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)

How Google Saved My Life (kinda)

I spent a couple of days over this Christmas weekend at Mount Laguna, just east of San Diego.  Most people think of Southern California as a beach place – which it is – but we are surrounded by some pretty  nice peaks, including this one at about 6,000 feet in places.  I took Homer, the dog, in search of snow and adventure.

Unfortunately the temperature got no lower than 35 degrees so our snow adventure turned mostly into mud.  Nonetheless, when the clouds parted and the first sunbeams came through on Christmas Eve, we decided to take a little hike.

We’d been out the day before, slogging through the soggy woods in a drizzle  to a lovely mountain lake.  At one point we came around a little stand of pine and found ourselves 100 yards from a rather large coyote.  He stopped for a moment – as did we – and stared.  He and Homer seemed to communicate by nose and I felt my guy pulling at the leash.  The coyote took a few steps up the slope, away from us, then stopped and stared again.  We held our position.  He continued this dance, taking a few steps, pausing, looking, all the way up the slope and disappeared into the tall grass.  I tightened my grip on the leash, remember that coyotes, like dogs, are packing animals and where there is one, there are likely others.  Truthfully, they’d almost never attack when a human was present, and certainly not during the day – but the thought of a hungry pack bearing down on my best friend caused me to quicken my own pace back up and out of the woods.

This day, I pulled the Jeep off the road, parked and took to a trail heading up-slope.  It wasn’t marked and I didn’t have my trail map with me, so it was simply going to be a late afternoon walk in the woods, nothing special, no destination.  We made steady progress up and up on the trail, Homer a few feet in front of me and off leash, enjoying every smell and sudden movement we encountered.  Thirty minutes later we came to a marker for the Pacific Crest Trail and took it north to Foster’s Point- a wonderful rocky ledge with a panoramic view to Anza-Borrego State Park and stretching to a hint of the Salton Sea beyond. The rain had stopped, but big dark and sometimes white clouds raced across the crest of the peak we were on and made shadow play on the desert below.  The wind was howling and it was cold.  I took a few pictures and turned to go.

Soon we were back at the marker sign for the Trail and I followed the adjoining trail off to the right, figuring to be back at the Jeep by sunset . . .  but this is where the problems began.  We’d hiked about ten minutes when we came across a fallen oak tree across the trail.  I didn’t remember it.  This concerned me but I rationalized that Homer and I had been having so much fun on the upward hike that I probably just spaced it.  We continued on, but now I was watching the trail closely, looking for my own footprints going in the other direction.   Here is a great hiking truth:  Hiking boot footprints are very similar; sometimes you think this one might look a little like yours, and sometimes . . . not.  Ten minutes later we were on such a steep slope down that I became certain that we hadn’t come this way.  I decided to return to the Pacific Crest Trail marker and look again for another trail, hopefully the one we’d come up on.

It was a hard hike uphill and we arrived at the marker out of breath.  As cold as it was I removed my hat to cool off a bit, and looked around.  I could see nothing in the way of an alternative trail, just a continuation of the one I had been on, continuing on in the other direction.  I walked down a bit anyway, then turned and walked back, hoping it would seem familiar.  It did not.  Therefore, the last path, the one that didn’t seem right, had to be the correct one.  I passed my confusion off as failure to pay attention, and headed back down the path I’d just left.  Once again it didn’t seem familiar but I pushed on.

The sun was getting quite low by now, and I had my first thoughts of being lost in the woods – not a good thing to happen on Christmas Eve when anyone who might help is probably home by the fireplace.  Homer dashed off the trail in pursuit of some small creature and I immediately thought of the coyote we’d seen the day before.  Sunset . . . this is when they come out to hunt.  I chased after him, calling in my sternest voice.  It took a moment, but being the good dog that he is, he came back and allowed me to put him on his leash.  We continued on.

By now, the temperature had begun to drop and, with the wind, I began to feel cold . . . and lost.  I plunged my hand into the pocked of my jacket and met my Android Phone.  I grabbed it.  Maybe, I thought, Maybe.  I turned it on and in what seemed like a long minute, it revealed . . . a weak signal.  I pushed the Navigation App – which is part of Google Maps – and quickly zeroed in on our location.  We were horribly off course.   The trail we were on went nowhere, just down to the valley, and certainly not near the road.  Darkness was falling and we had to get back and on track quickly.

I used Google Maps all the way back up the mountain and then, at the Trail Marker, I used it to locate the previously non- apparent trail back to the Jeep.  The right trail had been there all along:  it was the continuation of the wrong trail that I’d dismissed on my second trip back up.  Homer and I nearly ran all the way to the car.  By the time we got there, it truly was night . . . but we’d made it, thanks in no small part to Google Maps.

