Category: Marketing

The Reason Why Everybody Doesn’t Do This

As Help-U-Sell Brokers we have the pleasure of delighting sellers when they learn about us. So often, when we lay our program out before them, they get almost as excited as we are. Often, they say:

‘Wow! This is amazing! Why doesn’t everyone do it this way?’

The answer is too complex to share with a seller on the verge of signing a listing agreement, so we take the question to be rhetorical, and reply, ‘I don’t know . . .’ or ‘Beats me!’

But there is a reason. It’s a stupid reason, but it is the reason:

Our industry is organized around the notion that the average agent should make a decent living.

Thirty years ago or so, Brokers (not Agents, Brokers) made a shift in their business models. They put the accent NOT on serving buyers and sellers but on recruiting, retaining and serving agents. In a sense, the Agent became the Broker’s client.

Today, Brokers go to school not to learn how to better serve buyers and sellers, but to learn how to recruit. Keller-Williams, Exit and a host of other companies have invented new wrinkles in their operating systems to reward agents who bring other agents into the company. Basically, they’ve found a way to get their agents to do the recruiting for them.

In ordinary residential real estate today, it’s all about the agent: how to find more, get more, keep more agents. The Broker believes his income stream is dependent on agents, not on buyers and sellers, and that belief colors the entire operation.

So who are these average agents (the ones everyone is working so hard to recruit)? Nationally they do six or fewer deals a year. Really. Think about that. What kind of service do you think an agent doing only six deals a year brings to the table for a buyer or seller? Compared, say, to one doing 25 deals? Who’s going to be sharper, more up-to-date, better able to negotiate and solve problems as they arrise?

But, because the ordinary Broker’s business is dependent on his getting and keeping as many six-deal-a-year agents as possible, he has to find a way to make doing six deals a year appealing. He has to find a way for the average agent to make a reasonable living.

There’s a two-step formula for this.

First, charge outrageous sums of money for your services and do it with a percentage based commission so that your fee is tied to the sale price of the house. That way, when your agents sell more expensive property, they bring in more cash. Never mind that in most cases, it takes no more time, effort or money to sell a more expensive house. Just be glad you get paid more when you do.

Second, give the lion’s share of that bloated commission to the agent. You’re going to have to pay them really well so that they can appear successful even though they’re only doing six deals a year. If they appear successful, you’ll be better able to attract more six-deal-a-year agents who also want to appear successful.

Ok. I’m overstating the case. But I think you see the lunacy in this system. And it is lunacy, madness. The ordinary real estate business is so off track, it may never be able to right itself. It is so lost that the moment Google or Microsoft decides to jump into the business with both feet, automate it like Schwab did the brokerage business 25 years ago . . . well, your friendly local real estate agent could become extinct. . . like the dinosaur.

Thankfully, there is an alternative.

  • It is a system where the Broker is IN the real estate business, where his or her client IS the buyer or seller, where the agent is part of the Broker’s operational system to provide excellent service to clients.
  • It is a system where the Broker’s income stream is dependent on how many buyers and sellers he or she serves, where growth is driven by careful marketing, not by recruiting.
  • It is a system orchestrated by the Broker to drive ever increasing numbers of leads into the office, leads that are handed to the agents who are charged with the important task of turning them into happy clients.
  • It is a system that nurtures truly successful agents, who outperform their ordinary competitors in spades because they don’t have to worry about cold calls, door knocking, FSBOs, angry sellers, and open houses. All they have to worry about is the client they picked up at the office today.
  • It is a system that charges a reasonable Set Fee for the service it provides, a fee that stays the same regardless of the sale price of the property.
  • It is a system that offers sellers a menu approach to services and pricing, where one size does not fit all, and where the fee paid has a direct relation to the tools it took to affect the sale.
  • It is a system that delights customers because: it works, and they save money.

It is Help-U-Sell.

*By the way, in case you missed it, in 2012, the median gross income for an agent was $34,900, according to NAR. That’s gross, before expenses.

