There’s one thing for certain about the real estate industry–there is no shortage of gadgets, downloads, software tools, or marketing services targeted to brokerages. And as a broker, it’s easy to get distracted – you’re afraid you’ll be left behind if you don’t take advantage of the latest and greatest thing out there. At Weichert®, we call this “The Shiny Penny Syndrome”.
Essentially, this occurs when a company jumps to chase a shiny, new opportunity, service or product instead of focusing on mastering the basics of running a business. Often, these products and services offer to make your lives easier by saving time, helping to maximize efficiency, effectively marketing your brokerage, getting more listings or even helping your business survive the latest economic crisis. It’s important to learn to navigate this minefield, if you are a broker looking to grow in a challenging housing market. There are so many shiny pennies out there that it’s easy to end up jumping from one promising new real estate tool or marketing idea to the next in an increasingly rapid and costly cycle, while the core elements of the business like how to recruit, write an effective business plan, maximize agent production and monitor key performance indicators get less attention than they deserve. These shiny pennies are marketed so well and with such urgency that brokers often forget to ask pivotal questions like “How will it fit in with my current business goals?”, “What real results will it bring?”, “Where will I go for support?” and “What operational changes will be required in order to actually get the benefits of the product?”. Most Brokers know they must adapt and innovate to stay current and effective in an ever changing landscape. The real challenge is knowing how to balance innovation with the basic activities and systems needed to run a successful brokerage and build a business. Innovation With Purpose A key to successful innovation is to focus on the benefits to your core customer and core operations, rather than innovating for multiple seemingly attractive, trendy options. Important questions to ask when considering a new product, technology or marketing service include:
Strategic growth through planned and proven marketing for brokers One of the things an affiliation with a credible Real Estate Franchise Company can provide is a guide who can steer you to the best of real estate innovations while keeping your business plan on track. The Weichert System gives you proven, productive systems, technology and activities to implement for nearly every aspect of your real estate business, including real estate marketing, selling systems, recruiting, a lead system and business management. With comprehensive training, ongoing support and expert coaching from our real estate professionals and a parent company with first-hand brokerage experience, you’ll feel relieved knowing you have people in your corner. You’ll never have to go it alone again. Our support staff will work with you to map out a road to growth. At Weichert, we’ve already paved a road for success. All you have to do is take it. Visit us today at https://www.weichertfranchise.com. Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/real-estate-broker-marketing/dont-let-brokerage-get-caught-shiny-penny-syndrome/
0 Comments
With Millennials surpassing Baby Boomers as the largest segment of our country’s population, it is more important than ever to build a brand and a business that appeals to them. Especially since Millennials are approximately one-third of all home buyers and sellers. With these numbers in mind, it is clear that establishing and maintaining a real estate brand that wins over 21-35-year-olds is now mandatory. The question is, how does one create such a brand?
Dispelling the Millennial Myth When you think about Millennials and building a brand that will earn their trust, you probably think that technology needs to be at the forefront of your messaging. This is the most common millennial marketing myth out there today. Although technology is a priority to them, Millennials care far more about authenticity, altruism, and accountability, the three A’s of Millennial marketing. The biggest way that companies lose their footing with this lucrative sector is that they lead with their tools, rather than their hearts. Even more than Baby Boomers and their parents, Millennials want to see and need to believe deep down that you care about them before they will buy into you. Natural Authenticity & Altruism While everyone is out there telling Millennials that they care about their needs, a better approach is to create content that is in the best interest of this demographic and offer it up for free on a consistent basis. This shows that you authentically care about the community and are willing to earn their business. The more content that you create, and the more valuable it is, the more powerful your brand will be at attracting all the right people, whether they be buyers and sellers, agents, or referral partners. Give your knowledge and content freely without expecting anything in return, and the returns will come. Another very powerful way that you can show off your authenticity is through customer service, which happens to be another major priority of Millennials. Don’t claim to be dedicated to providing quality service and then drop the ball down the line. Instead, go above and beyond the call of duty and create content around how you help people achieve the results they crave. When Millennials talk, they will talk passionately about those that helped them and showed them that they really cared. Accountability for the Win There are moments in every business when things don’t go as planned and that is okay. Most Millennials are extremely forgiving when it comes to human errors with one caveat: you must hold yourself accountable. Let’s say that you made a promise to a young couple that you would meet with them for an hour to help them prepare an offer, but something comes up causing you to miss or forget your appointment. Don’t just shrug off the missed appointment or try to make excuses. Instead, use it as an opportunity to