It’s easy to dismiss the importance of technology in our daily lives, to see it as a frivolous waste of time, and to yearn for a simpler time.  But ten years ago?  I think my little Christmas Eve tale might have had a different ending.  As we approach the end of 2012, I am very, very grateful for Google, for smart phones, for the Internet . . . and for the Future.

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.

Help-U-Sell Success Summit Update

Ahhhh.  That’s what I feel every year at this time.  The NAR Expo is history and the Help-U-Sell Success Summit is done for another year.

I had lots of anxiety going into this year’s Summit.  Last year’s event was so good I thought it would be hard to top.  Also, our numbers were down slightly because of the location.  Not that Orlando isn’t a great place for a meeting, it’s just that the largest concentration of Help-U-Sell brokers is in the West and they pretty much stayed home.  One of our newest members, Kurt Steffein, made the haul from California (and what a wonderful energy he brought along), and Lona Murphy from Oregon surprised everyone by showing up unannounced!  A special thank you goes out to both of them.  But as we set the room for the meeting, we kept adding chairs and adding chairs, and by the time Jack Bailey rolled in with his entire Coaching Group in tow, we were about 30 people.

I could go on and on about who came and the nuggets they shared, but here’s something that’s more important: It was once again, a great meeting.   There is excitement about the business and the the opportunities bursting forth over the next several years.  Our crew is hungry and ready – their enthusiasm and love for what they do hasn’t paled in the downturn of the last few years.  Everybody who attended stayed fully engaged for the entire meeting.  We had no dropouts and no nod-offs.  Conversation was lively and productive.  And there was something else about this group that came through loud and clear – they all genuinely like and care for each other.  We talk about a Help-U-Sell Family a lot, and I know, that language is typical of a lot of real estate organizations.  But here it means something.  It really does.

What were the key messages of this meeting?  There were many, but here’s what I take away:

This year – and next year – are OUR years.  For the first time in a long time, sellers with equity are returning to the market.  That’s our target.  Always has been.  We have a huge competitive advantage in a marketplace where Joe and Sally Homeowner want to sell, because Joe and Sally also want to save – and that’s what we’re all about:  selling and saving.  After slogging through a market where many if not most of our sellers were . . . banks . . . who really couldn’t care less about what makes us unique, special and better, we are once again going to be in the driver’s seat.

That’s great, but it also means we have to return to an old habit that we’ve gotten away from in recent years:  marketing.  We have to dust off our logos (so to speak) and go back to spreading the word that we are here, people use us, it works and they save money.  The way we spread that word has changed somewhat.  It’s much more electronic and frankly, less costly.  But make no mistake about it:  as right as the timing is, it will mean nothing if we don’t re-invest in marketing who we are and what we do.

We are real estate people (thank goodness!) and as such are people people.  The highest and best use of our time is usually to be face to face with consumers.  However, there is an electronic universe in which the people we need to be talking to are living, at least part-time.  We have to be comfortable with that electronic landscape, with how it works and how to position ourselves within it.  I know, for most of us, that means hiring someone to manage our online presence; but even then, we have to have a basic understanding of how the Internet works from a marketing standpoint and how to take advantage of the huge opportunities there.

We are exceptionally blessed to have Robbie Stevens, Tony Tramontano, and everyone else at Help-U-Sell dedicated to securing our position in this new world and patiently nurturing our collective understanding.  I saw so many lights going on in that room the last couple of days as Robbie worked through some of the basics of our own Office Management System.  I think we’re all going home more comfortable and a little wiser.

I also remain in awe of Ron McCoy.   Of the Corporate team, he has the greatest longevity – about 12 years – but it’s much more than that.  In addition to all of the history, the great ups and downs of Help-U-Sell, he has a depth of understanding of what makes us tick and how to turn that into business success.  He has a great strategic mind and his attitude is unflagging.  After a grueling hour of tool after tool with an Internet marketing ‘guru,’ Ron showed us how to use Instagram to improve our online impact.  He showed us, we did it, we had fun, and we got it.  If you don’t believe me, check Facebook for yesterday, Nov. 13, and you’ll see a whole passel of pictures of Ron during the presentation, taken and posted via Instagram.

Mostly we are blessed to have such a delightful, scrappy team.  So many of the people who attended the meeting joined the Franchise in 2005 and 2006 – at the onset of the worst real estate market in history.  And they are still here, still strong, still smiling and many have done much more than simply survive.  Many have built remarkable businesses as one after another of their traditional competitors have downsized, consolidated and gone out of business.  It’s always been great to be Help-U-Sell.  It’s once again a great time to be Help-U-Sell.

Help-U-Sell, where different is better
It’s Good To Be Help-U-Sell

 

 

 

Accessibility Toolbar