Blogging Pro. Security fixes. A good time to run through your plug-ins to make sure everything is 2.1.x-compatible — and thus, possibly, a good time to leave 2.0.x behind.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
Category: Marketing (page 137 of 191)
Late last night I received THIS from a form filled out on my website:
I read about Russell starting Realtor Training, I would like to know if he can set up an automated program for me to follow and use here in Victoria Bc. I sold 11 million dollars worth of real Estate in 2006, I would like to double that over the next 12 months or more. Cheers, hope to hear from you soon!
And tonight see this post from Greg, where the question is:
I would like to know if anyone has a great listing generation system that works, day in and day out. My goal is to gross $600,000 over the next 12 months. I know this is a big topic. I am keen to to see what you respond with.
Both questions are basically the same – how can I easily NET about 500k a year. Please send me the answer. Thanks!
There are a number of things you can do to generate leads. The effective things require either your time or your money. For example, I use radio and TV advertising to generate lots of “come list me” calls. It is very expensive. Last year I paid over 600k just for my media ads. You can start with less – when I started, the first year on radio I paid about 20k. The next year about 40k. Geographic farms are a common way to generate leads. Some agents buy them from companies. Working one’s sphere of influence is another common lead generation method – contacting a “known database”. One way or the other you will spend time, money or both to generate leads.
To go big one must do one of these two things: prospect effectively or market yourself effectively. Pick one.
Do I plan to ever attempt to put together some sort of package of “steps” – kind of a one-size-fits-all to provide to other agents? No. You can get one here if you are interested in such useless crap. Is there a way to become really successful in real estate with a small amount of effort? It can look that way Read more
Another wide-open Ask the Broker question came in over the transom:
Very rewarding and refreshing to listen to Russell Shaw. Wow, I wish I lived nearby. I’d love to see Russ live in April. Having said that, I heard Russell say listing homes is my future. It really sank in.
I would like to know if anyone has a great listing generation system that works, day in and day out. My goal is to gross $600,000 over the next 12 months.
I know this is a big topic. I am keen to to see what you respond with.
I have no good answer to this — for now. What we are learning from Russell is that what we thought was a listing system is, in fact, a halfasstrophic mess. We’re rebuilding everything from the ground up, and we may have some good, market-tested answers to these questions in a few months. For today, what about you? Do you have any good advice to proffer to our financially ambitious questioner?
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
…is up at NY Houses 4 Sale. Cathy picked my Egoism in action for our entry, but the big winner was Trulia Blog’s interview with Barbara Corcoran. Lots of other great posts, so drop over and have a gander.
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
I am a hardliner on the subject of reform in the real estate industry. Over the last nine months, I have written at great length about, among other things, the skill-set required to survive in the future of full-service real estate, empowering buyers, dual agency, how the NAR makes war on the free enterprise system, divorcing the buyer’s agent’s compensation from the listing agent’s fee, rebuilding the MLS without the co-brokerage fee, eliminating the IRS safe-harbor for real estate brokers to induce them to take responsibility for managing head-count, and getting rid of real estate licensing laws — or at least the broker’s level of licensing — to promote better competition among agents and better due diligence among consumers in hiring agents. There’s all that, plus much, much more.
Why am I going through my bona fides as a reformer? Because I am about to denounce a failed, flawed, fractured, false reform that is to be proposed today by Redfin.com. At first blush, this “Real Estate Consumer’s Bill of Rights” sounds like a good thing — and it easily could have been a good thing. Instead, it uses a treacly moral suasion and calls for new legislation to ram the corrupt Redfin style of doing business down everyone’s throats.
Start at the beginning. Yesterday, Kris Berg, Ardell DellaLoggia, Kevin Boer and I had this email from Redfin.com CEO Glenn Kelman:
Hope you’re having a good weekend. We wanted to let you know, under embargo until tomorrow at 9 a.m. (or whenever Inman goes live with the news), that we’re launching a program on Monday called the consumer bill of rights.
It doesn’t argue the issue of commission rates; we don’t consider it our business what others charge. It mostly focuses on simple reforms that would ensure that consumers get complete and open access to information about properties and the process of buying or selling properties.
The reason we’re asking you guys about it is that we want other brokers to support these rights. This is something constructive and positive, not antagonizing and negative — which itself is a result of coaching you’ve given us.