prove you are accountable by apologizing and providing even more time and assistance than you originally promised. Every mistake or human error can be transformed into an opportunity for advancement with Millennials if you prove that you are accountable for your actions. Weichert® Brokers Live the Three “A”s It is easy for Weichert to talk about the three A’s because these are similar to the values that have been part of our culture since before there were Millennials. Those are Integrity, Professional Standards, Added Value, Personal Service and Relationships for Life. These values not only apply to how you can better appeal to buyers and sellers, but also how you appeal to new agents and how you make your brokerage the place to be. As Jim Weichert has said since starting his business in 1969, “People buy people before they buy products or services.” For more information on the Weichert approach to real estate and the tools and resources we offer to help you market your brokerage call us today at 877-567-3350 or visit weichertfranchising.com. Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/the-three-as-for-building-brand-credibility-with-millennials/ It’s a given that you place your brokerage listings on your website and enter them into your local multiple-listing service to gain visibility and get buyers. Maybe your agents also use other online platforms to showcase listings. But one place many brokers and agents undervalue is the use of Craigslist as yet another place to visibly saturate the internet with your listings.
Craigslist has been around for over 20 years. It’s reliable and widely used with over 60 billion monthly users and 50 billion page views a month. For a free way to get in front of a potentially different segment of buyers, posting on Craigslist is a solid tactic to add to your marketing arsenal. As with everything related to online marketing, there is a right way and a wrong way to use Craigslist. To help your listings stand out in the sea of 80 million Craigslist classified ads, here are a few of best practices: 1. Add An Odd Number In Your Heading Headings matter. In fact, recent studies of social media show that most online users share a post because of a compelling heading. Sharing a post is one thing, but actually reading it is another. According to the Content Marketing Institute (CRM), “Odd numbers in list posts have a click-through rate 20% higher than even-number lists.” Be creative around your odd-number usage to gain the most clicks and don’t just write “3-bedroom house for sale” as the heading. That’s what everyone else is writing, and you need to stand out among the slew of other home sales ads. Try “3 reasons you should come to this open house on July 7”. 2. Catch Viewers’ Attention With a Visual Chute and Digiday’s visual marketing report found that an eye-catching visual is at least 20% more effective than text, with a chart or infographic preferable. Naturally, your visuals will be quality photos of the rooms and outside of the property, not focused on any one thing. But it may be interesting to do an infographic of what this listing has over others in the area. Remove and date and time stamp and keep the home photos no more than 600 pixels wide for easy loading or potential buyers will get impatient and move on. Craigslist enlarges the first photo you upload and shows it with the heading. That first photo should be chosen for its high impact on buyers. The remaining photos will be displayed only when a viewer clicks on the heading to open the home posting. 3. Showcase Features as a List Viewers want an easy, bite-size way to learn about a home’s features. Put features or other special attractions in a bulleted list for easy viewing breaking it up with subheadings, such as interior/exterior or kids/adults. Too much text is a distraction and will scare away viewers. 4. Post Sunday and Monday Between the real estate organization Rent Juice and the authors of “Cracking the Craigslist Code”, it appears that Sunday and Monday mornings are the optimal days for posting ads based on collective studies of over 800,000 Craigslist real estate postings. Best hours are between 10:00 a.m. and noon or 5:00 p.m. 5. Keep Your Ad On Top As anyone who has used Craigslist knows, your ad eventually gets buried in the feed by newer ads that come in later. The further down this long list it gets, the less attention it gets. It’s important that you have a regular schedule of reposting your listings so they stay current and on top. Craigslist has limits on how many times you can repost and so a best practice is to repost your listing every 48 hours. If you do it that way it’s just a button push inside your Craigslist account. Doing it this way requires a minimal investment in time and keeps your property front and center every day. Using Craigslist to Market Homes Getting your listings out there is not always easy and can be costly. Craigslist provides a simple, effective and affordable way to market a home, especially when using the correct real estate marketing strategiesfor the platform. This is just one of many marketing channels you can leverage in real estate. With so many options, it can be confusing to know where to start or what’s most effective. If you think your business could benefit from information-sharing and coaching on real estate marketing strategies, consider teaming up with Weichert. Your affiliation plugs you in to a host of programs, services and peer networking to power your business and allows you to provide more to your agents. For more information on proven marketing tools and strategies to help grow your brokerage, consider becoming a Weichert Affiliate. Go to weichertfranchise.com or call 877-746-2067. Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/5-ways-to-use-craigslist-to-market-homes/ Leads are the backbone of your brokerage. Good leads keep existing agents productive and are a draw for new agents. With 92 percent of buyers using the internet in their home search, according to NAR, brokers using smart website visitor conversion methods have a competitive edge in the cultivation and generation of leads for their teams.
