The Power of Real Estate Testimonials

Testimonials are very powerful and should be included on your website and real estate marketing material. Testimonials are a personal recommendation for a service and as long as they are genuine they are much more convincing than anything you could possibly say. Whatever your customers say about your services is much more believable than what you say about your own business.

Testimonials are one of the best free real estate marketing methods and are also very effective.

Real Estate Lead Generation

One of the most important parts of an agent’s job is to generate real estate leads. In order to make this possible it’s vital that you satisfy as many of your customers as possible. By ensuring that your clients are satisfied then you stand a much better chance of being able to use testimonials.

You will need to be selective of which testimonials you choose. Sometimes you might get a client who writes a testimonial that’s not as enthusiastic as they could be. You will need to choose the most powerful and persuasive testimonials so that you can get the best from it.

Ask Permission

Many real estate agents are missing out on this important free real estate marketing technique because they are worried about upsetting their clients. It’s actually much easier than most people believe to get testimonials. Simply ask your clients what they liked about your services and then ask if you can write a testimonial with their permission.

This means that your customers won’t feel stressed about deciding what they should write. It also allows you to create accurate but enthusiastic testimonials, which will become a valuable part of your real estate marketing materials.

Testimonials are a fantastic way to make your real estate marketing materials more effective. Start asking your satisfied clients for testimonials today and help turn your business around.

One way you can achieve this is to work longer hours and maintain your existing habits of how you operate each day. This strategy takes more hours from the other areas of your life outside of work and will eventually lead to burnout, less results and less income over time. Although it will work in the short term.

The alternative is you can find ways to service more people in the time you have available to work.

By looking for solutions to help more people in less time you will find ways to reduce your working hours and earn more money. There are a few ways to go about this.

1. You can improve your skill (real estate sales training, attitude programming and goal setting etc.) so you get more commission earning results from each action or task you undertake.

2. You can improve your real estate systems. Change the way you currently operate, so that you become more productive with the hours you allocate for work each day.

Today we are going to focus on point 2, Improving your real estate systems and how some of the most successful companies and sales people achieve this objective.

In fact Toyota, one of the worlds most successful car manufacturers is always looking for ways to speed up production to make their output more efficient. They call this approach “lean thinking”. Lean thinking is a strategy for obtaining maximum results from less effort.

Brian Tracey from Brian Tracey International, one of the worlds greatest and well known sales trainers says you should find ways to group your daily tasks if you want to get more done in less time. He calls this the “Learning Curve”.

The Learning-curve theory says that, “the more you do of a repetitive task, the faster and easier you will perform each subsequent task of that kind.”

Most real estate agents work re-actively and as a result, most agents only earn $180,000 in commissions each year.

Let’s take a look at a few of the different tasks a real estate sales person has each day:

* prospecting for now sellers and future sellers

* following up existing contacts

* returning calls to buyer inquiries

* showing properties to buyers

* listing appointments

* Paperwork (arguably the least desirable aspect of real estate sales)

Now most real estate sales agents would call back buyer inquiries as they get them or even worse, take the calls as they come in.

What Brian Tracey suggests is that you would allocate two 30 minute blocks of time to returning buyer inquiries. One block at say 11:30am and the other at say 5pm, this ensures you are servicing your prospects in a timely manner.

The reason for bunching tasks is that it takes time to get into a rhythm for doing a certain type of task and when you find yourself starting and stopping you never find that rhythm and doing each task re-actively at different times, takes up more of your limited time.

Now we are going to have a look at the benefit for you of calling back inquiries in blocks of time.

Let’s say your first call takes 4 minutes and you realise after you hang up the phone that you forgot to ask a few critical questions that may have revealed if the prospect was also a possible seller. (We discuss these types of questions in our real estate sales program online called the “Freedom Factor“).

If you don’t group your tasks you go on to do something else and when you have to return another buyer inquiry you have a higher chance of making mistakes again.