Read more
This is another Ask the Broker question best thrown out to everyone:
It looks like I did Project Blogger one better. I actually hired on a new agent yesterday. As in brand new. The guy is an attorney, formerly in-house counsel for a non-profit, he just got his real estate license and wanted to hang it with us.
So what things would you say to a brand new agent in this market? What are the “New Basics”? I plan to tell him BloodhoundBlog is must reading. But whither from there?
I’ll lob a softball to get things started: I don’t want to seem to endorse Tom Hopkins, because too much of his real estate sales advice turns on what I consider to be deceptive tricks. But something he said has stuck with me forever:
Am I making the most productive possible use of my time right now?
That may not be an exact quote. The point is to make sure that, when you’re working, you’re working on things that will improve your present or future income potential, not spinning your wheels. The other end of the argument is, when you’re not working, make the most productive possible use of that time, giving your spouse, family and friends your undivided attention.
There’s much more than this, of course. What say you? Should a new agent go hi-tech — or go door-to-door. Farm and pray for rain or pay for leads? Go it alone or fill a hole on somebody’s team?
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
I am continually amazed at the people who write for BloodhoundBlog. Day after day they knock me out, but it’s always late Saturday or early Sunday when I am most impressed. Why? That’s when I have to make my short-list of candidate posts for the week’s real estate carnivals. Cathleen normally makes the final choices, thank goodness, but all of the contributors have a chance to nominate their favorites. Here are my picks for the week:
- Ideas For Niche Marketing by Brian Brady
- ASK THE BROKER: How does a Lender AE get business from a Mortgage Broker? by Brian Brady
- Sez Me — Random Sunday Thoughts — The Duh Factor by Jeff Brown
- Niche Marketing in Action by Teri Lussier
- What Do I Want In a Loan Officer? by Russell Shaw
- Reality-Based Success by Morgan Brown
- Predatory Coaching For Realtors and Loan Originators by Brian Brady
- Surprise and Delight Us by Morgan Brown
- Independence Day – It’s Your Business by Kris Berg
That’s nine, and there are more I might have included. If you missed some of these, give them a look. Only one will be entered in each carnival, and there’s no telling if we’ll win. But win, lose or draw, we are good and ever better. Go see for yourself…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
This came in as an “Ask the Broker” question, but it’s really a wide open pitch for any informed observer. (That would be you.)
So should second-home buyers buy now, or wait? Will lending rates go lower soon? Or is this the time to strike?
Have at it, if you like, but back it up with a reasoned argument. I have no idea where our interlocutor is located, so respond for your own market.
My own take: If you’re willing to buy aggressively and hold for at least three years — five would be better — this might be the ideal time to buy a turn-key home in the Phoenix area. Values could continue to slip over the short-run, but interest rates are unlikely to stay this low in the long-run. Waiting out the bottom on price could result in a worse buy overall, where hammering hard now on price while rates are still very low could put you in an excellent position to prosper when values start to rise again. Nota bene: Never invest money you can’t afford to lose.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
This isn’t real estate related, but since I’m only here as a blogging experiment anyway…
A stunninngly gorgeous and pretty damn smart teenager has found a soundtrack for my Project Bloodhound life. It might be old to the technogeeks here, but it’s new to me, and as there is no accounting for taste, I think it’s fun. Just the thing for tapping your toes during blogsomnia (just close your eyes and listen, the video sucks).
Happy Friday!
Mega-producing Realtor and BloodhoundBlog contributor Russell Shaw insists that “success is contagious.” He backed up that argument at yesterday’s StarPower seminar in Phoenix. Russell spent much of his day surrounded by Realtors eager to infect themselves with his 400-transaction-a-year mojo. As we have good cause to know, Russell is boundlessly generous with good advice, so it could be a few dozen new millionaires came down with an incurable case of success yesterday.
Russell was one of the seminar speakers, and he did a killer 25 minute presentation on how to price listings — or how to price listings that will sell — or how not to take listings that will never sell. His overarching thesis is that successful people think differently, and his presentation stood as good evidence of that argument: He told the audience nothing they did not already know, but he forced them to look at it from such a different frame of reference that he had the rolling in the aisles.
StarPower CEO and Ringmaster Howard Brinton has agreed to share the audio recording of Russell’s talk with us, so we’ll make it available as a podcast when we get the file.