Website Traffic to Leads Let’s say you’ve been diligent about your advertising and your team is actively working multiple social media channels to promote their listings and your brokerage. You are monitoring your website analytics and you can see a healthy rise in website traffic from your efforts. While you may be getting website visitors, how many visitors complete your contact form or, better yet, directly contact you by picking up the phone or sending an email? Converting visitors to real contacts through your brokerage website is one of the most cost-effective methods of generating leads. In digital marketing, we look at the ratio of unique website visitors to contacts, over a period of time, and we call that your “conversion rate”. Too many brokers leave money on the table by focusing exclusively on advertising, and not the more subtle art of optimizing your website’s conversion rate. Steps To A Better Conversion Rate Increasing and optimizing your conversion rate isn’t rocket science. In fact, in most cases it’s just applied common sense. But done correctly you will build a better conversion rate and help ensure a steady flow of clients by using a few tried and true website marketing principles:
Finally, always remember that when you get that contact, you need to be ultra-responsive. Think minutes and hours, not days. The digital world is one of instant gratification, if not by you, then it will be by your competitors. Lead the Way on Conversions To win in real estate, you’ve got to do it all. In the digital case that means both getting the website traffic, and getting the contact from either a form, a phone call or an email. The more website visits turn into actual leads, the more the cost of creating and maintaining your site and buying advertising, pays for itself with increased sales for your agents. Don’t neglect the last piece of the puzzle, convert! If you don’t have the type of resources outlined above to put into your website, you can still effectively take advantage of online consumer traffic by aligning yourself with someone who does. At Weichert, we make a significant investment in our website, Weichert.com and have the resources to continually optimize its results. Our digital advertising and marketing strategy drives over 3 million visitors to weichert.com every month*, making it one of the top independent brokerage sites in the country and continually driving leads to our call center to connect with agents. It’s one of our key benefits to our affiliates. To learn more about how this could fit into your business plan, go to weichertfranchise.com or call our team today at 877-567-3350. *Google Analytics, January 2017 Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/real-estate-broker-marketing/website-converting-visitors-leads/ The New Year came fast and is already in full swing. Did you make any resolutions? It’s important to maintain your focus on where you want to be in 12 months. Continue to take the lead and decide what direction you want to move your brokerage toward this year. Just as in your personal life, January is a good time to set goals for your brokerage to help you stay motivated and to reinvent yourself a little bit.
