February, 2011
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Most artists can’t draw, are Realtors amongst them?
Realtor formal training is often very dry, focusing on legal issues and contracts. Sometime you can get private training on prospecting and closing techniques and some of the usual motivational stuff, maybe sponsored by your broker. Yet today for closing on a deal and for building a customer base one needs to be more than just very good at the technical or communication aspects, one must be able to put together everything that is needed to make the transaction happen and to make the two ends meet, WHATEVER it takes.
Realtors need to become artists in their profession
The Realtors that close deals regularly know this very well. It is often something unexpected that holds up a sale, and when you hear all these “gurus” talking about their systems for prospecting and selling on automatic one cannot refrain a giggle.
You can delegate most of the work and leverage the work of other people for sure, but it is going to be people not systems. But what people again? The people who add emotion into the the action. Sometimes you meet Realtors that are very dry themselves. Professional, but boring to say the least.
I understand that selling or buying a house can be a serious business, but chances are that the more serious you make it the less it is going to happen. You don’t need to ridicule the house of course or any of the parties, but you definitely need to put some emotion into the deal. That is what people are responding to today.
But let’s not confuse true emotion with what they call “emotional labor”: the display of fake emotions for the sole purpose of obtaining an end. You know, like one of those stereotyped smiles you see around.
When you can display a real genuine emotion, you can tie up with the person in front of you. An emotion he can respond to. You are liable to see some amazing results and what before was impossible now becomes possible.
So more true in the web and social media arena where people are attracted by emotional factors and “artistic“ factors more than anything else. I was befriended just yesterday by a Realtor on Facebook. The next day I got in my Facebook e-mail a request from her to like her Fan page. She would not try to even connect, not even provide me the link to it. I was supposed to search for it myself.
No this is definitely the wrong way to go about things. This is again the export in social media of the old habit of going around in meetings and exchanging stacks of business cards without ever really meeting anybody.
This is not going to work anymore. There are tons of mediocre Realtors and real estate investors out there. Why should people chose one of them? Because they bring them a better deal? Because they ask for a lower commission? There can be an art in everything you do, even a real estate transaction. There is no manual to follow but you are expected to create your own . Mediocrity is going out. Art is coming in.
Roberto Mazzoni
Realtors need to forget their ABC to be successful
We have been living for a long a time in an Attendance Base Compensation society. It was enough to show up and get rewarded. While this was clearly the method of working for any white collar at a big or small company or any blue collar at a factory, it permeated thought our western culture and has become also the basic approach to life and business of more freely organized professions, like that of some salesmen and Realtors.
Realtor need change approach to selling
It was enough to show up at the brokerage office, or to show up at a house showing with a potential buyer or to show up at social events to network with other professionals and gain referrals by just exchanging business cards. Now that the ABC approach is falling apart everywhere (please read the book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
by Seth Godin on how and why it is falling apart – I don’t like the second half of it, with all the “Lizard Brain” discussion that doesn’t seem factual, but the first half is worth reading). We are now facing an increased majority of Realtors that just don’t know what to do to bring their income levels to a reasonable level.
We complain about the market, the financial credit crunch, the economy, the slow buyers and the unreasonable sellers. It is very true that many things have changed and doing business in real estate is much tougher than before, but just for this reason one cannot expect to continue being paid for just showing up.
People are looking for somebody and something remarkable. In real estate they are looking for someone who can truly answer ALL their questions. It is funny for example how many times I have personally ended providing sources for tax information and immigration information to my international buyers. These were central concerns that came before any discussion about the size of the house, its location ans so forth.
Their main concern is naturally to protect their investment, to be able to live or use their house in a foreign country, and to save on taxes as much as they can. And indeed many of them made the most profit in currency exchange or in tax savings other than just getting a good bargain price. And it is not just applicable to international sales. In any kind of transaction there is information and service that a salesman or Realtor can procure in oder to give the perfect or best experience to its customer that no one else would be able to replicate.
So let’s forget the ABC we have been taught for so long time and let’s start working on a new approach to our business. Let’s become artists in our field, people that are simply indispensable because what we offer cannot be found easily elsewhere. Let’s become the linchpin of our business model.
Roberto Mazzoni
Twitter, the big demise of the “accomplished” Realtor
In the last couple of weeks I have been conducting a very extensive research on the web presence of Realtors and in particular of their use of Social media. I have looked literally at thousands of profiles. One of the most interesting areas for creating a dialog with potential customers or with other Realtors and investors can be Twitter.
Realtors with empty social media profiles have also empty hands.
Not everybody understands it and not everybody cares, but what I found out is astonishing. At least half of the Realtors who have an account on Twitter have not been publishing a single message for one year! Could you imagine, registering your account, putting your face out there along with a bio that clearly state you are a Realtor or a real estate investor and then don’t say a word for the following 12 months?
