Your Future in Real Estate

It’s time to get serious about your career in real estate.  The market is rebounding, homes are selling and it looks like we are in for another multi-year cycle of appreciation and normalcy in the marketplace.

Now is the time when great careers and great real estate businesses are made.  It is your moment, your time to shine, your best shot at major success . . . IF you are positioned to take advantage of the opportunity.  What does that mean?

If you are an agent working for an ordinary real estate company, be it franchised or independent, you are competing against thousands of other agents just like yourself, with the same tools, same information, same offering, and same pricing.  The only edge you could possibly have in that fishbowl – the only things that might set you apart from the pack – are your personality and your work ethic.  So, let’s assume you really apply yourself next year.  You work harder and smarter and you polish up that smile . . .  and you go from doing 18 deals to doing 25.  That’s very nice, but it’s hardly the stuff of real estate greatness.

This is not the time to increase your production by 30%.  It is the time to increase it by 300%.  And you won’t do it by doing the same things you did last year and the year before, only doing them harder.  It’s time to look for a better way to do the real estate business.

If you are a broker, get ready.  You have been able to rein back outrageous commission splits a little in the past few down years.  But with the market heating up, even your most mediocre agents will be looking for more, and you know if you don’t give it to them, the office down the street will.  You can expect your turnover to move higher in the months to come which means, if you are going to maintain current levels of production, you’re going to have to kick up your recruiting game.

I gotta tell ya:  I don’t envy you at all.  The success of your business is dependent on your ability to get people to come to work for you and then, to get them to stick around; and your only real tool for accomplishing either of those objectives is split.  And what the heck does any of that have to do with helping buyers buy and sellers sell real estate?

Clearly, it is time for a new game, a new model, a new way to do this business.  A way that results in incredibly satisfied clients, busy agents with healthy bank accounts and brokers who are functioning as successful entrepreneurs, not mere support for their sales staffs.

And you know what the way is:  It is Help-U-Sell.  Here’s why:

As a Help-U-Sell broker you will go into the marketplace with a consumer offer that is not only fundamentally different than that of your competitors, but also superior to theirs from a consumer point of view.  You’ll accomplish the same results the pack of ordinary agents and brokers will but you will save people thousands over what they’d pay anyone else!  It is an offer that is so compelling that, once word is out in the marketplace, potential sellers usually want to at least talk with you before making a listing decision.  And we find we get that listing about 90% of the time.

It is a focus on marketing and marketplace intelligence that more closely resembles what Home Depot does than what ABC Realty does. And because Help-U-Sell marketing is systematic and focused, it produces a steady stream of buyer and seller leads into the office.  These are leads the office has created, leads the office owns, leads the office will assign and track.

It is agents who want to come to work for you because you have the one thing nobody else can give them:  leads.  It’s agents who have had a close brush with burn out from the gigantic job description they tried to manage at an ordinary real estate company.  They will see the streamlined, focused job you have for them as an opportunity to do more, make more and have more fun doing it.

It is a smaller, tightly knit office team that is outperforming companies with 10 or 12 times the agents.  It is an team with one goal – yours, with one direction – yours, one purpose – profitability.  It is very different from an ordinary office where the broker begs people to come to work, begs people to stay, begs people to attend sales meeting, begs people to do the prospecting they promised to do and so on.  Aren’t you getting tired of all that begging?

And finally, it is a bottom line that is beyond healthy, that is growing and expanding every month.  This is the great truth ordinary real estate brokers and agents have the most difficulty understanding about Help-U-Sell:

Even though we charge consumers thousands less, we deliver more dollars to the bottom line per transaction than our ordinary competitors who charge much more!

I know you don’t believe me, but go ahead:  call a Help-U-Sell broker – any Help-U-Sell broker – and ask them to explain it to you.  I’m sure you will be surprised at what you hear.

The Help-U-Sell ship is sailing, and it’s going to do more than it did between 1998 and 2006 (the rough dates of the last up cycle in real estate).  And if you are serious about your success, it is time to fly a new flag on your own ship, to find a new and better way to do the real estate business.  For goodness sake!  Do it in a way that is different from what everyone else is doing and that is better for consumers and for you bottom line.  Do it with Help-U-Sell!

*Unlike other franchises who will give you a list of their 12 happiest franchisees to call, I have no problem telling you to talk with any Help-U-Sell franchisee.  We are a multi-year winner of the Franchise Business Review’s franchisee satisfaction survey.  Year after year, our brokers affirm their delight with the business model and the power of the team.  So go ahead:  pick a Help-U-Sell broker – any Help-U-Sell broker – and let them tell you why joining this team is a very smart move.

 

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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