Arounds

Of course, you have your ‘Just Listed’/’Just Sold’ programs mapped out and happening automatically, right? Good! You do that because you know it works; and there’s solid psychology behind it.

When a sign appears in your neighbor’s yard, a window of opportunity opens in your mind. Suddenly you are curious about why they are selling, where they are going, what they are asking, why they chose that particular real estate company and so on. In essence: you are OPEN to receive a real estate oriented message.

If I can put MY Help-U-Sell real estate message (sell fast-save thousands) in front of you while this window of opportunity is open, the chances of you receiving the message and perhaps responding to it are greater than at any other time . . . except, perhaps, when YOU need to buy or sell. And there’s not that much time to get the message to you. It’s a window, and windows shut.

Now, let’s expand that concept. And let’s change the pronouns. Now YOU are a Help-U-Sell broker. As such, you have carefully analyzed a ton of data about your area and have judiciously chosen a couple of ripe target markets within that area. You’re just getting started (or just getting re-started) and don’t have much of a presence in your target markets. You can use the ‘window of opportunity’ concept that works when YOU get a listing even when YOU don’t have one. Here’s how:

Start cruising your target markets every day. By cruising I mean driving and checking the MLS. You’re looking for new listings the moment they hit the market. They can be listings taken by anybody. All of the neighbors – and ‘all’ might be 40 or 60 or 100 – now have their real estate windows open. They are ready to receive a real estate message. Why shouldn’t it be yours?

Work with Excel Print/Mail (husmailnow.com) and The Alexanders (brandsawonline.com/helpusell) to create a postcard program to go AROUND the new listings that come up in your target market. I think the best thing to do is be fairly generic. Create an ETM-like Jumbo postcard with content that doesn’t change or doesn’t change much. That way, the program is easy to administer and you can get your message out faster. By an ETM-like card, I mean one with pictures of homes for sale, sold & saved listings, testimonials, an Easy Way, and a bulleted description of your program. Decide how many homes you’d like to reach whenever a sign appears and lock that geography down with Excel or Alexanders. Maybe it’s 20 homes across the street from the new listing and 10 on each side. Maybe it’s more.

Now when a new listing comes up, Push The Button. Get your message into those open windows as fast as possible and listen for the phone to ring.

What are the ethics of prospecting around someone else’s listing? Excuse me: last time I read the REALTOR Code of Ethics it didn’t say anything about this! But shouldn’t this kind of prospecting be reserved for the agent who worked so hard to get that new listing or to make that sale? Absolutely not! Because in all probability, the listing agent will NOT make any attempt to reach the neighbors. They will not have taken the time to create an easy to administer program for this kind of outreach and they will be too busy to do it now. It’s YOUR window of opportunity – take advantage of it and watch your target market share bloom.

Establishing Yourself As The Best Choice

Listings are a little easier at Help-U-Sell.  We have a superior offer to consumers.  Superior.  Once they see that, understand it and believe it, they happily sign up.  It happens almost every time we get in front of a potential seller.

Understanding the offer – seller savings, seller participation, effective marketing – is not difficult:  most get it in a few minutes.  But believing it?  That takes trust (in you) and trust requires a different set of tools.

In establishing trust – belief – credibility, we make copious use of testimonials.  They are in our marketing, on our websites, on postcards, posted in our windows and certainly in our listing package.

Remember what Don Taylor taught us:  our challenge it to have people in our targeted geography understand that 1) we are here 2) other people use us 3)it works and 4) they save.  Nothing says the final 3 items better than a brief testimonial with a photo of someone you helped in your local market.

I am so delighted to open Facebook and see testimonials in some of our brokers’ posts.  And sometimes, there’s a new twist on testimonials.  Brandt Williams in Sioux Falls, SD always posts a photo of his latest happy buyer in front of his or her new house with a congratulatory message from him.  The smiles speak volumes to anyone seeing the photos.