To improve your bottom line and keep your agents in the forefront of their market, consider ringing in these five New Year’s resolutions for your brokerage: 1.Create Buzz Around Your Brand Think about your marketing plan for the year. After all, marketing should create buzz around your brand and should be well thought out and budgeted into your business plan. Use the amount of an average transaction commission as a base for determining how much you can comfortably spend this year. You want the most impact at the least cost. Whether that’s an ad highlighting your listings or a glossy ad in a regional or national magazine showing off what sets your real estate brokerage apart from others, your spending needs to build awareness, bring business in and grow your brand. As marketing is so crucial to business growth, Weichert® advises having a well thought out brokerage marketing plan in place each November for the following year. 2. Track Numbers Differently Every successful broker knows their numbers. Do you? It’s important to track sales, of course, but following the numbers of all your agent activities—new listings, buyer consults, open houses conducted—shows patterns that may suggest a change is needed to increase income. Keeping your agents accountable for their activities using hard data like this leads to better performance. 3. Introduce A New Technology Application Technology is ever evolving and is an indispensable part of the modern real estate enterprise. Try introducing new technology to your agents that can make showing listings easier in real time. For instance, Periscope is a live-streaming video application launched in 2015 that can be used from any smartphone to simply broadcast virtual open houses for those purchasing from a distance. Best of all, the app is free to use. 4. Use A New Marketing Tool It can be time-consuming to keep up with the latest marketing tools, but it’s important to remain competitive. We all use hashtags in our social media posts, but how do you know if your choice of hashtags is effective? This year, try Keyhole, which provides analytical details on various hashtags, including impressions, demographics and sharing. 5. Better Project Management Recruiting, training, checking budgets, answering agent questions, reviewing contracts and many other tasks must be completed to keep the office efficiently running. Simplify big projects and tasks with Todoist and save time. Used on over 10 platforms—web browsers, mobile devices, desktops, inboxes—and with lots of special features, projects and tasks on this application can be scheduled, broken down into manageable parts, and even shared and delegated to your office manager to keep you both in check. There you have it, five New Year’s resolutions to implement into your real estate business plan for 2018. Use of these resolutions can help you increase sales through smarter marketing, keep your agents accountable and productive, and, best of all, save you time. And if you are looking for one centralized solution to help you implement these types of resolutions, consider a franchise affiliation. Affiliations with a national brand such as Weichert® can offer you help with branding, tracking your numbers and have teams dedicated to researching and implementing new technology and marketing tools, so you can spend time managing other aspects of your brokerage. Final Thoughts New Year’s resolutions can be hard to keep, but your ability to set and keep some around your business goals are an opportunity to reinvent pieces of your business in the New Year and take it to new heights. At Weichert, we know something about reinventing real estate brokerages, it’s what we help owners do. For more information about becoming a Weichert franchise and its benefits, contact a member of our team today at 800-533-9007 or weichertfranchise.com. A Healthy and Happy New Year to us All! Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/five-new-years-resolutions-brokerage/ As an experienced real estate broker, you’ve spent your time in the trenches as an agent doing whatever you had to do to create buying and selling opportunities for yourself. How do you help your agents approach their business with the same level of excellence? You can probably think of instances where buyers or sellers slipped away because follow up was a little late, or even non-existent. Perhaps some competitor was just a bit quicker on the draw or had the right message at the right time and so a nice opportunity quietly disappeared because there wasn’t a safety net to ensure that it didn’t.
At Weichert we are razor-focused on the nurturing of leads and we can confidently say that ability to keep leads warm until they are ready to act comes down to exactly two things: responsiveness, and follow up. The Definition of “Responsive” In An Online Age If a client has taken the time to make contact by phone or through the internet, that’s a big step toward opportunity. What they want is to speak to someone, and generally the first person to do that will have the best opportunity to work with them. While online leads now bring most new business opportunities, studies have shown that online leads go cold incredibly fast. A study by Harvard Business Review shows that companies that contacted leads within an hour of receiving them were nearly 7 times as likely to engage with the lead vs. companies that took just a ½ hour longer—and more than 60 times more likely to engage with the lead than companies that waited 24 hours or longer! When you look at how leads are handled by your office and agent team, there are a few questions to ask:
If you don’t have a good real estate lead-handling system in place for your brokerage or know how well your agent team is keeping up with incoming leads, you could be letting good opportunities slip away. This is an area you may want to look at bolstering within your brokerage. Large real estate brands often centralize their contact handling to ensure all of these scenarios are addressed and handled in a timely and efficient manner. Weichert for instance, has a national call center which responds to internet and phone leads typically within minutes of receiving them. The leads are pre-qualified by our trained representatives and then immediately forwarded to qualified agents across the country for follow up. This occurs 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. By having this contact occur promptly, and screening for only the serious inquiries, our system creates the right first impression, and does not waste agents’ time with unqualified buyers or sellers. It is an invaluable resource to our affiliate brokerages. In Part 2 of this topic, we’ll talk more about what happens after you make that first contact with a prospect who perhaps isn’t ready to move forward. How do you insure that you are the one that is there when they are ready, and how do you maximize the value of that contact in the meantime? Stay tuned! If you are a growth-minded broker looking for other ways to make your brokerage more productive and get to the next level of results, talk to the Weichert® franchise team today. For more information visit https://www.weichertfranchise.com Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/dont-let-leads-go-cold-part-1-responsive/ When you’re considering purchasing a real estate franchise, brokers inevitably focus on the costs of the investment trying to understand if gains made by the relationship will ultimately outpace costs of the relationship. While each franchise is different, here are some of the key things you should expect from a real estate company offering a franchise opportunity.