If you have blocked your time, the next call you make will be mote effective for both your discovery of finding more business and the buyers needs of feeling helped to find the right property for them. It may even take you less time, perhaps a minute less per call. As you go on calling all 10 buyer inquires in the block period, you are more likely to get this task completed with a higher percentage of results. Due to the concentration and focused action on this one type of task, you will also save yourself about 9 minutes twice a day, saving you 18 minutes just on this one task.

Plus you have the momentum and positive energy of knowing you have become more professional. This helps when dealing with people to instill confidence in your prospect that they are dealing with a pro, which helps you get more accurate answers to the questions you ask.

Another example is to group your buyer inspections.

Rather than leave the office 6 different times a day and return after showing properties, you would be far more efficient if you line up all your inspections one after the other.

Let’s say it takes you 15 minutes to get to your first property to show, 15 minutes to show and 15 minutes to get back to the office.

Once you get back to the office you also have to get back into the concentration mindset of doing your next group of tasks. This could take a further 10 minutes.

So far you have spent 55 minutes on showing this one property and let’s say you have 3 to show. Your time investment for this group of tasks is about 3 hours.

If you organized yourself to group these tasks, you may only have 5 minutes between properties which saves you 20 minutes. Plus you don’t have the 2 extra drives from and to the office saving you a further hour.

Plus you don’t lose another 20 minutes in refocus time.

All up from this one task being grouped for one day you will only spend 1 hour and 40 minutes instead of the 3 hours if done separately. Plus you will also be more effective during your inspections speaking with your real estate prospects.

By bunching your daily tasks, you can see from the 2 examples discussed here you would save 1 hour and 38 minutes in the day. This is enough time to get a listing or at least find another one.

If you want to improve your bank balance and enjoy more time for outside of work to recharge your much needed energy levels you will begin grouping your tasks today.

Seeds of opportunity, just like leads

The cultivation (real estate follow up) of opportunities into results (that we can enjoy) is such a similar journey to the enjoyment of fruit after growing it from seeds as you’re about to discover.

A good friend of mine gave me 23 seeds of opportunity for a rare and little known variety of lime, called the “Finger Lime”.

I asked if I should dry the seeds first before trying to germinate them and she said there was no need to dry the seeds out first and that I should just place them on top of some wet cotton balls and keep them moist.

Two weeks passed, I had been keeping the seeds watered daily and some had changed from being white in colour to looking black and lifeless.

At this point I noticed my thoughts began to blame my friend for telling me to put them into the moist cotton balls without drying them out first.

I was feeling frustrated and starting to believe that I had wasted my time watering these seeds for the past 2 weeks. ??You see I thought seeds had to be dried out before beginning the germination process to prevent them from getting mouldy. When my friend (a plant expert) told me that was not necessary, I took her word for it.

I am ultimately still responsible for the way I chose to germinate the seeds. I could have done it my way but I decided to listen to my friends advice.

If I had if done it my way, it would have been harder for me to blame my friend if the seeds did not turn into fruit trees. Maybe I could have blamed it on the quality of the seeds.

The safe option for me was to avoid the responsibility and follow the directions my expert friend had suggested, instead of doing it my own way.

My belief that these seeds would germinate was low after 2 weeks of effort and anticipation, in fact I was just about to throw them out with the belief they were not going to germinate at all.

Something inside of me said, most people give up on the brink of greatness, so I decided to continue watering the seeds each day (similar to real estate follow up), which took belief and persistence.

A further 2 weeks had passed and finally I was beginning to see some of the seeds begin to sprout.?? At first there was just 2 of the 23 seeds then a few days later there were 5, now there are 6.

Of my 23 opportunities (leads) only 6 made it to the first stage of germination. Perhaps the numbers could have been higher if I had dried the seeds first, maybe they would have been worse.

The fact of the matter is that I have just under 20% of my opportunities make it to stage 1.??How many will make it to stage 2 being potted, how many will survive winter and my 2 year old son, how many will bear the rewards if fruit? (This is yet to be discovered but I will keep you posted).