But let’s get beyond testimonials for a moment.  They are bedrock in establishing your credibility with sellers, but what else do you need to be doing to build trust and confidence?  Here’s a short list:

1.  Your appearance.  Head to toe, what does your dress, your posture, your expression say about you?  Does it say you feel great, you are energized, you are successful?  Or does it say you got into the real estate business to be semi-retired?  I love logo clothing . . . but sometimes . . . well, here:

For me, one of the happiest places on earth is Frys Electronics.  The huge stores are filled with every electronic thing imaginable.  Unfortunately, Frys has a dress code for their male employees – largely young people working their first real job.  They are required to wear white shirts and ties.  This makes them easy to spot, but does nothing to build respect for the Frys brand or confidence in their employees.  The shirts are often dirty, wrinkled, sometimes stained.  You get the impression that the employees feel persecuted by the rule and you have thoughts of sweatshops and so on, not at all what Frys intended.

So what about your career apparel?  Are you wearing the same logo polo you got five years ago?  The one that has been through the laundry 50 times?  The one that used to be black but now more closely resembles scary bathroom mold?  Maybe you’d be better to put on something fresh.  And, by the way, if you’re in the real estate business (and not selling ranches, farms or land), I don’t think jeans help you communicate energy and success.  There are other ways to dress casually, ways that require a little more care . . . which is communicated to your client.

2.  Your syntax.  Yes:  your syntax.  Are you plowing into your potential sellers with an hours worth of ‘PRESENTATION” that leaves them exhausted and not sure what they heard?  Next time you do a listing consultation, set your smartphone to record.  Ask permission if you want.  Afterward, listen to it.  What is the dominant punctuation mark in your own part of the conversation?  It ought to be the question mark – or the question mark ought to be at least 50% of what you hear.  Really:  if you’re not asking a question for every point you make, you’re steamrolling your sellers and presenting, not consulting.

3.  Your equipment.  Are you showing up to your listing consultation with tools that say you are on top of technology?  Your seller realizes it’s all about the Internet today:  are you showing them that you are in command of this fact?  Ipads make great presentation tools, especially for graphics, but so do Android tablets.  I lean toward Ipad for real estate (despite the fact that I really don’t own any Apple products) simply because it is the accepted platform and there’s tons of training for brokers and agents using Ipad.  I just learned that you can control slides on your Ipad with your Iphone.  So you set the pad up in front of yourself and your sellers and use your phone as a remote.  I think that says something powerful about your grasp of technology.

4.  Your dialogues and graphics.  You’ll use the Seller Savings Comparison chart to demonstrate the financial aspects of your program, sure.  And of course you’ll have a world class CMA for the pricing discussion, but what more do you need?  Not much.  In fact, those two items may be 80% of most presentations.  Still I think you have to be prepared to tell the seller why you – that means you personally and you, a Help-U-Sell broker – are a better choice than anyone else.

I like the approach that starts with pointing out that you are like everyone else in the business, you do the same things they do, but you are better because . . . You might be better because you are a CDPE certified distressed property expert.  You might be better because your production ranked you in the top 4% of all REALTORS in your Board.  You might be better because your business grew 40% last year – which was one of the worst years in real estate history.

I’ve carped about this endlessly, but you simply must do it:  take your 2012 production and examine it using 3 key performance indicators (KPI):

  • Days on Market (this means from the day the sign went up until the property went under contract)
  • Relationship between Listing Price and Selling Price
  • Fallout rate

Now, compare your numbers with those of your Board or MLS.  If you’re not beating the Board in every category – and by a lot in some – there’s problem somewhere.  They don’t have your smarts, your competitive edge or your drive.  You’re comparing yourself against the average, and you ought to beat that every time.  And if you can show a seller, numerically and factually, that you can sell their  home faster than your higher priced competitors, get them more for their home (list to sell price ratio), and make the frightening possibility of a sale falling through less likely . . . well, you will have said all you need to say about how you’re better.