With the Right Partner, Franchising Benefits Quickly Outpace Costs It’s easy to get caught up in the numbers when you’re looking at a franchise opportunity, but it’s important to never lose sight of what each franchise is really offering you in return for your hard-earned money. Pay close attention to the totality of each brands’ offering and remember that what’s cheapest isn’t always the best deal – the returns on your investment and the scope of training and support that is offered are what really counts. At Weichert, we believe in the power of the handshake, supported by advanced technology and proven processes. With Weichert you have both digital assets and expert real estate professionals that provide you training and coach you through your specific challenges every step of the way. If this sounds like a good fit for your business, we’re happy to chat with you in more detail visit https://www.weichertfranchise.com for more information. Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/real-estate-broker-marketing/youre-really-paying-invest-real-estate-franchise/ It’s no secret that the Internet has changed the real estate industry – and every other industry for that matter. It’s made every transaction easier, smarter and faster. We can sit at our computers or look at the palm of our hand and browse a home down the road or across state lines, ask a real estate agent across the country about a home’s location over social media, or evaluate possible mortgage and financing options on websites. All done without so much as a phone call.
Most successful brokers however, understand that in the sale of residential real estate, having a personal, face to face connection with a buyer or seller has a power well beyond the individual home being discussed and gives you maximum influence during the sale. Marrying the Digital Age With The Personal Touch What we need to realize is that the need and importance of the personal connection in real estate selling hasn’t really changed much in the last 50 years. What has changed is simply when and how that happens. In the digital age, more and more initial contact with buyers and sellers happens online. They respond to digital ads, search online, respond to Facebook posts and Tweets, watch virtual tours posted online, or visit your brokerage website. The difference today is that your client is better informed and has a much better idea of what they want before you ever get to talk to them. This move to digital should not be viewed as a threat, but as something overwhelmingly positive. By learning to use digital mediums more effectively, you can create MORE opportunities to have those important face to face contacts that make a difference. Social media, and other real estate portals instead of threatening our livelihood, have actually made it easier for professionals to connect with buyers and sellers. What’s more, you can connect with them at the moment they are interested in your services, something the internet has given us that we rarely had in a pre-internet world. Real Estate Marketing – One Handshake at a Time At the end of the day, real estate is still a scary and complex process for customers and that personal service they get from you, guiding them through it all, can make all the difference between the experience they get from Brand X and you. And if you do it right, you will build stronger relationships with buyers, sellers, browsers, and people of every age and from every walk of life. Years from now, when they are ready to sell their homes, it’s not your clever Facebook post they’ll remember: it’s that you looked them in eye, shook their hand, and made them feel like you would do whatever it takes to make their dreams a reality. Making personal connections is something we believe whole-heartedly at Weichert. It’s what we teach, what we believe, and in many ways, it’s how it all got started. The Power of the Personal Back in 1969 a man named Jim Weichert started his career in real estate in an interesting way. With his new broker license still hot in his hands, Jim wasn’t content to wait for customers to find him. Instead, surrounded by dozens of more established real estate brokers, Jim started handing out business cards at local train stations. Every morning, and every afternoon, you could find Jim greeting prospective customers commuting to New York City. His approach was refreshing and highly personal, supporting his long-held belief that “people buy people before they buy your product or service.” The Weichert brokerage grew dramatically, but through it all, Jim maintained the importance of the personal touch as a core value driving the Weichert methodology. Even as the internet became the predominant method of advertising and promotion, his “people first” business philosophy maintains a central role in the operational systems he developed for the Weichert franchise model. By perfecting those systems and recruiting strategies, he created a business model that other brokers could follow with ease and greater certainty. In the current digital world, Facebook is the new train station, where you can connect with much more than commuters. (Though you are welcome to go to train stations too, this still works!). In this age of self-service and fast moving content, there is something refreshing to a consumer about that personal touch, good customer service and personal reassurance that everything will be fine. Don’t use technology to replace a handshake; rather, use the technology to prompt one. If you have a vision for your success that includes listening, learning, and working differently than your competitors, you just might be next Weichert Franchise success story. Contact our team at https://www.weichertfranchise.com to learn more. Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/internet-will-never-replace-handshake/ If you ask 10 brokers what great customer service is, you’ll get 10 different answers. But they’ll all tell you that they provide “great” customer service.
