Help-U-Sell Success Summit Update #2

I am so excited to announce that Patricia Boyd will be joining us at next month’s Help-U-Sell Success Summit in Anaheim!  Patricia is the industry expert in how to use finance to create more sales.  She is a strong consumer advocate and that point-of-view runs throughout her many programs (in other words:  she’s a great match for Help-U-Sell!). She is the author of the book “How to Buy and Sell Your Home without getting ripped off”, President of Real Finance Solutions AND owns REAL FINANCE ADVOCATE certification program which is promoted by NAR on Realtor University.  You can learn more about Patricia on her WEBSITE and by watching this short video:

Don’t miss this great opportunity to grow your mind and your business! Register now by going HERE (it’s free). And then make your sleeping room reservations at the Hotel Menage: 714.758.0900

*The Help-U-Sell Success Summit takes place Nov. 14 – 16, immediately following the NAR Convention in Anaheim, CA. Our special room rate at the Menage is available from the 11th – when the NAR meeting begins – all the way through the Summit and even beyond. So take advantage of it to come in early, go to NAR (help us in the booth!), or stay over for a day at Disneyland.

Help-U-Sell Success Summit 2011 Update

Nick Taylor from Zillow will be joining us next month at our Help-U-Sell Success Summit in Anaheim, CA.  Nick knows more about how to use credible real estate data to generate leads than anyone I know and I’m really excited to have him work with our group.  He’ll focus on how to tap into the power of the top consumer oriented aggregator of real estate information, Zillow, and will be introducing some exciting new tools that are just becoming available. Check out Nick presenting at a recent Agent Re-Boot event:

And being interviewed about Zillow features:

Nick has already impressed me with his mental sharpness and power of perception: yesterday he told me in his experience, Help-U-Sell folks ‘get it’ a whole lot better than your run-of-the-mill real estate person!

Don’t miss this great opportunity to grow your mind and your business! Register now by going HERE (it’s free). And then make your sleeping room reservations at the Hotel Menage: 714.758.0900

*The Help-U-Sell Success Summit takes place Nov. 14 – 16, immediately following the NAR Convention in Anaheim, CA. Our special room rate at the Menage is available from the 11th – when the NAR meeting begins – all the way through the Summit and even beyond. So take advantage of it to come in early, go to NAR (help us in the booth!), or stay over for a day at Disneyland.

Sometimes Being Visible Means Being Heard

Richard Cricchio of Help-U-Sell Honolulu Properties has been doing a weekly radio call-in talk show for, literally, years.  Rule one of Marketing is to be visible and he has used this audible medium to do just that!  He and his company are known throughout the island and this radio show is one important piece of the program that caused that to happen.  Here are recordings of a show he did this week, on October 5, 2011.

A Note About Marketing with Radio:  remember Richard is in Honolulu which is on the ISLAND of Oahu.  It’s a perfect location to exploit the power of radio.  His broadcast reaches the island and he’s in pretty good shape to do business anywhere within that ‘reach.’  If your marketplace is also like an ISLAND – which is to say, smaller, more compact, somewhat distinct or isolated – radio advertising might be a good choice for you.  However, if you are in a major metropolitan suburb, think twice.  Your message, whether an ad or a show like Richard’s, will go to the entire area, most often into places that are too far away for you handle.  You will probably discover that the cost to produce the leads you CAN work is greater than the leads are worth.  As always, I’d suggest you talk with someone – me, Ron McCoy, another Help-U-Sell broker or two – before you kick off any new or untried marketing program.

My Choice for Your Real Estate Tablet

Let’s dispense with it right up front.  The Ipad 2 is cool.  It’s light and thin and head turning and will make a fine Tablet for your real estate life (and more).  Having said that, I opted to go Android.

The Acer Iconia 500 Tablet is a wonderful device that operates like your Android SmartPhone, has thousands of apps – many free – available for download , and has expansion and storage capabilities the Ipad crowd can only dream about. It sells for about $425 at Costco with 32GB of internal storage.  I added a nifty leather cover with USB keyboard from Amazon for $40 (makes note taking an returning email a whole lot easier).  By the way:  I suggest, if the price is close, you should buy your electronics at Costco (or Costco.com) because of their liberal return policy.  If anything goes wrong, or if you just decide you don’t like your electronic purchase during the first 90 days, it is fully returnable and refundable, no questions asked.  It’s a nice added bit of peace of mind.

It’s not just that you need a Tablet for your real estate business;  I, for one, can’t imagine how you’re doing business today without one!  You need it for quick MLS access when you are out with a buyer or sitting with a seller.  It does what we used to do in the not-so-good-old-days when we carried a 15 pound MLS book with us everywhere we went.  You need it to display impressive graphics and stats when you sit with a seller during a listing consultation.  You need it (and the optional stylus accessory) when you are reviewing an electronic purchase agreement with a customer and need an initial here and a signature there.  And, Oh By The Way:  it also makes one heck of an ebook reader!

