Category: Marketing

Mistakes Real Estate Agents Make

My last post was all about brokers – Help-U-Sell Brokers in particular. This one is different not just because it’s about agents, but because it’s about ALL real estate agents.

Real estate agents are . . . what? En Mass, they are overpaid, unproductive, ineffective and blah blah blah. But that’s not the whole story. The good ones are really good. They are worth their weight in real estate paperwork. In fact, good real estate agents are heroes. Trouble is, there’s just not that many of them out there. Most are mediocre at best, hoping to make quick and easy money selling a very expensive commodity.

So how do you tell if your agent is good or mediocre? Start with production. The average agent in America today does about 7 deals a year. That’s hideous. Not just for the agent, who on average will make about $34,000 on that kind of production, but also for the consumer who gets stuck with an agent who does so little he/she can’t possibly be as sharp or up to date on the business – and particularly on how to solve transaction problems – as someone doing, say, twice as many deals. So ask your potential agent: ‘How many deals did you do last year?’ You should hear something in double digits and ideally, the first one should probably be a 2 or better. But don’t fool yourself into thinking the one with the largest number of deals done in the previous year must be the best agent. Not always true. In fact, not usually true. You’re looking for the one who not only has decent production, but has clients raving about their buying or selling experience. Ask to see testimonial letters – the good guys have tons of them – or do what you’d do if your were hiring an unfamiliar babysitter: ask for references . . . and then call them.

Ordinary real estate agents make money by securing clients – either buyers or sellers – and working with them to affect transactions. Agents work on behalf of Brokers. In most cases Agents can’t do anything without their Broker’s supervision and approval. When you list your home for sale, you may think you’re listing with Sally Agent, but you’re really listing with Bill Broker. Sally is just there on behalf of Bill. Commissions are paid to the Broker, who then splits the commission with the agent (there are exceptions to this compensation scheme, but they are rare).

Ok, so there are three paragraphs of consumer education about real estate agents. Now let’s get on to the mistakes agents make.

#1 – Thinking that their commission split is the most important factor in their decision to affiliate with one broker over another. You know those ‘average’ agents doing 7 deals a year? In many markets around the country they can command 70% of the commission dollars coming into the broker. Sometimes even more. Many agents simply shop and negotiate with brokers until they find one who will pay them the highest split . . . so they can make the most money on the 7 transactions they will do each year. It’s as if the high commission split affirms them as successful and desirable as real estate agents, somehow blotting out the fact they they do only 7 deals a year. What they don’t seem to understand is that a broker who will pay them big splits on lousy production will probably bring NOTHING to the table to help them build and develop their businesses. A broker who gives 7 out of every 10 dollars away before he/she even begins to pay the bills isn’t going to have money for marketing, for support staff, for lead generation . . . for anything except the legal ‘blessing’ of the agent’s transactions.

It doesn’t have to be that way. In truth, the relationship between broker and agent can be very powerful. If the broker is really IN the real estate business, s/he attacks the local market strategically. S/he studies it daily, schemes and plots, builds and pays for a comprehensive marketing program that produces leads, leads, leads. The broker builds an operation so powerful that s/he needs help to handle all of the business it has created! That’s where agents come in. They are the ‘help,’ the ones who take all of the business the broker has created and turn it into sales. Wonderful! But, a broker who is taking responsibility for marketing, for generating leads, for expansion and business development cannot afford to pay huge splits even to good agents. And S/he can’t afford to keep the 7 deal a year crowd around either: they blow many more leads than they close! So the agent who works for such a broker probably has a lower split: 50% – 60%, but has the benefit of a steady stream of business created by the broker. That’s a value for value relationship; everyone wins. The broker keeps enough commission on each deal to make a profit and the agent does far more production and makes much more money, too!