Let’s assume only 4 make it to pots and of them only 2 opportunities bear the fruit rewards. I began with 23 opportunities and less than 10% have produced fruitful rewards. Is it worth it??? Well what do you get if you don’t do anything?

More importantly, how does this have anything to do with selling real estate?

Every person that makes contact with your office (enquiry) is an opportunity for reward (listing).

Some will be ready for rewards sooner than others. The opportunities (enquiries) that call and make first contact with you today ready for reward (ready to list) are harder to convert into rewards (listings) than opportunities that you have nurtured into respectful relationships for weeks, months and years.

Why are the phone-in today sellers harder to list than enquiries you convert into contacts (future sellers)?

The phone-in sellers are harder because they will generally call in 2-4 other agents also and the one who gets the job is the agent the sellers feel most comfortable with.

The sellers you have converted into contacts from other opportunities some two, six or twenty-four months prior become easier to convert to listings and sales because you have had the time to build a relationship to one where they feel more comfortable with you.

Sellers will often still call in other agents when they are ready to list but you have the advantage of them feeling comfortable with you and them not really knowing the other agents.

Now getting back to the opportunities, for every 100 opportunities you get (people to communicate with) let’s say you convert just 20 to stage 1 (which is a future seller contact).

You follow up with these contacts for months, some years and over time, some of your real estate seller contacts‘ motivation will change. ??Some of your contacts will decide not to sell, some will speed up their plans and come onto the market sooner than they said in their last conversation with you. Some of the contacts may even list with another agent without speaking to you.

You may want to quit following up with contacts when this happens but this would be a great mistake.

After you have developed the habit and focus of following up and cultivating your relationships with all your contacts you will begin to notice that you become “luckier”. Not only are you getting the business you were before, which comes from just turning up. You now get extra listings and sales, and this is how the most successful real estate agents get so many more results than everyone else.

In fact, the agent who develops a smart system for their real estate follow up with contacts is likely to achieve more listings and sales than the bottom 80% of agents within their office if all their results were pooled together.

Most agents give up qualifying opportunities into contacts after a few no’s. If they are not qualifying for contact sellers they are not going to have anyone to follow up and soon they will have developed an attitude of blaming someone or something else for their failure. Their failure to convert opportunities into contacts, contacts into listings, listings into sales and finally income into financial independence is the sole responsibility of themselves.

The successful agent does not give up, regardless of their disappointment. Sure they may feel discouraged from time to time but they learn how to speed up the process of getting back to focusing on what they know has to be done to keep their higher than average results pouring in.

If you find yourself saying “these leads are no good” or “my office doesn’t support me” or something else to the tune of blaming, catch yourself out and say “I am responsible for my results and my future and only I can create my success”.

Finding listings in real estate sales is no different than the process of growing seeds to fruit. There is opportunity everywhere, the missing ingredient and what makes all the difference is you and your attitude.

If you aim to have 500 future sellers on your database in the next 12 months, you will have sufficient future business to be able to enjoy a more balanced work life balance.

Let’s break down how you can build a database of 500 seller contacts and outline a plan for you to make this your reality.

To build your database by 500 new contacts you need just 10 new contacts added to your database each week taking into account that you holiday for 2 weeks of the year.

To obtain 10 new contacts each week you have many options and here are a few, you can:

1. Cold calling or door knocking 250 people each week (that’s just 50 per day and this means speaking to, not just attempting to speak to).

2. You can go through previous real estate office records of general enquiries, past buyers and sellers, withdrawn listings etc…

3. You can set up your own real estate lead generation system (which less than 5% of agents have) and invest money marketing to prospective real estate sellers both “now” and “future”.

When you get 10 new contacts each week, you will also likely find 2-3 listing appointments and if your present to list ratio is only 50%, you will earn and win 1 to 2 listings per week and about 5 to 6 extra real estate listings each month on average.

This could be you more often!

