Tag: Don Taylor

Set Fee Blog Stats: 2012 In Review

WordPress creates an annual report for bloggers who use their service. I just (finally) opened mine and go some eye opening information:

  • In 2012, there were 67 new posts on The Set Fee Real Estate Blog, bringing the total to 292.
  • There were about 5,400 total views in the year, with the busiest day being February 15, with 72 views.
  • The post that garnered the most views on that day was about Maurine Grisso’s REO Training.
  • Most viewed posts for the year were (in order):
    1. How To Do It, Step 6: Accountabiity
    2. The Buyer Questionaire
    3. Old Scripts/ New Scripts
    4. Full Service Broker vs Limited Service Broker vs Discount Broker
    5. Clarifying Terms: Full Service Broker, Limited Service Broker, Discounter, Help-U-Sell

It seems pretty clear that the public is confused about the difference between full service, limited service, discount service and Help-U-Sell. I’d probably do myself a favor by writing more about this murky topic.

  • Most people came to this site via Networked Blogs, HelpUSell.com, and Facebook
  • My most active commenters were:
    1. Kirk Eisele
    2. Dan Desmond
    3. Don Taylor
    4. Robin Rowland
    5. Jeanne Strayer

Wouldn’t you like to put those five people in a room and then sit back and listen to them talk!

You can view the full report HERE.

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 Power of Zillow – The Power of Inventory

Hey!  Take a look at this:

That’s the first page of results of a search on Zillow for homes for sale in Chino Hills, CA.  Do you see the Help-U-Sell logo over on the right?  Yep.  It appears six times!  Six of the first nine listings are Patrick Wood’s!  Patrick is, of course, our franchisee in Chino Hills and he’s done about as good a job establishing the brand in his community as anyone this side of Don Taylor.  What do you think a consumer, looking for real estate in this town, who does what consumers today do (go to Zillow.com) thinks when they see this?  The compounding effect is remarkable!  The logo to the side of the listing is one of the benefits of becoming a ‘Premiere Agent’ with Zillow.  Of course, the main reason Brokers and Agents upgrade to Premiere is to have their contact information appear next to the listings of non-Premiere agents, but that’s really of minor importance to Patrick.  He gets HUGE bang for the buck from the display of the logo because he has a ton of listings! This is always true in our business:  the broker with lots of listings gets lots of leads.

This is why most of Help-U-Sell marketing is directed to potential Sellers.  If we do a good job of building inventory with our superior offer to Sellers, we’ll have all the Buyer leads we could ever want.

I don’t hear it much anymore, but there was a time when I’d occasionally hear a broker complain that they weren’t getting any leads from their website.  My reply was always the same:  ‘How many listings do you have in inventory?’  I’d usually hear something like ‘three’ or ‘five’ or ‘I’m down to two.’  They didn’t have a website problem, they had an inventory problem.  Solve the inventory problem and the leads will flow.

I mentioned that Patrick Wood has done a superb job of establishing the Brand in Chino Hills.  I want to share something else from him.  It’s a little bit of community involvement, of giving back, that really works:

That’s Patrick’s son in one of the uniforms his dad bought for the team. Once again:  same logo, prominently displayed.

Now, some Help-U-Sell purists might question the prominence Patrick gives to his own name.  I mean, one of the beauties of Help-U-Sell is that it is a system that works.  Unlike ordinary real estate businesses, it is not dependent on personality for success.  When we go out to establish the brand, we establish Help-U-Sell, not any individual.  Yet here, Patrick is branding himself just as he is Help-U-Sell.  He’s done this for eight years and today he IS Help-U-Sell in Chino Hills.  Ken Kopcho in Santa Maria, CA has done something similar with his ‘Ken Sells’ identity and website.  There’s nothing wrong with this.  If there is a negative, it is that branding yourself probably diminishes the value of your business on the open market.  If you were trying to sell a business that was built as much around YOU as around your Brand, the assumption is that it would collapse when you walked away.  An established Brand – especially one like ours, that’s built on replicatable systems – should be in a much better position to survive an ownership change.

ON A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT NOTE . . .

Tomorrow, Google’s new privacy policy goes into effect.  This is a logical change that probably won’t upset too many people (although some have been screaming about it for weeks).  What they’re going to do is pool all of your profile information from all Google owned products to create one master profile with all of your information in one place.  By pooling your profiles into one, they’ll have more comprehensive information about you and will be better able to serve up advertising that is apt to appeal to you.  In addition to the information you’ve provided to, say, Google+, YouTube, Blogger, etc., they will also pool your browsing history.  Again, it helps them know what advertising to serve you.

Don Gross of CNN had a pretty good piece about the change and you can read it here.  At the end of the article, he presents a handful of easy things you can to to improve your privacy in this new Google world.  I found it helpful enough to reproduce it here:

Here are a few tips on how to keep your data a little more private on some of Google’s most popular features.

Don’t sign in

This is the easiest and most effective tip.

