems more detailed and precise.  But, to my knowledge, Facebook isn’t routinely giving away $100 of Ad credit and Google is.  Since this is a test and a learning experience, why not do it as cheaply as possible?  If it works for you, then invest a couple hundred bucks in a Facebook campaign targeting people around your office and see how that performs on Analytics.

 

Phone Photography

For most of us, our phones have become our cameras.  A few years ago this would have seemed silly, but much better lenses and a proliferation of photo-fixing apps have greatly diminished the line between the point and shoot camera and the phone.

Now, phone evolution has taken another step forward.  Photojojo.com is showcasing dozens of new accessories for your SmartPhone camera that make it even more useful.  REALTORS, take note!  Many of these items are seemingly custom made for your business!  For example:

self powered cell phone spot light for bright videos and photos from photojojo.com

The Pocket Spotlight:  Perfect for lighting up that dark corner.  And can you imagine how it would improve your phone-shot video?  It has its own battery, so it won’t drain your phone (that’s a good thing).  And for $10 more you get a set of flash filters, too.

Clip-on Lenses Galore! Including the one lens you must have for taking interior photos: the wide-angle! They even have a fish-eye, but that’s probably too severe for real estate.

camlapse cell phone camera rotater for 360 degree images from photojojo.com

The Camlapse, which enables you to take perfect 360 degree photos, ideal for some forms of virtual tours.  I saw a regular camera device that did this demonstrated at NAR a few years back for about $400.  This little cutie costs just $30!

external storage for IPhone, additional GBs and easy interface with computer from photojojo.com

The IPhone Flash Drive Adapter!  I know, I know:  your old-fashioned IPhone is too cool to take a micro SD card (which would enable you to bump up your memory by many gigabites).  This cool device has an IPhone plug on one end, a USB plug on the other and 8 or 16 GB of storage in between!  It’s a little more pricey ($100 – $150), but if you made the mistake of buying an Apple product on your phone upgrade date (wink-wink- nudge-nudge), here’s your solution!

In addition they have tons of cool accessories for SLR cameras and even some interesting new wrinkles for, get this, Poloroid photography:

Poloroid Z2300 from photojojo.com

So get your credit card out – I know you’re going to need it – and get on over to photojojo.com.  Your phone photography will be soo much better!

How to Use Facebook to Generate Leads

Forget about spending hours posting fascinating real estate information, looking for people to ‘Friend’ and creating an online persona. I know: that’s what all the ‘Gurus’ are telling you to do. And I’m sure it can work.   But I’m too impatient for that.  I want instant gratification.  I want to start a marketing effort today and see the results this week.  You can do that with Facebook and the following steps will show you how.

  1. Go to your office website content management system (CMS), or to your tech person if you have one, and build a great landing page for customers.  What kind of customers?  Well, the page could be directed at Buyers or Sellers, but since every real estate website is directed to Buyers (search, search, search) and since listings are the name of the game, I’m going to suggest you build one for Sellers.  What should be on it?  A brief description of what you do and why you’re better than anyone else in the business, testimonials from real people you’ve helped with happy photos, and a contact form that ties directly to your cell phone.
  2. Go to your Facebook page.  Look for the gear icon in the upper right corner and click it.  You’ll get a drop-down menu and you should select ‘Create Ad.’  You’re going to create a little sidebar ad to run on Facebook that will drive people to the landing page you just created.
  3. Locate a good duty free graphic that will draw the eye and craft an intriguing statement in the space allotted.  Tip:  put your phone number in the ad.  It is remarkable how many people will phone you rather than click the link in your ad – and, since this is pay-per-click, if they don’t click, you don’t pay!
  4. This is the fun part.  Target your ad to hit the Facebook pages of the people you want to reach.  Maybe you’ll choose a geography:  say, a 5 mile radius of your office.  Maybe you’ll choose an age range:  25 – 55.  Maybe you’ll choose any number of other criteria.  Each time you select a criteria, you’ll see the size of your potential audience shrink.  That’s a good thing.  The best marketing is target marketing and as you fine tune and shrink your target audience, the effectiveness of your ad will increase.
  5. Set a click-rate.  How much are you willing to pay when a consumer clicks your ad?  Facebook will suggest a range and it will often be fairly large, say:  $1.50 – $10 a click.  Whatever you choose can be edited at any time, so I suggest starting in the lower half of the range, ideally just south of the mid-point.  What you’re really setting is the MAX you’ll pay for a click because the click rate varies depending on how many other ads are competing for the same audience at the same time.  Maybe you’ll bid $3.00 a click.  When you check your stats,  you’ll discover you’re only paying, on average, $2.05 a click.
  6. Set a campaign duration and total budget.  I would suggest your first campaign should run 1 – 2 weeks and have a budget of, oh . . . $200.  That will be enough for you to see some results and make adjustments.
  7. As the campaign runs, check your stats daily, even two or three times a day.  Are  you getting enough clicks to exhaust your budget in the time allotted?  If not, maybe you should up your click rate.
  8. Meanwhile, meticulously track your results.  Of the clicks that get to  your landing page, how many fill in the inquiry form?  How many call you?  And what about the people who never click, but call the number in the ad?  How many of them are there?

You see, this is how you develop leads using Facebook:  you treat it like any other advertising medium . . . because that’s what it is.   I love Facebook pay-per-click advertising because it can be so highly targeted.  $2.00 might seem like a lot to pay for a click, until you recognize that it is a click originating within your target market, from a person who fits the description you chose, who was sufficiently motivated by your teaser ad to investigate.  It’s a bargain!