These people evidently don’t understand that a bad presence on the web is going to recoil on them. It would be much better for them to consolidate their presence, removing the profiles they can’t keep active and reducing their actions to what they really care to maintain updated, if anything. If myou can’t be there every day you can at least automate some content publishing so that you don’t seem to be totally devoid of things to say. There are free tools can do it for you.
Evidently the old approach of placing a sign near the property and wait for someone to call stays with them also in the on line world. Investors are a bit more active better, but not much. You can find some very big names, some “guru” or real estate investing let’s say, that with account that have been silent for months.
We all know that Twitter ha still to prove itself as a money making platform, pretty much like most of social media when it comes to pure selling, but it is also proven by now that most of the activity you do on social media and blogging is aimed at procuring leads and contacts.
Once you have the leads, you then develop business through a regular personal contact. What would you think if a customer was coming by your office every day, for one year, and always saw the sign “Ill be right back?”
I guess he would stop passing by pretty soon and would know that you really don’t care for your business.
Nobody is forced to be on social media. As a matter of fact, there are investors and Realtors who are doing perfectly fine with old style referral systems; but at least they have the good sense of not even trying to pretend to be there.
Possibly some people might even figure that they would not be found out, but today your have software and services that can give you the whole history of a person’s presence on social media. A complete picture of his activity and “value”. And it is like having a personal score that anybody can look at in a few minutes and build an idea about us even before they get in touch with us.
So possibly some of these Realtors that have a totally empty and dead account might wonder how comes nobody is calling them and that they are not getting so many leads as it used to be. They could believe that social media is not working for them. Well actually it does, but in reverse, shifting people away from them and into the hands of their competitors who maintain a decent social media presence.
This subject is important for any marketing positioning strategy in the real estate field and other business fields. Today people look much more at who your are and can immediately find out by resorting to the master of all referral systems: Google and see what comes up about you. If nothing comes up at all or if they don’t like what they see, you have gotten bad publicity right thene and you have lost business. Something to think about if you want to survive the crisis.
Roberto Mazzoni
Realtors web sites don’t plainly work, why?
According to a research published the the NAR (National Assiciation of Realtors) for 2009, most Realtors have a web site for presenting their own listings (63%). Actually most of them had sites active for more than 5 years (57%) and the percentage of Realtors using Web for promoting their business is growing. Yet only 3% of their business actually is coming from their online presence, how comes?
Managing their web site and social media presence can be overwhelming for Realtors and real estate investors if they don't have the right strategies and tools.
Lot of effort and in some cases also a substantial investment of time an money and so little results? It turns out that the majority of contacts with prospects and customers still happen through e-mail or text messages and the phone, but the site is recognized by many as an essential part of their business and yet it is not performing well at all.
It turns out that there is a major shift going on in the culture of a typical real estate buyer and of the typical investor, and Realtors, at the same time, need to keep up with it. It isn’t all about the merit of the individual property anymore, but it becomes more and more a relationship issue.
When we look at the figures, we see that the Realtors that fare better, much better, are those which have been in the business longer (at least 16 years) and who get a substantial amount of their business from past customers and from referrals. But even they can improve their performance particularly in terms of time spent to cultivate those referrals.
So how can a new investor or Realtor coming on the scene shorten the “learning curve” and start getting referrals and customers without working almost full time for just about 8,000 dollars a year? That’s how much a regular Realtor grosses during his first two years in business and it is no wonder that half of those who join the profession for the first time plan to leave it soon.
The problem here boils down to how you use the site and what kind of information you put in there. Of course listings are important, but I doubt a customer would need to go to an individual Realtor’s site to view the listings. You have Realtor.com, Zillow.com and a host of other sites where you can get comparisons and and again it very seldom happens that the agent actually sells the property he is listing: it is usually sold by some other Realtor who brings in the buyer.
So why use the site just for the listings, when we already know this isn’t something customers are looking for and it isn’t what is selling anyway. Indeed lot of effort is put by Realtors in social media activities as well, but again there is no set pattern of presence, a little integration strategy and very little work on personal branding.
If I were to be giving a listing to a Realtor I would like to know what he would do for me to facilitate the sale. If I were planning to purchase an investment property, maybe from a distance or even from abroad, I would expect my Relator to be competent and trustworthy.
The lack of personal branding is even more dangerous for new Realtors who don’t have past clients voicing for them and that cannot bring to the table a substantial amount of transactions, of experience and accreditations.
So again there is a huge space of improvement possible in the field of real estate, both for investors and Realtors looking for buyers and sellers. It is a matter of integrating and finding out what’s working and testing it as they move along. The current statistics tell us that it is definitely not working: only 3% of transactions are coming from the web. It is a clear indication that change is needed and the sooner the better.
Roberto Mazzoni
D5 Creation