Many of Google’s services — most notably search, YouTube and Maps — don’t require you to sign in to use them. If you’re not logged in, via Gmail or Google+, for example, Google doesn’t know who you are and can’t add data to your profile.

But to take a little more direct action …

Removing your Google search history

Eva Galperin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has compiled a step-by-step guide to deleting and disabling your Web History, which includes the searches you’ve done and sites you’ve visited.

It’s pretty quick and easy:

— Sign in to your Google account

— Go to www.google.com/history

— Click “Remove all Web History”

— Click “OK”

As the EFF notes, deleting your history will not prevent Google from using the information internally. But it will limit the amount of time that it’s fully accessible. After 18 months, the data will become anonymous again and won’t be used as part of your profile.

Six tips to protect your search privacy (from the EFF)

Clearing your YouTube history

Similarly, users may want to remove their history on YouTube. That’s also pretty quick and easy.

— Sign in on Google’s main page

— Click on “YouTube” in the toolbar at the top of the page

— On the right of the page, click your user name and select “Video Manager”

— Click “History” on the left of the page and then “Clear Viewing History”

— Refresh the page and then click “Pause Viewing History”

— You can clear your searches on YouTube by going back and choosing “Clear Search History” and doing the same steps.

Clearing your browsing history on Google Chrome

— Click on the “wrench” icon at the far right of your toolbar

— Select “Tools”

— Select “Clear browsing data”

— In the dialogue box that appears, click the “clear browsing data” box (there are other options you may want to use as well)

— Select “Beginning of Time” to clear your entire browsing history

— Click “clear browsing history”

Gmail Chat

When you start a chat with someone, you can make the conversation “off the record.” Off-the-record chats will not be stored in your chat history or the history of the person with whom you’re talking. All chats with that person will remain off the record until you change the status. To go off the record:

— Click the “Actions” link at the top right of the chat window

— Scroll down to “Go off the record.” Both you and your chat partner will see that the chat has been taken off the record.

What are Google’s other products?

Obviously, anything with “Google” in its name counts. But the Web giant owns other products that might not be so obvious to some folks.

— Gmail. Yes, the “G” is for Google.

— YouTube. Google bought the Web’s leading video site in 2006

— Picasa. The online photo sharing site became Google’s in 2004

— Blogger. The blog publishing tool has been Google’s since 2003.

— FeedBurner. A management tool for bloggers and managing RSS feeds. Google bought it in 2007.

— Orkut. Google’s original social-networking site isn’t big in the U.S. But it’s one of the most popular sites in India and Brazil.

— Android. Yes, you probably know this. But just for the record, Google owns the most popular smartphone operating system.

 

 

Big Brother, Google and Print Media

Has it occurred to you yet that Google – at least the search engine part of Google – is, essentially, a monopoly?  They have achieved such penetration in the realm of Internet search that, what few competitors there are,  are insignificant.

I remember when I started surfing the net back in the 90’s.  None of us knew what we were doing and AOL gained a huge leg-up by organizing the Internet (today that seems so silly) and by giving us crude search capabilities.  I drifted from search engine to search engine and eventually settled into AltaVista.  In the mid-nineties AltaVista leaped ahead of its competitors by pioneering the use of web-crawlers that would go out, scan websites for information, and return data for indexing.  Today we call the crawlers ‘Spiders’ and they scamper a little faster.  AltaVista was eventually bought by Yahoo and, in May of last year, was shut down.  Now, when you try to search using AltaVista, you’re really searching using Yahoo.  As an interesting aside, it was AltaVista that brought us that wonderful translation tool, Babel-Fish.  Just as the search part of AV has been over taken by Google, so has Babel-Fish:  today we use Google Translate.

Which brings me back to the Google monopoly.  They didn’t gain that position by destroying or overtaking competitors; we gave it to them.  Google came out of the box so far ahead of their competitors that almost overnight other search engines were left in the dust.  Google made the Internet useful.  It brought order to chaos.  That’s the nice part.  But to monetize search, Google had to bring value to those of us with something to sell or something to say.  They realized (just as Don Taylor did in 1976) that the most effective marketing was highly targeted marketing.  The delivery of a highly targeted demographic to an advertiser proved to be very valuable and targeted pay-per-click ads became a dominant feature of the Internet.

So, how did Google get so good at segmenting and categorizing demographic groups to deliver to advertisers?  They kept track of us.  They recorded what we searched for and what we clicked on.  They watched how we behaved when we interacted with them and they stored that information, analyzed it, reduced it to numbers and predictive algorithms.  Today Google knows more about what interests me than just about anyone else!

We’d like to believe that Google is blind, like justice.  We’d like to believe that if I – a White male in his 60s living in Southern California – search for something, that you – a Hispanic female in your 30s living in the Northeast – also search for, we’d get the same results.  Not so. Google not only sells you as a potential target to advertisers, it also uses what it knows about your online behavior to filter search results so that your search outcome may be very different than mine.