You need some mechanism for accessing the Internet when you are out in the field on any Tablet you might buy.  You might opt for a Tablet that gets online via a data plan through your wireless carrier.  I explored this option before I bought the Tablet and discovered that I wasn’t going to get out for less than $50 a month – not much for your real estate career but steep for me because I am cheap.  A better option might be to connect through your phone.  If you have an Android phone, with a small additional fee, you can use it as a ‘mobile hot-spot’, which means you can connect another wi-fi device to the Internet through it.  At Verizon, adding this capability to your SmartPhone costs about $15 a month.  I’d suggest you do what I did:  explore your options for Internet connectivity before you buy a Tablet.

What separated the Acer Iconia 500 from the rest of the pack for me at the time I bought it (about four months ago), was it’s expandability/connectivity.  It has full size and mini USB ports.  I can move files from my PC to my Tablet effortlessly via a thumb drive.  It has an HDMI port out so that I can view images or video from my Tablet on a big screen or TV.  It has a mini-SD card port into which I have a 32GB memory card filled with any file I might need on the road.  These are things the Ipad didn’t have (at the time . . . now, I’m not so sure).

The Acer is a great Tablet, but it’s not the only one.  Samsung makes a couple of terrific Tablets, a 10″ model (like the Iconia) and a 7″ model, which fits very nicely in your hand and in your purse.  HP got into the market for a Nano-Second and then suddenly got out and had a fire sale to dump it’s inventory.  Their mistake:  loading their Tablets with their own proprietary Operating System.  Don’t make that mistake: go Android or Apple.  For this reason, I’d avoid Blackberry’s version (but that’s personal; my last Blackberry Storm was so bad I dumped it early to go Android).  There are a couple of great places to play with a variety of Tablets:  Best Buy and Frys.  Each retailer has a full array of the latest and greatest.  However, I’d suggest you go home after a retail fact-finding mission and see if you can find your chosen device online (or at Costco).  Hey, wanna drive your retail salesperson nuts?  After you settle in a fall in love with a Tablet, pull out your smart phone, get online and shop for it right there in the store!  It makes them crazy!

STOP! Before you take my advice,, check out the date of this post: Oct. 6, 2011. That’s just a little more than a year ago, but in tech terms, that’s a lot. Much has changed or gelled since then and I’m not sure I’d be recommending Android for a REALTOR tablet today. It’s still true: I love all things Google and own no Apple devices, but I’m not in the street selling real estate every day. What has become clear is that the IPAD is the tablet of choice in our industry. There are abundant resources and training for it aimed at REALTORS. Can you still make excellent use of an Android tablet? Sure, especially if you are already familiar with the Android/ Chrome operating system and apps. But if you’re starting from scratch? And especially if you already own an Iphone – get an Ipad

The Real Estate Company of the Future

What does the real estate company of the future look like?   Everyone wants to know but most would prefer to ignore the early signs.  Picture an frightened ostrich with his head in a hole.

What we do know is this:  it will be lean, it will cost less, it will make sense, it will use technology to create efficiencies, it will run on systems, not personalities, it will look more like E-Trade than Merrill Lynch, more like Amazon than Sears.

In short, it won’t be based on the old Broker/Agent model where the broker delegates responsibility for building and marketing his/her company to the agents and attempts to grow through endless recruiting.  That’s a stupid model and really:  except for a few magical years in the sixties and seventies, has always been a stupid model.  And  it’s already disappearing.  How many 500 agent offices are still open in your marketplace?  Many have transitioned to a more ‘virtual’ concept, which is code for agents working from home with little real supervision.

No.  I think the future will feature a real estate practitioner (Broker or Agent – and maybe in the future there won’t be a difference) who is a connector.  He or she will be competent, capable and personable – someone a consumer can like and trust who will connect the seller with marketing (mostly electronic), the buyer with home search tools, both with quality representation and transaction processing.  The practitioner (ok, let’s call it a Broker) would stand at the center of a team of professionals each managing predictable and efficient systems to accomplish the various tasks involved in the process.

If it sounds like I just described Help-U-Sell, that’s partially correct.  I think we are closer to the future than anything else out there.  We have the technology – that we actually own and control – and it continues to morph and evolve every week, adapting to  changing markets and needs.  We already have the Broker-at-the-center model and the strong consumer focus.  Still we’re not there . . . we’re close but there are a few more bits of innovation that need to happen before we arrive . . . that’s why it’s the real estate company of the future.  What does your crystal ball tell you about how you’ll work tomorrow?  What do you see as important moving forward and what as irrelevant?

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