Look. My dad got licensed to sell real estate in 1967. He went to work for Ted Tamminga, a local broker who had placed an ad for ‘Help’ in the newspaper. Ted had been in business for 30 years and was a fixture in the community. His connections and his marketing produced dozens of leads every week, leads he was too busy to handle. He was missing opportunities because he was maxed out. So, my dad went to work for him to handle the overflow. Ted threw him the crumbs, the buyers with problems, the sellers with unrealistic expectations; and he paid my dad 50%. Dad worked for Ted for 4 years, I think; and by that time he had his own client base (all of those leads Ted had fed him), and he opened his own shop. Ted was delighted with the help and wished him well . . . and placed another ad in the newspaper.

Now THAT’s a broker/agent relationship that makes sense, don’t you think? A little like the master/apprentice relationship in the olde days. My dad built a client base on Ted’s lead generation effectiveness and had the benefit of 30 years of experience as he learned how to run a successful real estate company. That’s worth far more than the measly 20 percentage points more he might have made in commission split paid by a broker on life-support in 2013!

Agents, when you shop companies, it’s not about split. Split is almost irrelevant. It’s about the Broker: what business is s/he in? Is s/he in the recruiting business? Constantly chasing and hiring ever more agents (and watching the failures sulk out the back door)? Is s/he in the training business, spending most of his/her time working with the non-productive agents on staff in hopes of magically making them into super stars (and ignoring the truly productive people)? You want a broker in the real estate business, one driven to achieve ever increasing market share in a clearly defined target market (that coincides with your own). One who masters in marketing, studies it, tracks it, plans it, executes it and tweaks it. One who believes job one is lead generation. (Why lead generation? Because it is leads that will serve his listed sellers the best).

If you can find one of those, you don’t even have to ask what the split is. It doesn’t matter. You’re going to make more, do more transactions, and have a heck of a lot of fun in the process!

#2 – Getting caught up in the real estate ‘cycle.’ Many agents wake up and realize they have no business; so they do what they should: prospect, prospect prospect . . . which leads to a few listings . . . which take time energy and effort, especially when the offers come in. The prospecting stops because the agent is too busy with listings and offers. And then s/he is too busy processing the ensuing transactions to prospect for new business, until all the transactions close and then . . . YIKES! they have to start all over. Their production (and their income) looks like a mountain range: peak – valley – peak – valley. The answer is systems. Prospecting is neither mysterious nor magical. It’s just an activity, a routine, repeatable process. It can become a system that runs almost on auto pilot, but for that happen it must be given sacred space: time that is scheduled, set aside and inviolable on the daily calendar. It must continue even when all hell is breaking lose in other aspects of the business. Taking care of listings, presenting offers and shepherding transactions to closing must also continue every day no matter what. And, hopefully, you’re seeing the impossibility of all this ‘continuing.’ Unless the agent is willing to hire and develop help to get it all done, to take on servicing, buyers, transaction processing, etc., s/he will be limited in the number of transactions s/he can do.

But, once again: it doesn’t have to be that way.

There are rare brokers who take the burden of lead generation off the agent’s shoulders, who do the prospecting for listings and who have systems in place for servicing and transaction processing. Agents in these special offices simply take the buyer leads the office has generated and turn them into pending sales – which are handed off to the processing entity. The lucky agent then goes back and gets another office generated buyer lead and repeats the process. It’s a heavenly, non-cyclical real estate existence!

#3 – Believing their office is one big happy family. Uh-huh. In ordinary real estate offices, it’s every man (and/or woman) for himself. With leads in short supply, and everyone competing for the same customer . . . well, don’t leave your new buyer’s phone number laying around on your desk, ok? Let’s reality test that ‘one big happy family’ idea. How many licensed agents are in your local Board of REALTORS? Got the number? Great. Now, how many transactions were done in your local Board/MLS last year? Got it? Ok. Now, divide the number of transactions by the number of licensees. You’ll probably get a number like 5 or 6. That’s how many transactions each agent would do if the leads were distributed equally. WAKE UP! There is not enough business to support all the people trying to make a living in real estate, not in your Board, not in your MLS, and not in your office! Your ‘happy family’ is probably more like ‘Cutthroat Island’ (by the way: that’s a great movie!). Only in offices where the broker takes responsibility for generating the leads and then takes ownership of them (assigning them to capable agents and holding those agents accountable) can this kind of gunslinger ethic be avoided.