I got a big reminder of this yesterday.  Ron McCoy, who lives 90 miles away in Riverside, just bough an IPad II.  The Apple version of PowerPoint on the IPad is something called Notebook.  Ron wanted to convert his PowerPoint Franchise Sales Presentation to Notebook and had no luck figuring it out.  While we were on the phone, I Googled it and quickly came up with a website devoted to Notebook with a long string of how-to’s about this very subject.  When Ron did the same search the website was buried. Google gave us different results because:  we live in different areas and we search for different stuff.  Google watches . . . Google knows.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Google.  I’m more a Google person than a PC (Microsoft) person.  I have a Google T-Shirt.  I have an Android phone.  But sometimes all of this Google-looking-over-my-shoulder-while-I-browse creeps me out a bit.  Sure, their motives are purely Capitalistic:  they want great data on me to sell to advertisers.  But what if their information came under the control of an entity – a faction, a government, a policing unit – who maybe had other motives?  Makes me want to browse through an anonymizer!

I applaud Google for what its done to marketing.  That arena is fundamentally different and the difference is directly related to what Google did.  But it’s interesting:  after years of diss-ing print media as the nearly extinct dinosaur that it is, Google has taken to using traditional paper advertising to show its concern for our online safety.  They’ve earmarked tens of millions of dollars for a ‘Good to Know’ campaign running in newspapers and magazines.  The first ad ran in Britain recently and encouraged people to be a little more creative with their passwords.  It’s actually very good information, so good that I’ll reproduce the ad here and encourage you to do what Mother-Google is asking you to do!

 

Having gotten all of that rambling tangential junk out of the way, here’s my point for you today:  If Google – who owns the Internet – who invented online marketing – is getting into print advertising, isn’t’ it something you ought to consider for your business?   For five years we’ve preached that print is dead-dead-dead, and every time one of our brokers put a toe in the print-media waters he pulled it back in shock and horror.  But suddenly, Maurine Grisso takes a full page ad in her local paper for a song the week between Christmas and New Years and actually develops LEADS.  I know:  Maurine is a brash pioneer, sometimes so far on the cutting edge that she’s actually on the bleeding edge; but nobody can fault her for not taking risks and sometimes reaping big rewards.  And I’m not suggesting you sink thousands of dollars into print advertising this month or next.  What I am suggesting is that it might be time to put that toe back in the water.  Spend $50 or $100 and run a little ‘Sell Fast – Save Thousands’ ad or something similar.  Try putting a true ETM (with sold-and-saves, testimonials, and an Easy Way plus a few listings) on the back of a Homes magazine.  Pay very close attention to the results you get:  how many inquiries does this specific ad produce?  Then let me know if Google and Maurine are right or if it’s still too early.  Thanks!

Richard Cricchio, Help-U-Sell and the Office Exclusive Listing

We had quite a Roundtable Call today.  Lots of good information flew around, but one item really struck me.

Richard Cricchio from Honolulu started talking about ‘Office Exclusive Listings.’  I asked him to clarify and he responded:

‘When we take a call on a listing, we always ask if the caller is working with an agent.  If they’re not, we send them directly to the seller to arrange a showing.  The seller shows the house and we followup afterward.  That way, if the buyer moves forward on the house, all the seller pays is the Set Fee.  They save the largest amount of money.  We’ve always done that on all of our listings and it’s helped drive the message that we are about savings.’

It sounded like such a radical idea.

But it’s not.

It’s about 35 years old.  It’s a thing called ‘Help-U-Sell’.  That’s how this company was designed by Don Taylor.  That’s why it’s called ‘Help-U-Sell‘.  As we turned the corner on the new millennium, we started adjusting the model here and there.

First, the seller’s phone number came off the for sale sign.  Remember, for 25 years, our listings were ‘For Sale WITH Owner’ and we put the sellers number on the sign so buyers could contact them directly.  We did that for two reasons:  first, it gave the seller the greatest opportunity to save, which is what we wanted so they’d tell everyone they know about us and second because it’s a way of multiplying our efforts, enabling us to more that we’d otherwise be able to do.

Then we started capturing buyers and showing our listings ourselves.  Sellers still could find their own buyers by holding open houses and talking the house up with the neighbors and at work.  But we wanted a relationship with that buyer, so we started handling the showings ourselves.

I’m not saying either of these adjustments was wrong.  But I do think it’s interesting that the guy who is way out ahead of the pack in our currently running Winter Warm Up Contest is still sending buyers directly to his sellers.  How much time are you spending each week running over to show a listing to a new buyer?  If your sellers handled that task for you, what else could you be doing with that time?  Are your followup skills strong enough that you could still build a relationship with that buyer after they’ve seen the listing with the seller?  After all, most of the time they’re not going to buy that house anyway.

In today’s market, where so many sellers have so little equity, I’d think giving them the greatest change of finding their own buyer and saving the largest amount of money would be very appealing.  Think about it.

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