Here’s the key: What can you offer in your teaser ad to get viewers to your Landing Page?  If you are Help-U-Sell, that ought to be easy.  (Picture of house ‘thinking’) Headline:  Thinking of Selling?  Body: See how much you can save!  (555) 543-2109.  

And, by the way: though I dissed Facebook’s ability to build your business in the first paragraph, truth is: it’s a great tool for staying in touch with past clients. Please exploit that aspect to the fullest. But try a little pay-per-click to generate NEW business.
 

What is a Sales Commission?

Sales commissions are so common in business that I sometimes wonder if we haven’t forgotten what they are all about.

While there are several ways to compute a sales commission – paid as a percentage of gross or of profit, paid on revenue over an agreed level, paid as a set fee per unit and so on – most are calculated on a percentage basis. The historical background on this goes back to the time when the maker of a thing wanted to focus on the making and get someone else to take the burden of developing a customer base and selling the thing.

Because the salesperson did not have a vested interest in the product or the company – he or she was just ‘the help’ – sales commissions were used as a motivational tool: the more you sell, the more you make. Some organizations took this idea to the max, graduating their commission scale upwards as a salesperson’s production increased. Others, fearing that good salespeople might make more than CEOs, put a cap on commissions (and usually drove their best salespeople away in the process).

The situation in real estate is a little squirrely. Technically, you pay your real estate BROKER (not agent) a commission when your home sells. Usually it is a percent of the sales price (which, of course, makes no sense at all), and it is intended to motivate your broker to work hard securing you the best possible offer on your property. But, in reality, most sellers never meet their broker. The person they deal with is an agent who works for the broker. The broker pays the agent a ‘split’ of the commission the seller pays the broker, and uses the ‘split’ as a means of motivating the agent.

That’s the way it’s been for decades.

But this is 2013. Home selling has changed:

  • It no longer takes an arm and a leg to sell a properly priced listing. The Internet has made powerful marketing affordable, even cheap.
  • The mystery of getting a house sold has evaporated as consumers have gained access to information previously held from them and systems have replaced personalities in the selling process.
  • As a result, the real estate superhero salesperson has lost his/her battle with Kryptonite. There really is no magic in the home selling process anymore. It’s pretty much: price it right, plug it into a marketing system that produces results and negotiate a good deal.
  • The value of an agent today has more to do with negotiating that good deal, looking out for his or her client’s interests (representation), transaction processing and problem resolution as the sale progresses to closing. It’s not so much about ‘selling.’

What I question is why we are paying our brokers a commission?  A commission is something you use to MOTIVATE a salesperson.  The broker today is NOT a salesperson.  In most ordinary real estate offices s/he is a glorified admin – supporting the efforts of his or her salespeople and keeping the office infrastructure working.  The ordinary broker today is someone we should be paying a FEE to, not a commission.  A FEE is something you pay a professional for handling a specialized task:  you pay an attorney a FEE, you pay an accountant a FEE, why not your real estate broker?

If there is a true salesperson in this equation it is the real estate salesperson, who works for the broker . . . but s/he is not a salesperson in the way you are probably thinking.  You’re probably thinking, ‘Yes!  It’s that salesperson who is going to sell my house, not the broker!’  But we’ve already established that you don’t really ‘sell’ homes; homes sell when they are priced properly and plugged into an effective marketing program.  The salesperson in an ordinary real estate company sells something other than homes.  What they sell is the services of the broker to consumers.  The broker hires salespeople not because s/he needs someone who knows how to sell a house, but because s/he needs someone to convince new sellers and buyers to do business with the company.

Seem like a muddled mess?  It is.  We have an antiquated business model at the heart of every ordinary real estate company.  They keep trying to dress it up as ‘new!’ but, as we used to say down South, ‘you can put lipstick on that pig, but it’ll still just be a pig.’

There is another, newer way to do business that makes sense, is completely effective and costs less.  It is Help-U-Sell, where you pay a broker a Set FEE to sell your home.  Because selling a properly priced home is not rocket science, the broker and his or her support staff and office systems ‘sell’ your home.  You’re not paying a bloated percentage based commission so that the broker can then turn around and compensate a salesperson NOT for selling the house but for bringing in new business to the company.  That merry-go-round you’ve been riding all these years is in a gazebo lined with fun-house mirrors:  the distortion and dizziness are numbing.  Get off now, regain your footing and return to logic.  Call Help-U-Sell and ask, ‘How do you guys work?’  You’ll probably be delighted with the answer.

NOTE: I keep talking about ORDINARY brokers and ORDINARY real estate companies. I realize it would be easy for almost any broker or agent with any company to imply that I couldn’t possibly be talking about THEM because they really are different. So let me clarify: probably more than 90% of the real estate offices operating in The United States today are ORDINARY. They are offices where the broker’s number one job is NOT selling real estate, but rather recruiting agents. They are offices that put the agent at the center, developing endless programs to aid salespeople, not consumers. They are offices that charge consumers a lofty percentage based commission not because there is a relationship between the commission and getting the home sold, but rather because they need all of that cash to pay the salespeople the huge ‘splits’ required to keep them. It’s all about accents. Ordinary Office = accent on the agent. Extraordinary Office = accent on the consumer (And there is no better way to put the accent on the consumer than to charge a logical low set fee for the service involved in selling a home).

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