If your list to sell ratio is only 50% you will likely average 2 to 3 real estate sales per month which equates to approximately $30,000 in commissions each month if your average real estate selling commission is $10,000.

This means you would produce about $360,000 for the next 12 month period if you decided to start speaking to 50 new prospects each day starting now. You must also engage enthusiasm, optimism and belief that you can achieve these objectives.

If you coupled these cold and warm prospecting strategies with your own lead generation system you

How much are you losing?

could increase these numbers by another 20 to 40% conservatively, providing you market to your prospects correctly and follow up the way we share at our real estate agent seminars. (You might like to keep an eye out for our next seminar, check back to this website often and read our emails so you don’t miss out).

If you couple the actions discussed above with an effective real estate follow up system, research shows us you will also further increase your results a staggering 67%. This could be you earning over $721,000 in commissions per year within the next 24 months, if you start working this plan beginning today.

It’s important to give your clients a reason to choose you over your competitors. If you can’t accomplish this then your real estate marketing materials will be a waste of money.

Unique Real Estate Marketing Materials

All businesses need to do some form of promotion to get the word out there about their business. If you simply copy the real estate mailers of every other company then these won’t get read. In order to encourage people to read your real estate marketing materials you need to make them look interesting and unique. Make them look professional so that people know they can trust you.

Caring Real Estate Marketing Materials

When you meet buyers and sellers make sure you don’t only focus on your own achievements. Make them realise that you care about them and the community, mention how you will work with their interests in mind. This will set you apart from all of the other real estate agents.

Solve Problems

You need to show your potential customers that you care about them and that you will be able to solve their problems. It’s a good idea to be specific when targeting these problems. For example you might be looking for homes to sell in which case you could help people to prepare their homes for sale.

Demonstrate that you can solve these problems when you send out your real estate mailers. This way people are willing to contact you in the first case.

Real Estate Marketing Flyers

One of the biggest mistakes that most agents do is produce amateur real estate marketing flyers on their computer at home. It’s important that your real estate marketing materials are professionally produced.

Start promoting your agency and services today so that more people will choose to hire your services. Revamping your real estate marketing materials is just the starting point to improve your business.

All too many sales people just guess what their results will be for the month, quarter or year by plucking a figure out of the air. You have seen this, haven’t you?

Here, in this 10 minute profit packed audio podcast, you will discover how to be more accurate in your monthly, quarterly and yearly profit objectives and the accomplishment of them…

If you haven’t already done so, you might like to request the free special report entitled “How You Can Make More Money Selling Real Estate in One Year Than Most Agents do In Four“. you can request a complimentary copy by completing the form to the right.

Click on the play button below and to the left to listen in now and remember to leave your comments in the box below!

]]> http://listinginnovations.com.au/blog/?feed=rss2&p=1030 00:01:01 This audio podcast will give you greater insight into how to ensure you and your team can double your listings, sales and profits. All too many ... This audio podcast will give you greater insight into how to ensure you and your team can double your listings, sales and profits. All too many sales people just guess what their results will be for the month, quarter or year by plucking a figure out of the air. You have seen this, haven't you? Here, in this 10 minute profit packed audio podcast, you will discover how to be more accurate in your monthly, quarterly and yearly profit objectives and the accomplishment of them... If you haven't already done so, you might like to request the free special report entitled "How You Can Make More Money Selling Real Estate in One Year Than Most Agents do In Four". you can request a complimentary copy by completing the form to the right. Click on the play button below and to the left to listen in now and remember to leave your comments in the box below! selling,real,estate,,real,estate,,real,estate,sales,profits,,real,estate,principals,,how,to,get,real,estate,listings,,real,estate,agents,,real,estate,prospecting,,automated,lead,generation Barry Liddle of Listing Innovations no No http://listinginnovations.com.au/blog/?p=998 http://listinginnovations.com.au/blog/?p=998#comments Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:35:49 +0000 admin http://listinginnovations.com.au/blog/?p=998

There are a number of reasons why some real estate agents will hesitate or refrain entirely from purchasing listing leads. These are valid concerns and the way by which list providers address them should reflect in the quality of their leads. Here are some things to consider when you buy real estate leads.

Leads can be old. Quality listing lead providers will make sure that their lists are not rehashed versions of prior leads. They will see to it that the list is current and viable.

Real Estate Listing Leads can be expensive. While true, it should also be pointed out that making sure that the list contains names and contact information that are accurate can be quite costly on the part of the provider. In the end, it is the quality of the lead that really matters. The conversion rate should be the true test of the value of the leads.

Prequalification. There is only so much a listing lead provider can do in the way of prequalifying leads. Once they have ascertained a possible prospect, it is generally better to pass the prospect on to the agent at this point. Once the agent gets notified of the lead, this is the critical moment in terms of converting this prospect into business.

Agent Follow-up Mistakes. Mistake 1; many agents rarely call the leads within 24 hours of receiving them. Mistake 2; if the lead does not respond positively to listing immediately most agents disregard them as “dud” leads. Most leads will not be ready immediately. Selling a property is a process and a long one at that for many people. When an agent gets a lead, the prospect could be 3,6, 12 or even 24 months away from putting their property on the market. From here on the quality of the lead depends on the agent’s skill to follow up. While this sounds harsh, this is the reason 95% of agents don’t get the amount of listings they would like from their leads.

Exclusivity. When an agent decides to buy real estate leads, he does not want to be sharing this list with others. Unfortunately, this is another factor that drives up cost since the provider has no other market, presumably, for the list. Only you. Please note that exclusivity is something that is very hard to ascertain. A good deal of trust is involved in the relationship between a real estate agent and their listing lead provider on this one.

All in all, getting a good list from a reputable provider is important when you buy real estate leads. However, always remember that there is still the matter of converting these leads. A lot still depends on the real estate agent, his/her skill, and how he/she establishes a relationship with the prospective clients.

Also take into consideration that early leads are better than old leads. Some people are not immediately ready to sell or buy, but this does not mean that they won’t be. Savvy agents will not dismiss these leads as bad leads. Rather, they tend to classify those as tremendous opportunities in the future. Think of it as building a profitable pipeline of “coming” business.

At Listing Innovations, we help real estate agents set up their own lead generation systems. When you engage our services, you are assured that the leads you are getting are all yours. You are not giving away your hard-earned money to build someone else’s lead generation system. You have your own system that you could sell with your business and drive its value up even further. You can get onto our notification list if you’re not already on there to be notified of upcoming workshops by going to http://www.listinginnovations.com.au/workshop/

Most companies offering leads to real estate agents are offering people free market appraisals hoping they will be real estate sellers ready to list now. The truth is on average only about 8.4% of new leads will be ready to list now (depending on the source), and the remaining are often discarded by agents as “poor leads”. The fact of the matter is that all leads fall into one of three categories:

1.    Ready Now (about 8.4%)
2.    Ready Within 3 Years (about 81.3%)
3.    Never going to sell (about 10.3%)

The agents that are only short-term focused miss out on many of the best opportunities for listing leads and this is why those that are in real estate as a career and think long term often get much better results (up to 80% more listings) from all their leads.

Internet lead generation, while being a new concept, is not entirely unique to the real estate industry. It is currently being applied to other industries, including banking as well as the medical professions.

As the saying goes: The proof of the pudding is in the eating. It is much the same with real estate leads. Listing Lead providers will be judged by the quality of the leads that they produce. Things such as wrong phone numbers and unqualified home sellers make for a very bad impression on the quality of the companies offerings. This is the reason why a number of quality list providers have adopted proactive means in screening their lists. These include manual screenings and the use of filtering software to eliminate those homebuyers and sellers who are less likely to commit. Their goal is to provide the real estate agent with the best real estate leads listing possible.

Does this mean instant success for the agent? Of course, not. Getting a good list is just half the battle. The best estimates put only a ten-percent conversion rate on the best of them. The rest is still up to the real estate agent. Remember that the list is only a list of possibilities. There is still no substitute to the personal touch, the trust, and the relationship that the real estate agent brings to the table.

In order to build real estate leads and keep track of them you need to be storing all of this information in an organised database. Simply scribbling it down on bits of paper won’t do.

Contact

Your agent leads database or contact management system is very valuable to you and you should be using it on a regular basis. Ensure that you continually keep in touch with people on your database. You can do this in a number of different ways. Sending real-estate mailings, phone calls, emails or stopping in for a chat. A nice personal touch would be to remember their birthday and send them a card. This is very easy with the correct real estate lead management system.

In order to build your database you must try to collect information. There are a few tricks to do this. You could give people information for free, or providing a service. You will then be able to collect their information and add it to your agent leads database or contact management system.

Follow up

It’s important to remember that you must follow up with your leads on a regular basis. You can do this in the similar ways. Continue following up so that you can find out exactly what that real estate lead thinks about you. Checking that they have received your information and asking whether they have had chance to look at it yet is a great way to follow up.

Improve reputation

Word of mouth is the best form of real estate sales and marketing. You should make sure that all of your clients are happy with your work and will refer you to friends. Make sure you demonstrate that you are caring and not just trying to earn money.

Your real estate lead database is very important for the success of your business. Concentrate on building it up so that you can market your business.

As mentioned by Fortune Magazine, the failure to deal decisively with people problems. Many of the real estate principals/directors I speak with often say that finding, training and keeping great sales people is a major problem holding them back from greater results. The best piece of advice I have on this subject is to hire slow and fire fast, and you should fire people at a time that suits you, not them. The chances of correcting their incompetence is remote to zero, although stubborn principals and directors continue to try. The only indispensable person should be you.

Principals and directors often fail to pay close attention to their core business and are easily distracted. In fact, most get bored with the key tasks that extract the most listings, sales and profits in their business and are easily lured away by more ’sexy’ new ideas. Instead of looking for the next “big” thing, look to make tiny tweaks in the core results based functions of your real estate business.

What sort of functions I hear you ask.

Continually searching for new sales winners.

The way most are doing this it is little wonder they don’t do it as much as they know they should. Some of my clients have begun implementing automated systems to find, sort and qualify their sales people applications. So instead of employing someone to speak to 400 sales applicants per month and discard 396 from first interviews, the system automatically discards 95% of them leaving only 5% per month for possible first interviews. This means principals and directors are able to find more of the right type of sales people instead of wasting their time trying to help their struggling sales people turn it all around.

Increasing the number of people calling the office

This is an area most principals and directors fail to invest enough time in, trying and testing new ideas. This task alone will increase your office listings, sales and profits without even getting more sales people or even training your sales people. It is pure maths, the more “warm” prospects your sales team speak to the more listings they will get, the more listings they get, the more sales they will make and the more money and success for everyone. But before you can try and test, you need the ideas and what 98% of principals and directors have been taught or learned by looking at what their competitors are doing is a complete waste of time and money.

Building a company database fast

Most real estate offices and I am talking 98% of them are not focusing on and maximizing the growth of their database. This is a task that should be the focus of everything a successful real estate business does. If you ask most principals/directors if they want to be growing their database of contacts most will tell you they do, so why aren’t they? Frankly, they don’t know how because they have never been shown. Most old school real estate franchises implement new technology and offer it to their franchisees but this is rarely done from a marketing perspective of maximizing the office’s contact list. Instead these franchises just want their office owners to get more advertising as this helps promote the franchise. What about the profits you as the principal/director want to build you fortune?

Converting more of the prospects that contact your office into listings and sales

This can be achieved in 2 main ways:

1. Sales training, so your sales team are communicating with the prospects in more compelling ways.

2. Automated systems that follow up with your office contacts and pre-dispose those that are interested in selling to want to sell with your company, so that when your sales team call, the prospects are more receptive to them.

These are some key components to improving your real estate sales success.

Best Wishes

Barry