I have to go to Spanish Class now, so while I’m studying a new language, why not spend a little time studying the language you’ll be using next time you sit with a seller.  You can help them make a great decision if you do a little practice and updating first.

The Shine Goes Off The Penny

There is a notion that, if you want to really know what the next big thing is, ask a teenager.  Actually, I first read about this concept a dozen years ago in, I think, Wired Magazine.  At that time they were touting the gadget forecasting wizardry of Japanese teenage girls.  You know, the same group that led us to ‘Hello Kitty’ and neon hair-color   I’ll never forget one of the graphics for that piece:  a photo of a girl wearing a phone on her hand.  The mouthpiece went on her pinkie finger, the earpiece on her thumb, and both were connected to a small, square keypad she held in her palm.  Now I thought that was about the coolest thing I’d ever seen . . . and of course, that’s the last time I ever saw it.

Now Buzz Marketing  a company that routinely polls teens about what’s hot and what’s not is out with some startling new information.  They are telling us from the floor of the huge Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, that:

Apple is, like, soooo over!

Apparently, Mr. Job’s little baby has suffered a kind of logo death,  its ingenious iconic label having appeared so many times that it is now seen by the young as the establishment:  stoggy, slow, definitely NOT cool.

There seems to be another element contributing to this growing un-coolness.  The parents of teens today, largely GenXrs’ and even Millennials, are very quick to line up for the latest IPhone . . . and you know what happens to last year’s model?  Yep, it gets handed to the kids who then have to explain to all their friends why their screen is a silly millimeter smaller.  ‘Oh, you know, like the new Iphones came out, and my parents were all, like, you know, and, like I even had to hold their place in line for, like, deades!  So they got their stupid new phones and I was, like, stuck with this old piece of junk!’

To teens today, the Samsung Galaxy line of phones is seen as cool.  Not surprising: it is cool.  But get this . . . the hot new portable computer is not the Ipad, it’s the new Microsoft Surface!  Now that gorgeous piece of hardware is a little pricey for teenagers, which probably explains in part why it hasn’t exactly flown off the shelves at Best Buy.  But still, it’s 50 year old REALTORS (!) who lust after Ipads these days, not those on the cutting edge of style and hip-ness.

Buzz Marketing has more for us.  Guess what else is passe, today.  Drum-roll, please. . . . Facebook.  I mean, for-reals, who would want to go to the same club to socialize with their friends that their PARENTS go???  Increasingly, kids are turning to Tumblr for social purposes and to something called Snapchat.  I know the former of those platforms, but the latter?  It’s news to me.

Noticeably absent from Buzz Marketing’s message to us (at least the parts of it I saw) is my chosen platform, Google-Chrome-Android.  But then, I think big-G is so pervasive that it’s beyond hip.  It is the universe in which hip comes and goes.  It’s like, you know, God or something.  So while the rest of America is lining up for whatever Apple tells us we cannot live without, while kids are poisoning their parents (!) to get a couple more hours of Internet time, I’ll be quietly playing Angry Birds (oh, that’s sooo tired) on my Acer Tablet!

(Thanks to Chris Matyszczyk of Wired Magazine for the fodder that led to this post)

Focus Your Website: For Buyers? Sellers? . . . or Both?

The primary function of most real estate broker websites is pretty obvious:  provide information to and hopefully capture prospective buyers.  That’s why the home search function is usually front an center and why IDX is so important.  This is certainly true of Help-U-Sell Broker websites with their scrolling ‘Featured Listings’ and nearly dominant search field.

It makes sense too:  almost every bit of advertising we do, from For Sale signs with URLs to flyers with QR codes, is intended – at least as a secondary function – to drive buyer traffic to the website where quality information and powerful search tools deliver value that makes  buyer lead capture more possible.

But what about Help-U-Sell?  Our whole marketing thrust for 36 years has been to target Sellers, take more than our share of listings and let the listings create Buyer Leads.  Since the lion’s share of real estate marketing has gone online – and since a major portion of that online presence centers on the office website – isn’t there a disconnect between the heavy Buyer orientation of Help-U-Sell Broker websites and our own ‘Secret Sauce?’  Maybe.

