What’s What! Website Illumination

If you are one of the many Help-U-Sell Brokers who already understand this, please skip ahead.

This is about the various websites Help-U-Sell Brokers may have, how they relate and what’s required to manage them.

Until the first week of March, 2010, all Help-U-Sell Broker websites were hosted and maintained by outside vendors.  The two biggest vendors — the ones who had most of our offices — were Fidelity and Point2Agent.  Your office  website — not the one that was just released a few weeks ago, but the one you’ve had for a couple of years — was not hosted or configured by Help-U-Sell.  Both of those vendors and several others have done an admirable job of keeping our offices present on the Internet for some time.  But here’s where the confusion comes in.

Fidelity, the vendor for many Help-U-Sell office websites, decided to pass that business on to the sub-contractor who had been doing the work all along:  NewHomePage.com.  In order to maintain their old Help-U-Sell office sites, brokers who had been with Fidelity needed to sign a new agreement with NewHomePage.com.  Pricing didn’t change, but the name of the vendor did.  Unfortunately this change occurred within a couple of weeks of the release of the new Help-U-Sell websites and some of you have made the assumption that the NewHomePage.com websites are the new broker sites everyone’s been talking about.  They are not.

The new Help-U-Sell office websites were released the first week of March during the Tech Summit.  To see your new site, go to a website address configured this way:

www.yourofficename.helpusellbeta.com

For example, if your company name is Help-U-Sell Acme Realty, you’d enter:  www.acmerealty.helpusellbeta.com.

The new broker websites are a work of art, brilliantly designed from the bottom up to be attractive to search engines and to permit tons of easy customization and optimization.   These sites will become major lead generators for our offices but they will take some initial work on the broker’s part and some ongoing involvement to achieve maximum effectiveness.  That’s what the Tech Summit was about.  ***

The question is:  now that you have the new Help-U-Sell office website provided by the company, do you still need your Point2Agent or NewHomePage.com website?  The answer is ‘Yes,’ for a number of reasons.

First:  IDX.  You probably have IDX set up for your old website and it is automatically feeding your listings and those of your MLS to your website.  Getting the same IDX feed to your new Help-U-Sell website requires a new agreement between you, Help-U-Sell, and your MLS.  Once that’s in place, it takes some time to map the IDX feed to fit into the Help-U-Sell site.  Until you have IDX up and functioning on your new website, you should keep the older site that already has IDX.

Second:  Traction.  Even when you get IDX on your website, even after you customize and optimize it to draw consumer interest, it will take awhile for the Search Engine Spiders to crawl your site and see what’s there so that they can include your new website in search results.  I wouldn’t drop the old site until you are getting at least as many inquiries from the new site.

Third:  Leads.  Put plainly:  If your current Poin2Agent or NewHomePage.com website is producing a reasonable number of leads each month for you, why cancel it at all?  It’s perfectly fine to have more than one website, each one pulling a set of leads for your office, so long as they conform with Help-U-Sell  Logo and Trademark guidelines.

Managing your new Help-U-Sell office website is easy and a complete guide is in the Download Library (under Tech Summit Materials).  However there is one area where some confusion seems present, and it’s Listings.

The new broker site will extract your new listings out of your IDX feed and display them on your website.  This means, if you put the listing in MLS, it’s going to find its way to your Help-U-Sell website automatically.  That great!  It means you don’t have to double input on your new listings.  HOWEVER:  once your new Help-U-Sell site has the listing, any changes you make to it in MLS will not reflect on your Help-U-Sell site.  You’ll need to make price changes, report properties under contract and sold in OMS in order for the changes to reflect on the website.  You’ll also need to manually remove listings from your new Help-U-Sell website in the unfortunate event they expire without selling.

There’s another reason to be particularly involved with your listings in OMS.  Our system permits levels of customization that are not allowed by most MLS’s.  We have space for dozens of photos and virtual tours as well as comment and feature fields that may not be available at MLS.  So, when you get a new listing, put it into MLS, wait a few moments, then  open up OMS, find your new listing and customize it any way you want.

***NOW HERE”S THE BIG NEWS

The current series of Tech Tuesday Teleconferences ends with next Tuesday’s meeting.  Beginning the next week, on Tuesday, April 13, Tech Tuesday will go back to basics.  We’ll start all over and go step by step, through your websites, learning how to work with them, with OMS and with the Content Management System, etc.  When you get your email notice that it’s time to re-up for the Tech Series, please follow the link and get ‘er done.

 

 

 

 

Sleepless in Sarasota

Ever have a sleepless night?  That’s me right now.  My brain just won’t turn off.  So I got to digging around in the blog and came across the pricing series I did last November.  I think it might be helpful today as more and more people are starting to venture back into the market.  Read them in order, 1-4, and let me know your best pricing secrets.  Oh, by the way:  if you’d like good quality versions of any of the graphics to use in your own pricing conversations, just let me know.

Pricing Clinic 3

Pricing Clinic 3

Pricing Clinic 3

Pricing Clinic 4

Why We Charge A Set Fee

The Low Set Fee is the heart of our identity.  It is the engine that produces the result we are known for:  consumer savings.  There are several reasons why we charge a Set Fee instead of a percentage based commission.