Cathy and I were both hugely impressed with the intellectual content of the event. Despite my first name, I am not a terribly gregarious specimen, so I am much more likely to catch success from a book. But every one of the eight presenters was bursting with good ideas. Cathy was particularly impressed with Tami Spaulding from The Group in Denver. So many good ideas seem to come out of The Group that I may want to devote some concentrated attention to what they’re doing.
Cathy fell in love with Spaulding’s ideas for a pre-listing package, and I immediately saw how such a thing could be done on-line as well as in print. There were a lot of other ideas like that, things that we think we can adapt to our way of going at things.
This year’s StarPower Annual Conference is in Phoenix. If you come to town, we’ll buy you a beer. And there’s an excellent chance you’ll catch Read more
It finally dawned on me. I have been grappling with the idea of single-property websites for some time. Should I? Shouldn’t I? Would a single-property website for a listing enhance the exposure of the home and therefore hasten a sale or would it simply serve to impress the seller? Would a single-property URL be detrimental in that it would cause brand confusion with our widely-promoted and established website which already provides all of the property information in what I consider a very comprehensive and compelling format? I could create a distinct site or blog for the home, but wouldn’t that drive traffic from my site? Conversely, I could create a domain forward and point the URL to the existing page in my site, but wouldn’t that in fact be redundant?
Yahoo! Today I’m on board with the concept of the single-property site, and I have Yahoo! and my real estate company to thank for my sudden clarity of thought.
Let’s Call Them “Prudential”
I happen to be affiliated with a company (who shall remain nameless) who negotiated an exclusive agreement with Yahoo! Real Estate. Without going into specifics, I will be the first to admit that there is great benefit to the agents of this partnership, but it comes with a cost. Agents pay to be included in the program but, more importantly, I fear that as many leads are being driven from me as they are to me.
We Want to Help You (Help Us)
Participating agents can assign a unique Yahoo! Search ID to their listings which, when entered in the Yahoo! search bar, will bring up the full property page. This page is branded with the agent’s information which, at first blush, sounds like a hell of a deal. Further, if a consumer happens upon the property during a search, they will be directed to this same branded page.
Let’s start with the obvious. This is a company branding effort in agent-branding sheep’s clothing. As an example, a client of ours who was relocating back to San Diego was using the Yahoo! site to search for homes. She innocently saved her search and within Read more
“Surprise and Delight” is a mantra that has been engrained in my consciousness from my pre-mortgage education in the world homebuilder marketing and customer experience modeling. “Surprise and Delight” is a very straightforward concept; however, the astounding lack of implementation in the marketplace (especially the mortgage and real estate market) makes this strategy an untapped powerhouse waiting to be used to your advantage. “Surprise and Delight” strategy is just what it sounds like — surprise your customer with a small delight when they least expect it; taking their experience with you from acceptable to exceptional. Propelling past acceptable to exceptional gives you the ultimate power in marketing — the power of remarkable service.
Surprise and delight can be traced from concepts well outlined in Seth Godin’s Free Prize Inside, and Harry Beckwith’s Selling the Invisible (both must reads). The basic tenet is excellent service is no longer enough, superior knowledge is not enough, a “great deal” is certainly not enough. None are enough to make your service remarkable. There has to be something more – something worth remarking on. It’s important to define remarkable service as service that is so extraordinary it makes your customer share the experience with people they know. And not just share, advocate on your behalf because of it. Anything less than their advocacy means you’ve failed to render a service to the degree of remarkability.
An example. There is a little flower shop in Laguna Beach, California named The Black Iris. They are not just another flower shop – they are flower artists that create imaginative works of art with flowers and other flora. The first time I saw one of their bouquets I was blown away. I inquired about it from the person who had purchased it and they raved about this little shop. I had to order one for my wife’s birthday. $150 later, my wife had an exquisite arrangement that actually made her weep with happiness. $150 is a lot for flowers; it’s a piddling price to be a hero to your loved one. I immediately told my brother-in-law about them and many other Read more
This is me in today’s Arizona Republic (permanent link):
Skilled Realtor bargain of lifetime
We own 65 Internet domains so far. Of those, 29 are actually hosted on the Internet, sites you can visit with your Web browser. The others are “pointed” at the hosted sites.
If you forget that I work for BloodhoundRealty.com but remember my name, GregSwann.com will take you to our main Web site.
We build custom sites for our higher-priced listings, which accounts for many of the hosted sites. We also have sites for our Weblogs and a site we use to test new versions of our software to make sure it’s ready to deploy.