#4 – Thinking that if they just keep doing what they did last year and the year before, they’ll do better this year. That’s the definition of insanity, remember? Doing the same thing and expecting a different result! The problem is most agents are stuck in a dead and/or false paradigm. The picture of what their career should look like is in stark contradiction to reality. The only way out is to adopt a new paradigm . . . which is very hard for anyone to do in even the most favorable circumstances. Until the agent is willing to question every assumption they’ve made about their career: the function and value of a Broker, their own value in a transaction, what needs to be done to sell a listing and so on, only then can the old paradigm begin to crumble. And truth is: few are willing to be so bold, so brave.

It almost goes without saying (I mean: consider the source, right?), but the solution to all of this agent angst is Help-U-Sell. That idealized broker referred to above actually exists. S/he runs a Help-U-Sell office. S/he understands that job one is to generate leads, which are assigned to agents. Agents whose job description is focused and manageable. If you’re wondering why your real estate career sucks, why you never can seem to get ahead, why not do something different? Question your own attitudes about commission splits and lead generation and then go see a Help-U-Sell broker. It could be one of those life changing events.

Mistakes Real Estate Brokers Make

I’ve been away from Help-U-Sell for three months now. I am starting to see the forest, not so much the trees. It’s an interesting, uncluttered perspective. I found myself this morning thinking about some of the common mistakes Help-U-Sell Brokers make in their quest to dominate the (real estate) world. Here are a few that jump out at me:

Not adding help when it’s needed. Help-U-Sell brokers are very passionate about what they do. The mission of saving consumers money and changing the way real estate is sold is sometimes so precious that they have difficulty delegating parts of the job to others. But, without that delegation, there is a limit on how many consumers you can actually help. Staffing in a Help-U-Sell office is driven by one metric: overwhelm. That’s the trigger that it’s time for help, and it’s true regardless of whether we’re looking for admin help or sales help. If administrative tasks are keeping you from doing the marketing you need to do or from getting that new listing in a timely fashion, it’s time to hire an admin assistant. If you’re spending all of you time in the office because you’re bogged down processing transactions, it’s time to hire a transaction coordinator. If you’re losing buyer leads, not getting back to inquiries in time and so on, it’s time to look for buyers agents. We never recruit to build our businesses. We recruit to take care of the business we’ve already created. If you are overwhelmed, if you are dropping plates, try to identify the area that’s sapping your current resources and hire someone to free you up to do what you do best: meet the people.

Not doing a thorough market analysis before spending money on marketing. Our approach to marketing is very different than the one employed by ordinary brokers. We never spend a dime unless there is a reasonable chance for a return, and we never spend unless we can track the results. Predicting a reasonable return by gut or by listening to the salesperson is the way ordinary brokers do this. At Help-U-Sell we massage our neighborhood numbers until they are granular as the sand at the shore. We look at turnover rates, ratios of equity sellers to REOs/Short Sales, date of purchase and so on, and we look at it by Zip, by neighborhood and by carrier route. We target our marketing to the segments that are performing best in those key areas. But before we pull the trigger on marketing, we install a powerful inquiry/intake process that will result in lead capture when the marketing produces. I worked in ordinary real estate for decades before I came to Help-U-Sell, and I can tell you I never saw an ordinary broker approach marketing in this logical manner.

