Archive for Real Estate Marketing Tips
One of the tools you have available to you for incubating Internet real estate website prospects is drip email.
What is Drip Email?
If you’re not familiar with drip email, it’s a capability offered by some websites (like Point2 Agent) and other tools with prospect database management capability. Using drip email, you can compose a series of emails on specific topics of interest to a particular target group. Then, you can assign prospects to participate in a particular drip email campaign, and the email series will be sent to those prospects at pre-defined intervals.
The objective is to stay top-of-mind with prospects who aren’t ready to make a move or work with a professional. And, as we all know, the Internet is full of those independent, “I want to do it myself” types.
When Should You Use Drip Email Campaigns?
In my view, there are only two ways in which drip email campaigns should be used:
- To stay in touch with prospects you have had contact with, in between regularly scheduled personal telephone calls and emails.
- To stay in touch with prospects who refuse to interact with you in any way.
When Should You NOT Use Drip Email?
So, what does that leave out? That leaves out using drip email as a method for contacting prospects when you first get their contact information.
Let me say that another way. If someone registers on your IDX search, or requests a report from your site, and leaves a telephone number and email address, you wouldn’t use drip email as the only way to contact them.
The first thing you need to do in order to convert that prospect into a lead is to contact them personally. If they leave a telephone number, call them. If they leave only an email address, send them an email.
How Do YOU Make “First Contact”?
Let’s talk about converting prospects to leads. How do you respond to a new prospect from your website? How’s it working for you?
Gary Keller and associates have done it again. I was very impressed by one of their first literary efforts, The Millionaire Real Estate Agent. Now comes Shift: How Top Real Estate Agents Tackle Tough Times.
My copy of the book is on order, so I can’t do a complete review here, but I wanted to pass this along because there is an excerpt from the book on Realtor.org that you can take a look at.
The excerpt relates to one of the “Twelve Tactics for Tough Times” described in the book. This one is about overcoming buyer reluctance. Even this brief excerpt has some extremely useful information in it, so it shows the overall quality of the information in the book as a whole.
One of the things I really like about the approach Keller takes in his writing is how simple he makes things, and how he distills concepts down to truly understandable terms. For example, take a look at the excerpt – number 2 under Four Strategies. He uses a simple bit of math to very clearly identify the advantage of buying up in a down market.
The math itself isn’t rocket science, and I’m sure a lot of us could have distilled the concept down to something that simple. But, I think you need to think outside the box a bit to take something that you know instinctively and make it that clear.
The book covers some other interesting topics such as managing expenses and leveraging yourself in a down market, lead generation and lead conversion. If you’re interested in purchasing the book, don’t buy it at Realtor.org. You can save $7 buying it on Amazon.com! Expense management, you know.
It’s true that these tough times won’t be around forever. Looking into my crystal ball, though, I’d bet you’ll be able to benefit from this type of a resource for the next year or two. And, this probably won’t be the last down market you’ll go through in your career, either.
I’ll keep my eyes open for good resources for recession-proofing your business. If you come across one, leave a comment!
In today’s real estate market, there are a lot of home buyers out looking for deals. And, buyers sometimes use the price per square foot as an indicator of market value. When they find a home that has a lower price per square foot than most of the other homes in a market, they figure they’re looking at a good deal.
Some markets don’t publish the square foot of homes for sale. But, in other markets, agents use price per square foot to sell homes.
So, where do those size calculations come from? From now on, you might decide that the square foot measurements on your listings had better come from your own tape measure.
Why the Tape Measure?
Put yourself in the position of an agent from Texas. The agent listed a house, and used the square foot figure listed in tax records filed with a local government office.
What this agent didn’t know was that the people who bought the house were looking for a deal. The buyers say that they wouldn’t have bought the house if it weren’t priced under market value, based on the price per square foot.
You know what’s coming next, right?
The buyers determined that the size of the house was overstated by 253 square feet. So, what happens to their “great deal”? It goes out the window. And, what do the buyers do? They sue the listing agent and the agent’s broker.
The listing agent had noted on the MLS listing the “approximate heated area” in square feet. The agent had relied on tax information. The buyers had signed a waiver indicating that they had not relied solely on any information provided to them by the agents involved. Didn’t help any.
After the initial trial, a Texas appeals court upheld the lower court’s outcome, which awarded damages to the buyers, and held the real estate folks involved liable for misrepresentation and fraud. Whew!
If you want to read the appeal court’s decision, you may find it interesting.
The moral of the story, of course, is this: if you sell based on square feet, you better get out your tape measure!
Family Businesses and Website Design
· CommentsThis guest post was written by Larry Easto who is a
best-selling business writer, and publisher of Real Estate Marketing Link
I am not a big fan of one spouse working in a small business operated by the other spouse.