I’m not suggesting that our Broker sites shouldn’t LEAD with tools and tips for Buyers.  As I said, almost all of our advertising is designed to drive buyers to the website where a value experience makes them ‘capturable.’  In fact, I want our guys to be pulling Buyer leads OFF Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com and a dozen other online sources and offering them a better experience on their own Broker sites with language like:

Have you noticed that a lot of the listings you’re seeing on XXXXX.com are already sold?  Have you seen duplicates and inaccuracies?  That’s because that’s a National website trying to do a Local job.  They receive data from dozens of different sources and sometimes their machines have difficulty telling what is true and most recent.  How would you like to get up-t0-date access to the data in our Local MLS?  There is no better data anywhere for a home search here in Anytown.  You’ll be searching for homes just like I do, with the same information I use;  it’s free and easy to use.  Great – let me get your email address and I’ll set you up an account.

So, Buyer orientation and tools prominent on the first page:  YES!

But, are you also using your website to attract Sellers, to educate them about your program, to do the job so much of our marketing did in years gone by?  There are ways to do this you know.  Step one is to create a page (or pages) that provides the kind of information that caused Sellers to contact you in the past:

  • Sold and Saves
  • Testimonials
  • Easy Way/Smarter Way
  • Seller Savings Comparison
  • Brief Description of your program

Take out an old paper ETM – the one we delivered in thousands of mailboxes each month.  Can you build a page on your website with the same elements, presented in the same powerful way?  (By the way, the answer is ‘Yes.’  The tools are there and they are easy to use, especially when you have the Sarasota Tech Team standing by to help every step of the way).  The Sellers Savings Comparison has been up and operational for several months, and Robbie just introduced the new Sold And Saved banners (thanks to input from the great Brokers who attended this year’s Success Summit).

Step two is to start driving Seller traffic to this page, just like you drive Buyer traffic to page one of your Website.  That means first, buying an easy to remember URL for the new page, something like:  www.sell-and-save.com, and pointing it at the Seller page.  Then include it in every bit of advertising your do that may be seen by Sellers.  It also means taking advantage of new marketing opportunities to drive traffic:  QR codes on postcards that tease:  Find out how you can sell your home fast and save thousands.

I’m glossing over Step two rather quickly because it’s more about a way of thinking than anything else.  Attracting the Seller Inquiry has been so much a part of who we are that it is like breathing.  It’s automatic.  It’s a lifestyle.  But the real estate ditch of the last six years had us scrambling for Buyer Leads and Institutional Sellers, not genuine Seller Leads because they were (alas) non-existent.  It’s time to take the new seller tools we have for Broker Websites and become just as obsessed with exploiting them as we once were with our next ETM.

Step three is to build Landing Pages for your targeted call to action advertising.  These are simple fill-in web forms for gathering contact information on a potential client after an offer of something of value in return.  Here’s an example from the fine folks in Waynesboro, VA, Help-U-Sell Direct Savings Real Estate:  LINK.  This one is for a Market Analysis, something of great value to today’s homeowners.  You’d drive traffic to this landing page with postcards, flyers and other advertising, teasing:  Find out what your home is worth TODAY!

You might build similar landing pages for ‘Find out how you can save thousands when selling your home‘, or ‘Free E-Book:  How to Save Thousands When Selling Your Home.’  And so on.

Once again, when Boo probably would have been sufficient,  I’ve said Boo-H00-Hoo.  Forgive me:  I’m on vacation (Ole!).  But I hope you will take my enthusiasm for this topic and the new tools available to you to get back to doing what we have always been about:  Attracting inquiries from Sellers with our Superior Offer, Converting those Inquiries into Listings most of the time, and Letting the Marketing of those Listings drive a steady stream of Buyer Leads into our offices.

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