Cutting back on marketing or not marketing at all when cash is tight. Help-U-Sell is a powerful brand with powerful consumer recognition and acceptance. Many people know we sell real estate and save people money. Owning that identity in the minds of consumers is very powerful. It’s an enhancer, and makes every bit of marketing you do more effective. Unfortunately, if you don’t do something to keep your logo in front of consumers in the local marketplace every day, all of that power will evaporate. They’ll want to sell, they’ll want to save, but they won’t know you’re there! Visibility is job one in marketing, and it must be managed even in the leanest of markets.

Not plugging into the network. We are a dispersed group. We’re all over the country, and it’s rare that we have two offices within easy driving distance of one another. Most of our offices are like little islands of sanity in an ocean of real estate lunatics. It’s unfortunate, but sometimes, in moments of weakness, sane Help-U-Sell brokers become overwhelmed by the the babble of their ordinary competitors and (YIKES!) start to question their own program. Sometimes they even begin to tweak or flat out change what they’re doing because some six percenter did a good bashing job on them. There is one great remedy for this and it’s tapping into the network. We meet every Tuesday for tech issues and every Wednesday for general broker issues. The meetings are lively and crisp. I can think of no better way to plug in, stay focused and motivated than to attend theses meetings whenever you can. Hearing Richard Cricchio or Mark Dosik talk about what they are doing is golden. And how cool is it that YOU get to participate in the design of the next great website enhancement just by showing up to an occasional teleconference?

Looking at agents like an ordinary broker. Let me remind you of some differences . . . . The ordinary broker recruits agents to build his/her business. The Help-U-Sell broker builds his/her business through careful marketing and adds agents to help take care of the business that has been created. The ordinary broker expects his/her agents to do a journeyman’s job on every aspect of residential real estate: listing, selling, prospecting, processing, marketing and so on. The Help-U-Sell broker expects his agents to take the buyer leads the marketing program has created and convert them into happy customers. One of the reasons you can charge consumers LESS than ordinary brokers and still make MORE on your transactions than they do is that you don’t have a listing agent to pay. The broker (or his assistant) takes all listings. Listings belong to the office, not to an individual agent. Abundant listings produced by the low set fee offer produce a strong stream of buyer leads – leads created by the office and owned by the office and assigned to agents. It’s a very different perspective!

Back to basics:

1. We go into the market with a superior offer for home sellers: Sell fast, save thousands with our Low Set Fee pricing.

2. We carefully target where we spend resources establishing our message based on where we are most likely to get a return.

3. We are absolutely deadly on buyer inquiries. We practice, practice, perfect, and fine tune how we respond, how we communicate value and competence quickly, and we convert more of our hard earned leads than anyone else.

4. We hire agents to take care of the business we’ve created. It’s a great, focused, fun job, that’s not for most agents. That’s why we monitor our agent’s performance and sometime de-hire or replace those who don’t seem able to convert the leads they are given.

(If you want to know how to go back to basics in greater detail, HERE is a series of 10 posts that will show you how to rule the real estate world)

Not Charging a Set Fee? . . . Um. .

Help-U-Sell brokers: are you still charging a percentage based commission or using some kind of sliding scale in your pricing? I know there are a few of you out there and I understand why.

We went through our own ‘Dark Ages’ around 2006-2008 when you were led to believe that you were actually a discount brokerage and so charging consumers the same way ordinary brokers do (just a smaller percentage) was fine. I also understand why that horrendous bit of advice has stuck with some of you. From 2006 until, well, today, our market has been dominated by short sales and REOs – both situations where the entity paying for real estate services was a Financial Institution (not a homeowner interested in savings). Baffling as it may seem, the Banks and Lenders who were using brokers to market properties and facilitate sales were not particularly interested in savings. To them, the low set fee was something unfamiliar and they didn’t want to think about it; they insisted on paying 5%** or 6% or sometimes even 7%. So, for five years or more, most of the listings you sold were paying a percentage based commission anyway. This was true for those of you charging a set fee as well as those charging a percentage. Really. I’m remembering a conversation I had with a good Help-U-Sell broker early in 2012 about his 2011 production. He charged homeowner/sellers a set fee, not a percentage based commission. But in all of 2011 he had only one listing sold that paid that set fee. All of the others paid 5% or 6% or something similar because ALL OF HIS LISTINGS (except for 1) WERE SHORT SALES OR REOs!