My Own Experience
This attitude is founded on my own experience in starting my first post-marriage business. At the time, my wife who is a bright, highly-educated person was taking a break from her professional career to raise two small children. Feeling totally fulfilled as a mother but under-stimulated intellectually, she was looking for something to keep the thinking part of her brain engaged and challenged.
At my suggestion she agreed to look after the bookkeeping of my small two-person business. This turned out to be really bad decision. While she loves math and arithmetic puzzles, she was and remains totally undone by any numbers with dollar signs in front of them. It was as if the dollar sign transformed each number into some kind of a weird unintelligible symbol, loaded with psychological and philosophical significance.
After one very frustrating month, we all agreed that life would be better for everyone if my secretary looked after the bookkeeping and my wife looked for intellectual stimulation somewhere away from my business.
Over the years, I have seen many small businesses encounter difficulties as a result of the involvement of the owner’s spouse. Not surprisingly, many domestic situations have also been negatively impacted as a result of business issues carried home by one or other of the spouses. Recently I experienced another example that reinforced my dislike of one spouse working in the business of the other.
A Website Design Debacle
A couple of years ago, I worked with a very good graphic designer on a client project. I liked her and respected her design talents. We worked well together and produced a book that delighted my client.
Since the designer also offered website design, I chose her to help me with my first website. In website design projects, she looked after graphic design…the look of the site… and her husband, a full-time IT professional, designed the technical elements of the site, after his normal working hours.
At the first meeting with my design team, the graphic designer behaved as she had in all of our other meetings. Her husband acted like a know-it-all, answering questions that I directed at his wife and generally running the meeting. Because I had faith in his wife, I ignored his behavior and we proceeded with the site development. With minimal fuss, we came up with a design and appearance that was exactly what I wanted.
However, when I started to research issues as search engine optimization and driving traffic to my site, I realized that there was not much behind the attractive façade. Missing were such elements as page titles and descriptions and key words that feed search engines. Also missing was the ability for me to monitor traffic, pages visited, referral sources and similar features.
When I raised these issues with the graphic designer, her response was simply to tell me that they had done what they were contracted to do. This being the case, it would seem that all of the problems with my original site were my fault. Apparently I failed to specify everything I required…even though I was relying on an IT professional to provide the technical elements I needed but didn’t know I needed.
Issues of responsibility aside, my experience with this website design team reinforces my no owner’s spouse rule. I will continue to avoid dealing with small businesses, including real estate agents, that are operated by one spouse and include the other spouse in some capacity.
Experience is indeed a great teacher.
Note from Kathleen:
Larry’s experience points out a great lesson in website design. There are many elements that need to be addressed to create a useful website. If you’re planning to have a custom site designed, make sure that the vendor you choose can address all of the critical issues.
- Website design needs to start with SEO (search engine optimization). You need to work with someone who understands SEO and can assist you in selecting the right keywords to target, then make sure the on-page elements of the site supports that strategy. An SEO expert does not necessarily know anything about design or coding.
- The web site needs to have a professional look and design, A designer does not necessarily know anything about SEO or coding.
- The code for the site needs to be clean, and all functions need to work properly. An IT or code expert does not necesarily know anything about SEO or design.
If your website vendor can’t address all three of those issues, you’ve got the wrong web builder!
Are Your Sellers in Denial?
· CommentsMost probably, the answer is a resounding Yes, at least where the price of their home is concerned!
In this type of a real estate market, you know you have to be more careful about the listings you take on. If you take a listing from a seller who thinks their home is worth significantly more than the market will bear, you know you’re facing a fight.
If you list the home at an unreasonable price, you know you run the risk of alienating the seller trying to get price reductions, and spending a lot of your time and hard-earned cash trying to promote and advertise a home that is not going to sell.
It’s the real estate version of what sailors call their boats – a hole in the water that you pour money into.
One client of mine told me how she handles the “seller in denial” issue. She pulls listings that are comparable to her prospect’s home. Then, she packs the sellers in the car and they go on a buying trip.
She finds that the sellers typically get more and more quiet as the tour goes on. They look at homes that may even be in better condition or that have more features, but are priced in the range she is suggesting.
This blast of reality can have two great outcomes – the seller may decide to do some upgrading in order to sell, or they may see the value of pricing the home to be competitive in the market. Of course, you can always run into a seller who just doesn’t get it, too.
I was interested to see this approach mentioned in an article at Realtor.org. Check it out. The article describes some other very interesting ways to handle pricing issues and objections. You know, things like “But, we need the money”, “We can always reduce the price later”, “People can just make an offer”!
Have you found a great way to get sellers to set a realistic price? Please share!