  • It is logical. If you know how your market behaves at any given time, if you know how long it will take to sell a properly priced property, if you know what you’ll be spending each month on marketing — you are able to know what it will cost to sell the typical home.  That, plus a ‘fudge factor,’ is your carrying cost.  Add a reasonable profit for your company and you have a Set Fee that makes sense to you and to the consumer.
  • Percentage Commissions, on the other hand, make no sense at all.  Think about it:  if your company charges, say, 6%, the guy with a $200,000 house is going to pay $12,000.  His friend, two blocks away with a bigger house, worth $300,000, is going to pay $18,000.  What did the friend get for the extra $6,000 he paid?  $6,000 more advertising?  I don’t think so.  Is his agent going to work $6,000 harder?  Doubtful.  Truth is:  they’re paying hugely different prices for the same thing.  It’s nuts and the consumer knows it.
  • It is a differentiator. Differentiation in the real estate business is a good thing.   The California Association of REALTORS has been asking consumers for years if they’d use the same agent again in a real estate transaction.  In 2004, 79% said ‘yes.’  In 2009, only 22% said ‘yes.’  If that’s not a confidence crisis, I don’t know what is!  Seems to me, the smart thing is to look as little like the rest of the pack as you can.  Charging a Set Fee instead of a Commission says you’re different.
  • It drives more business to your door. The Low Set Fee that produces savings over what ordinary brokers charge has great appeal to Sellers, resulting in large numbers of listings which create a strong flow of buyer leads through the office.  More Sellers = More Buyers = More Business.

Maurine Grisso, on the Broker Roundtable Call today, presented the Set Fee as well as I’ve ever heard it presented.  She talks in term of 3 ways your home might sell:  You Sell – We Sell – They Sell.  No matter how it sells, you always pay the Low Set Fee.  If you find your own buyer (You Sell), that’s all you pay.  If our Help-U-Sell office finds the buyer (We Sell), you pay your Set Fee plus our Selling Fee.  If you elect to go into the MLS and another Broker brings the buyer (They Sell), you’ll pay your Set Fee plus whatever % Commission you offer to the selling broker.  In all cases, the Seller saves over what they’d pay a traditional broker.

The Set Fee is who we are.  It’s what sets us apart from the crowd.  It’s what motivates consumers to call us and ask, ‘How’s that work?’  Set it wisely and re-evaluate it regularly, and wear it like a badge of honor.

Charging Less, Making More

The ability to go into the marketplace with a financially attractive offer for consumers AND walk away from the transaction with more dollars than your more traditional counterparts is at the heart of Help-U-Sell’s appeal to brokers.

Think like a traditional broker for a moment.

  • The success of the office is built on one thing:  your ability to attract and retain productive agents.
  • Your primary tool in accomplishing this is commission split — you know to be successful you need agents and to get them, you’ll need to pay well.
  • Unfortunately, the health of your bottom line is dependent on how many commission dollars you retain after splitting with your agents.

Put all of that in a hat and shake it up and you’ve got  . . . a mess!  Your formula for success is at war with itself! No wonder ordinary real estate offices suffer from embarrassingly low profitability if they make a profit at all (despite the fact that consumers think they’re paid way too much!).

Help-U-Sell takes dynamite to all of that nonsense.  First thing we do is demystify the listing process.  We toss out the notion that personality is what sellers buy when they list their property for sale.  Bunk! we say.  Listing is a logical thing.  If you present a system with a track record of success for a fee that is reasonable, most people jump at it.  Instead of two hour marathons where traditional agents warble on about how wonderful they are, listing presentations become simple, short and matter-of-fact:  here’s what we do, here’s what you do and this is what it costs.  Listing is so easy in Help-U-Sell that, well . . . even a Broker could do it.  That’s why we take the listing side of the business out of the agents’ hands.

We believe the listing side of the business belongs to the company, and the broker or an assistant (that’s different than an agent) takes all listings.  The agent’s role is on the buyer side, where we can afford to split commissions.  But, since we create all the leads for our buyer agents through our large number of listings and the power of our well-conceived marketing, we don’t have to give away the farm to get and keep salespeople.  We’re not asking them to call on FSBOS or Expireds, to knock doors or make cold calls to find listings.  We’re not asking them to master a slick listing presentation or memorize responses to two dozen common seller objections.  We just want them to take the prospects we’ve created and find them a property.   Good agents thrive at Help-U-Sell.

Back to the listing side;  here’s how the dollars break down:

Here’s where the ‘yeah-buts’ start to echo from the mouths of ordinary agents.  Yeah-but, with no listing agent the seller’s getting less than full service! Says who?  Full service is getting the property sold for the greatest walk-away dollars in the right time frame — and we do that every day.  Yeah-but, you get what you pay for!  When you list with me I’m going to actively market your property until it’s sold! Um, let’s see . . . ‘actively market‘ . . . I guess that means put a sign in yard and a listing in the MLS, which then syndicates to a couple dozen Internet sites, right?  In my experience that’s what ordinary agents do when they get a listing.  In my Help-U-Sell office, we have a comprehensive marketing plan, orchestrated, monitored and constantly improved by . . . ME.  It’s not just a bunch of agents running around willy-nilly, making it up as they go along on every listing they take.  I could go on with the ‘yeah-buts,‘ but we try to keep these posts to a ten minute read or less.

We are a very proud group, and rightfully so.  We’ve taken the fluff and snake oil out of selling real estate and converted the process to logical systems that get results.  We’ve done it in a way that saves consumers thousands of dollars and makes our brokers a nice profit.  Who could ask for anything more?

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