(Cue the Chicago song, ‘Hard Habit to Break’)

To summarize: you charge a percentage based commission because you got bad advice from someone you trusted 7 or 8 years ago, and the advice was reinforced by the worst real estate market in history. That’s why you’re charging everyone, say, 4%. It’s a flat 4% so you feel comfortable calling it a ‘Flat Fee.’

What’s Wrong With This?

1. Close your eyes and think like a home seller for a moment. You’ve just sold your $300,000 home through Acme Realty* agreeing to pay a 6% commission. You are sitting at the closing table scanning the HUD-1. You come to the line for Commission and you see . . . . $18,000. Your heart stops for a moment. You look up at your agent. She’s nice enough, dresses well, drives a nice car. The transaction went well, no big surprises . . . but . . . $18,000?!? Really?? Ok, open your eyes now. Every homeowner you ever work with has that memory. Every single one. Every one of them has wondered what the heck they got for their $18,000. Every single one would have chosen a less costly, less mysterious alternative if they’d seen one. The smartest thing you can do to ensure the success of your real estate business is to look as little like your ordinary competitors as possible, and looking different begins with how you charge for your services. Imagine the absolute delight that same seller – the one with the $300,000 home – would feel when s/he looks at the HUD-1 and sees a neat $4,950** on the commission line!

2. When you charge a percentage based commission, but one that is less than what most other brokers charge, what you’re saying is that you’re just like them, except you are a discount service. Consumers understand ‘Discount.’ It means you pay less because some stuff is stripped away. At Penny’s, you have to search for the cash register kiosk and the person there is there only to take your money and bag your purchase . . . which is of inferior quality to something similar you might buy at, say, Nordstrom. Nordstrom, where you will be met on the floor by a sales associate who knows everything about almost everything in their particular department and who will, if you want, shepherd you through the entire shopping experience, all the way through bagging your purchase, which will be of outstanding quality and fully warranted. The natural question to ask any discounter is: ‘what am I giving up?’ Help-U-Sell – Low Set Fee Help-U-Sell – is not a discount service. The consumer gives up nothing. We do what the other guys do, and actually, more. We charge differently (Low Set Fee vs. Commission) and we charge LESS because our business model is different. It’s not particularly different in the way we work with buyers and sellers, but it is radically different in the way we run our offices and the way we market. Ordinary percentage based brokers can’t emulate what we do to make our model feasible and profitable without absolutely blowing up everything they have in place and starting from scratch.

3. Percentage based commissions – even ones that save consumers money – are nuts. They make no sense whatever. (Look me in the eye): THEY REALLY DON’T. Why is the person in the $350,000 4 bedroom paying $6,000 more to sell his house than his neighbor with the $250,000 3 Bedroom? Why? I’ve been asking that question for a dozen years and still I have yet to receive a rational answer. That’s because there is no rational answer. It’s a stupid system devised and maintained to keep a dead business model on life support. And if you don’t think the consumer is thinking this same thing, you’re naive at best. I could go on and on, but I already have. If you want more detail about the insanity of percentage based commissions in real estate, just go HERE.

4. Some of you believe you have to charge a percentage based commission because you have agents in the office who take listings and you need that lofty percentage to be able to pay them. What? Are you sure you’re Help-U-Sell?? We’re the guys who understand and acknowledge that it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to market a home. In our offices, marketing is a SYSTEM: a predictable, repeatable, effective system. There is no magic to it, no smoke and mirrors. It’s simply push this button, pull that lever. And you don’t have to have a super-star’s name on top of your for sale sign to get it done. In our offices, the Broker (or his assistant) takes the listing. The listing belongs to the Office, not to an agent. We have one less person to pay when the home sells, and that’s how we make a ton of money charging people a lot less. I’ve looked at it and looked at it and for the life of me I cannot see how you can split a Low Set Fee on the listing side with an agent and make it as a Help-U-Sell broker. Not only is it NOT who we are, it’s also financial suicide.

OK, there are four reasons to get back to basics, re-think your fee and who you are. It’s a perfect time, too. Equity sellers – who ALL want to save – are returning to the market. Inventory is getting scarce in many areas and what comes on the market sells quickly with little effort. This is OUR market, the one in which we thrive. Make the adjustment, return to who we are, and start marketing it! It’s time.

*The ‘Acme Realty’ referred to in this post is completely fictitious. Any resemblance between it and any other Acme Realty is purely coincidental and unintentional.

**Commissions, whether percentage based or set fee, are always negotiable between the consumer and the broker. They are not set by law, consensus or REALTOR rule. They are set by individual brokers for their individual offices and vary from office to office and from location to location. Various percentage based commissions and set fees are used in this post for illustrative purposes and should not be taken to imply a ‘going rate.’

4 Reasons Why You Should Consider Using Google Voice in Your Real Estate Business

Right up front, I admit it: My name is James and I am a Google-holic. I’m not braggin’ or complainin’, but I love almost everything Google’s ever done and operate my electronic life largely within a Google universe. Sorry, Apple-ites. Your shiny white devices seem stodgy and old fashioned to me. I think when you pay for that new Iphone, 60% of what you’re buying is marketing. Just sayin’ . . .

So, leave it to me to tell you why I think you should consider Google Voice as the telephone system of choice for your real estate business.

1. Transcribed Voice Mail. When a caller on your GV number goes to voice mail, their message is transcribed into text and sent to you via email or text message. If you want to hear the message, you can still do that, but the beauty is that most times, you won’t need to. You’ll be able to get the information you need from the text. This can also be very helpful if you are occupied with something else and an important call comes in. For example, you are out showing property or in a meeting. A call comes in and goes to voice mail. In a minute you are reading a text or email version of the message. It’s something very important that needs your attention right away. Great. Now you can excuse yourself, step out and take care of the problem.

2. Amazing Forwarding Capabilities. You can program GV to forward your calls to any other device you may have: your home phone, your cell phone, your office phone. It’s very easy to change which device(s) ring. You can even put them on a schedule. But there’s more. Suppose you are in your office, on your office land line with a very important call. But you have an appointment out of the office and you have to leave NOW to make it on time. You don’t want to end the important call, so you push a button and suddenly all of your other devices begin to ring. The call seamlessly transfers to whichever device you answer, say your cell phone, and the caller never knows you’ve made the change.

3. Great Marketing Tracking. Google will give you ONE GV number for your Google account. (By the way: you get a Google account when you sign up for Gmail. The email address and password you set up there becomes your login credential for any other Google product). So, if you wanted to assign a different GV number to each marketing piece you did so you’d have a text record of how many calls each piece of marketing produced, you could. You’d have to open a number of different Gmail accounts, but think about it. Maybe you’d have one number for all of your signs. Maybe you’d use a different number for all of your mailbox marketing. Perhaps you’d have a number for print advertising and so on. Five or six numbers would probably give you the visibility you need. Now, I’ve heard that sometimes GV can take some time to assign you a phone number. That wasn’t the case for me: it was instantaneous. But, I did read about one person, wanting to track marketing via different Google Voice numbers, but delayed by Google’s backlog, who went to Ebay and bought accounts for about $6 apiece.

4. Personalized Greetings. Setting up a personalized greeting is so simple. You just find a contact in your messages and assign them a custom greeting. The first person to get a personalized greeting should probably be your spouse: ‘Hi, honey. Sorry I’m tied up, but I’ll call you as soon as I get free. Love you.’ Then do one for your kids. Then, every time you take a listing, take a minute to customize a greeting for each of your sellers: ‘Hi,Bill and Cathy. Sorry I can’t take your call at this moment, but you are among my most important callers, so rest assured I’ll be back to you as soon as I can. Thanks again for choosing me to market your home.’ Or maybe a specialized greeting for your buyers: ‘Hi, Sue. I’m probably out showing property at the moment, but I’ll call you back as soon as I can. If you’ve seen a house you like and want information about it, send me a text with the address and I’ll have all the details when I call you back’ (you may have just stopped Sue from calling the listing agent!). Or, how about this (it’s my favorite): a personal greeting for friends, family and business associates who call you a lot and don’t need to hear your long winded message: ‘Hey, Dan – leave a message.’

A long time ago . . . well, a couple of years . . . we had office switchboards, PBXs, and extensions with flashing lights for multiple lines. It was expensive and inefficient. Today you can actually run your business using a virtual phone system from Google. Google Voice plus a cell phone (or two) is probably all you need. Give it a look. (Be sure to watch the short video on ‘Block Callers’!)

Marketing Nuance – A Subtle Point

You listed with a real estate broker to sell your house, right?

Actually, that’s probably not the correct syntax. What you really did was to list with a broker to get your house sold.

It’s a subtle difference in wording, but one that points out the disconnect between thought and reality for many real estate consumers. The first phrase imbues the broker with near magical powers: he is going to take the house, wave his magical real estate wand, and cause someone to buy it. That’s really not what happens, although many brokers would like you to believe the myth that it does. Phrase two is closer to the mark: you’re going to use a broker to gain access to the natural matching of buyers and sellers that’s already going on. The broker is not magical. He is just a skilled gatekeeper.

Of course, I was selling real estate when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I’m sure things have changed (yeah, right), but . . .

Sellers used to be very concerned about what I was going to DO to sell their house. They wanted to see examples of the advertising I would run on their property, thinking that it was advertising that would cause the house to sell. They wanted to know how many open houses I was going to hold, thinking that the activity of allowing people easy access would cause the house to sell. They seemed to think that selling a house was an active process, that somehow advertising and activities would cause otherwise disinterested potential buyers to suddenly want the home.

I toyed with the idea of telling the truth – that that’s not what happens at all – but opted instead to do what I was taught in one seminar or another: play to the sellers’ misconceptions and overwhelm them with all of the advertising and activities I was going to DO.

By the way: this ‘grin at ’em and tell ’em what they wanna hear’ attitude is how salespeople die. Truth is always best.

The TRUTH was probably best expressed by my old broker back in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Richard Williams. Richard was and still is a real estate visionary and one of the smartest brokers I ever met. I was railing on one day about how he needed to do more advertising in this publication or that one when he calmly said, ‘Jim, a certain number of buyers are going to buy houses in the neighborhood today whether you are there or not. Your job is to get in front of as many of them as possible.’

That statement encapsulates the marketing function of a real estate broker as accurately as it can be. People can’t be made to want to buy real estate. They either do, or they don’t. A little education can help them make an informed decision, but it is a decision beyond anyone else’s control. Their decision to buy one house over any other is not a decision at all, it’s a choice, an illogical, personal, quirky choice. No amount of full page advertising is going to cause them to choose one house over another.

The broker’s job is to orchestrate a marketing program that puts his or her office in front of as many of these potential buyers as possible. Once that is achieved, ‘selling’ real estate becomes a matching process: buyers’ hopes and needs to inventory.

So how does a smart broker market to get in front of as many potential buyers as possible?

Job one is to be SEEN, to be VISIBLE. The consumer needs to see your sign, your logo, your name everywhere to have a comfort level that you may be able to help. The most effective way to accomplish this is with For Sale signs . . . SO: the best thing your real estate broker can do to sell your house is to go out and get another listing and another listing and another listing. The company with the largest number of signs in the neighborhood* is probably going to get the largest number of calls . . . of course, what they do with the calls is another issue, one we’ll talk about in a moment.

Job two is to GENERATE LEADS: to put marketing pieces into the hands of consumers that will motivate them to make contact with the office. When a broker decides to create a marketing piece, he or she should do it dispassionately . The decision to advertise one house or another should be made based on which one will cause the largest number of potential buyers to contact the office, not on which seller is ‘owed’ advertising this week. This is an important point. Truth is: almost always, the property that motivated the potential buyer to contact the office is NOT the property they eventually buy. There are dozens of kick-out factors they may encounter as they do their investigation. But that doesn’t matter. What’s important is that they contacted the office.

So, when a broker decides to advertise a property, it’s not to get that particular property sold, it’s to generate buyer contact. It is this general lead generating activity that will cause your house to sell and it may not even involve advertising your house at all.

Now, in today’s ordinary agent centered real estate world, this ‘orchestration’ of marketing rarely occurs. Agents, stumbling all over one another to beg for listings, promise the one tangible thing they can think of: advertising. And sometimes they actually do it: willy-nilly, this property, that property, whichever seller is most cranky this week. The broker is not taking control of this process, is not doing the higher level job of deciding what to advertise and what not to advertise, because he can’t afford to. He’s already paying his willy-nilly agents SOOO Much that he has no money for carefully planned marketing. In a universe where agents who do 6 deals a year command a 75% or even 80% split of the commission, marketing becomes the responsibility of the agent, not the broker, and there is no coordination, no strategic planning of marketing, no sense to it at all.

Ok: we’ve got Job One and Job Two. Here’s the third thing the real estate broker needs to do: CAPTURE LEADS. When marketing causes a potential buyer to contact the office, what will then cause them to agree – however subtly – to letting the office match them with a perfect property? It is a process that often occurs on the telephone, and smart brokers work on it constantly.

It’s important to understand what courage it takes for a potential buyer to pick up the phone or fill out an online inquiry form. They know they are likely going to hear from a salesperson . . . and that’s not what they want at all. What they want is the information. Period. So there is a very natural defensiveness on the other end of the line when the agent answers the phone.

How the agent handles the call, how he or she relaxes the caller, provides valuable information, builds a comfortable rapport with the caller is EVERYTHING. All of time money and effort the broker has used to generate the lead can be lost right here if the agent is not prepared to earn the caller’s trust and then to begin the matching process. Now, think back to the last time you called a real estate office for information on a property. Uh-huh. I know. It was a painful experience. If the agent made any attempt to earn your business at all, it was probably lame, stupid and full of sales scripts. And that’s IF they tried to get your business at all (most won’t).

As a business consultant to real estate companies, I can almost always increase the company’s bottom line by several percentage points (and that’s a lot) by simply working with whomever is answering the phone and responding to buyer inquiries. I’m not kidding. That phone call, that inquiry, is the ARENA. That’s where the process of ‘selling real estate’ begins. It is so important, I think it makes perfect sense for a home seller to call the office of the agent they are considering and see how they are handled. If the person on the other end of the line can’t comfortably communicate competence, if they can’t skillfully earn the right to help you find your next home, how are they going to capture the real caller who might be perfect for your house?

Bottom line: advertising wont sell your house. An agent or broker won’t sell your house. What will sell your house is an office with an active lead generation and capture process. And where will you find such an office? I’d suggest you look at Help-U-Sell. Our offices continue to keep the broker in charge of marketing, lead generation and capture. We are completely focused on the process and we do it better than anyone in the industry. AND: with low set fee pricing, we save sellers a lot of money, too.

*I talked about visibility in terms of signage only. It’s simpler that way. But understand that visibility extends far beyond your front yard. Today it’s getting the inventory all over the Internet. It’s putting the best houses in the inventory everywhere a potential buyer is apt to be looking. Marketing is like building a spider web: the more strands in the web, the more places the company’s identifiers and best listings can be seen, the more potential buyers can be caught.

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