What does good customer service really mean and how does it impact your business? Here’s a few thoughts on this:
Creating Memorable Experiences In some brokerages, customer service often takes a back seat to sales. Yet the truth is that a consistent focus on building a relationship with both clients and potential clients brings significant rewards in the long term:
In most cases, lackluster customer service doesn’t necessarily mean clients are treated badly. It could mean greater focus is placed on keeping business and sales ticking over as quickly as possible and Customer Service takes a back seat as a result. There are lots of reasons this can happen:
The most successful brokers and agents we see, however, have found a way to balance the customer service elements through a combination of the right processes, tools and technology. When you add a great brand name to the equation, everything works together. Now you can be both effective, and efficient, which makes clients feel special and you exceptional. The Weichert® brand is known for its systems and tools that build business while fostering satisfying customer experiences. If you are a growth-minded broker looking for ways to make your brokerage more productive and get to the next level of results, talk to the Weichert franchise team today. Visit our website at https://www.weichertfranchise.com. Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/blog/making-great-customer-service-full-time-gig/ A broker recently told us about his first ever performance review as a manager. “I remember my boss telling me that though I was very smart and energetic I had to learn to ‘let go of the bench’. It is a lesson I took to heart when I became a real estate broker.” This is great advice for all brokers and something we stress to the many brokers we speak to on a regular basis. And it’s not hard to see why.
For many brokers, such as yourself, the decision to open your own business simply made sense – after all, you’re experienced in the industry, have a great track record and know how a brokerage runs, so taking on the business side of things is just one more task. Except sometimes, it’s surprising just how much time it really takes. Running your own brokerage means recruiting your own real estate agents, real estate marketing, and managing it financially and administratively. When you are dedicated to seeing your business succeed, this often means you try to take on everything yourself. And if you don’t–or can’t–get something done, it doesn’t happen – and that doesn’t help your business. This is where learning to “let go of the bench” comes in. Developing the ability to delegate managerial and sales work properly is one of the keys to successfully running any business, but is especially true for brokers because so much of your time is spent is spent on essential, but non-sales related tasks. There’s no way you can multitask while running an open house, for example. Delegating not only means that you have access to additional people to take on certain tasks, it also means having access to people that you can trust to do those tasks properly. This is an essential part of the process of taking yourself from real estate agent, to effective leader of a brokerage, and having the time and resources to be able to put in place the plans, processes and support needed to build and grow your business. Without it, you risk being overworked and overwhelmed, and your business has trouble moving forward. How to Delegate Effectively and Turn Employees into Managers
At the end of the day “Letting go of the bench” is easier said than done. To do it properly you need a plan, a strategy for the cultivation and motivation of team leaders in your brokerage. You need discipline and a plan for managing at a different level and finally focusing on the things you need to. You need to have a system and a set of activities that if properly executed, will help you consistently meet your growth targets. It’s this type of process and tools that the Weichert System for Growth and our real estate coaching program provides. For more information visit https://www.weichertfranchise.com. Original content posted on https://www.weichertfranchise.com/real-estate-agent-marketing/develop-managers-brokerage/ |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
July 2020
Categories
All
|