We are a high-tech real estate brokerage trying to stay ahead of the curve in a high-tech era.
Looking over one shoulder, we compete against traditional Realtors. But looking over the other, the Realty.bots — venture-capital-funded Internet real estate start-ups — make the traditional real estate marketing message harder and harder to deliver.
Is Zillow.com, or another automated valuation method, a useful tool for pricing homes? No, but I have to be prepared to show why, perhaps first overcoming my client’s skepticism.
Is a $199 Internet listing as effective as the full-service marketing package we bring to the table?
My view is that a skilled, experienced Realtor is the bargain of a lifetime. Under one hat, you get pricing and sales expertise, advice about staging and repairs, an expertly executed marketing campaign, a professional negotiator, thoughtful and knowledgeable hand-holding through the escrow process — and more.
Unlike a Realty.bot, your Realtor has actually bought and sold houses — dozens or hundreds of times. With expertise that stretches from little things, like hiring a landscaper, to topics as big as the Internet itself, the professional advice you will get from a good Realtor cannot be matched by canned Realty.bots, no matter how much fun they are to play with.
Technorati Tags: disintermediation, real estate, real estate marketing
I don’t like mission statements, but I’ll give you one for BloodhoundBlog:
Everything you wish were in Realtor magazine but isn’t.
That’s pithy but inadequate, because there’s more here already than Realtor magazine — or the Specialist — would ever take on. We have three lenders to take us inside the mortgage industry. We have two investment experts to brings us hard-core, hands-on advice. We have some of the best writers in the RE.net — who produce some of the best reading in real estate writing, period, weblogged or printed.
And we are nine months old today.
Our traffic grows month-by-month. In addition to the folks who see our work by RSS feed, we are routinely attracting more than 1,000 unique visitors a day on weekdays. We’re slower on weekends, but we’re right on the verge of hitting 30,000 visitors a month. Our readers take in just short of two pages each, on average, so a lot of what we write is getting read. We throw off at least 500 outbound clicks every day, which means that the sites we link to are seeing quite a few Bloodhounds in their kennels.
This is all great, but I want more. We’re building the Russell Shaw Sales Success curriculum, and, by the time we’re done with it, we should have something that will provide tremendous value to Realtors and other sales professionals for a long time to come. I have no expectation that Teri Lussier and I will win the Project Blogger contest, but I plan to make the course material I’m developing available via ebook to any Realtors who hope to join the burgeoning RE.net. Our contributors are becoming steadily better known, and this cannot but produce interesting opportunities for them in the long run.
Even so, I want more. I am very proud of everything we have done so far — and a week’s worth of BloodhoundBlog content is an over-scale pound of meaty reading — but I want to come to the place where a day’s work is of that weighty scale. I know we can do this. There are days when we do it already. Read more
Mega-producing Realtor and BloodhoundBlog contributor Russell Shaw is is hosting the second in his series of Sales Success symposia for striving Realtors. The first event was a huge success.
The purpose of the seminars is to establish the most vitally-important points to be covered in a sales training curriculum, to be produced in the coming months in audio and video podcasts. Russell will address larger meta-topics and then entertain questions from the audience to unearth smaller but still important sub-topics to be addressed in the podcasts.
The second of these events will be held on Tuesday, April 17, 2007, at the offices of North American Title, 3200 East Camelback Road, Suite #150, Phoenix, AZ 85018. The event will run from 6:30 PM to approximately 9:30 PM, and refreshments will be served. There is no charge to attend. Russell will handle two meta-topics, followed by question and answer sessions, with a short break between. North American Title and Worldwide Credit Corporation are sponsoring the event and will make short presentations.
Who should come? A striving Realtor is one who has learned how to stay afloat in this business but wants to learn how to build a bigger, more profitable business. In other words, if you’re a brand new agent or if you’re happy with your current level of production or if you’re already a top-producer, these symposia are not for you. Because Russell is building the curriculum for a full-blown Sales Success training course, his goal is to hear from the Realtors who want most to learn the lessons he has mastered in his career.
Click here for a poster you can hang up in your office to let other agents know about the seminar. All the details plus driving directions.
If you want to attend, we’d love to have you, but space is limited. This is an opportunity to learn a whole lot even as you help other Realtors learn a whole lot — for years to come. Plus which, it should be a lot of fun…
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing