Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

I have been silent for quite a while on my blog because I was going through an evolution in my business and my own life that I thought demanded my full and undivided attention and that culminated in me applying for my new and hopefully final visa to stay in the United States. But these last months have been the time for a huge transformation in my attitude toward work and in my plans for the future and I have made some major progress in establishing a new and better direction that will expand even more my activities by bringing together everything I have learned so far.

Managing change successfully

My repositioning is still underway but I want to share with you my evolution because I have realized that actually continual evolution and change are a necessary ingredient in today’s world. You can never reach the perfect setup, the perfect positioning, the perfect knowledge, since every day and week there might be changes that bring major shifts to your operation and to your way of viewing things.

So I will share with you the changes, and the methods I am using to master them, hoping you find them valuable. The key concept here is mastering the various phases and motions that life demands of us while focusing more and more on a set direction a and making so that our eventual destination is reached despite all the detours, but also be ready to change destination as soon as we realize that we got onto a wrong course or that there is a better a more direct way to get where we want.

Quitting is not necessarily wrong, actually it is very right sometimes. Seth Godin, in his book “The Dip: A Little Book that Tells You When To Quit (and when to Stick)” tells us: “Sometimes we get discouraged and turn to inspirational writing, like stuff from Vince Lombardi: “Quitters never win and winners never quit”. Bad advice. Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.”

Choosing when to stay and when to go is in itself an ability and I believe that in this era of excessive information and “biased” information everybody gets swamped under an overwhelming number of options and doesn’t quite know where to go and why he should got there in the first place, and when to quit doing what he is doing and going somewhere else.

I have not transformed my self in a new self-help motivational guru, not yet at least. Don’t worry, but I believe that my down to earth experience as a real entrepreneur faced with the real challenges everybody faces every day, main of which the challenge of change, can offer some good and honest advice by sharing with you my itinerary and talking also about my business of course. In the end I have managed not only to change country, language, culture and business altogether, but I have also succeeded in pulling it through and coming out at the other end with a much bigger experience and with a better understanding of how to find the best directions ans more importantly how to change them when it is needed.

Let me know if you like this kind of subject and what you would like to know more on it, and I will do my best to offer you valuable contributions that will help you manage your change.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. Get the time to read The Dip. Its is very short but it is worth your time.

Did you ever attend to a seminar or a presentation and the guy on the stage was saying the right things, was wearing the right dresses, was moving in the right way and yet you did not feel like buying his words or products?

Do you ever work with some customers that you simply hate? Do you feel that you are making too little money with your real estate job? Or maybe you are making enough money but can’t really enjoy what you are doing? It all looks like another job, but with a 12 hours a day schedule?

Are you dealing with the right type of customer?

I want to borrow a presentation from one of the most respected and influential Internet marketers to date because I think there are some key points that everyone has to assess in order to be really successful and which have to do with choosing a business and a customer that fully resonate with you as a person and which feel completely comfortable for you.

People perceive more than meets the eye and they can feel when you are doing something just because you have to and when you are not really “sold” yourself on the subject and on the actions and activities that such a subject entails.

Frank Kern’s “Core influence” presentation is 2 hours long and is definitely worth watching. I don’t personally agree with some aspects of it, like the “brain or subconscious theory” (I have a much more spiritual approach to life), but the process that he describes is definitely important when it comes to actually find your perfect market and your perfect customer. And he also gives an account of his personal experience with this process.

My take on it is that you’ll never be successful if you don’t take the time to:

1.Define what is the type of life you want to experience and where you want to experience ti and with whom. Having stuff is really not important if you can’t use money or object to live the life you really want to live.

2.Establish what you really enjoy most doing, that is the type of professional life you want to live and what kind of work exactly fits you best. In real estate for example there are a number of strategies and professions one can undertake. Often people look for the most lucrative one that can give the most results in the minimum time and with little or no effort. And they fail or commit to a job that they hate.

3.Figure out exactly what you customer wants to experience, how your properties or services can enhance his life. This brings us into selecting a segment of the market or a type of customer that is closest to your personal inclinations. Some people hate dealing with home buyers and they focus only on wholesaling properties to other investors. Some other people prefer rehabs and like dealing with hammers and drywall. Other people like me prefer the marketing side of it and specialize in creating relationships between people and in tutoring them. In my international real estate work, for example, I am translating between different cultures and actually sell by teaching.

4.Make sure that what you do aligns perfectly with what you desire to do most and is targeted to a customer that is just like you or that needs exactly what you have to offer.

By putting these four elements in play, you will get sales effortlessly and you will naturally attract the right type of customers. This is not something esoteric or complex. It is simply looking at what honestly you would like to do, regardless of constraints or potential consequences, and steer your boat into that direction.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. If you want an example of this approach in action look at Frank’s presentation. It’s free.

Commercial shortsales and foreclosures is going to become one of the main targets of interest for international real estate investors and therefore it will also enter into the scope of content of my blog. It is a completely new playing field even though the names and concepts seem similar to what we have come to know well in the residential field, they are VERY different.

The next new wave is going to be commercial foreclosure, but you really need to know how to ride it.

These are the five key differences:

1.The legislation on the subject is substantially different and therefore it requires a different approach and a different type of knowledge.

2.The owners of a commercial property have much more experience and knowledge in the field than a regular home owner that is gone in foreclosures. So we are not dealing with distressed owners any more, but we are rather dealing with business men who we are not necessarily trying to substitute, but rather ally with.

3.The cycle of a commercial real estate project is much longer: usually 18 months or more versus 3 to 6 months being the typical cycle length for a residential property.

4.There is very little knowledge on commercial loan modification and many owners don’t really know what they should do, yet they HAVE to do something because commercial loans usually are 5 years long not 30 years long. Therefore people go in foreclosure not because they can’t make their mortgage payments anymore, as it happens in residential real estate, but because they have to renegotiate an existing loan for a property that has lost value.

5.The value of the property is more dependent on its proper management rather than on the actual value of the building itself. Location, age and state of repair have naturally something to do with it, but proper management and marketing are paramount.

Why is this interesting for international investors? They can invest on a single deal with a local investor that they trust rather than having to do multiple residential projects. The risk is more concentrated because you have all your money in one single project, but there are many more tools to establish the worth of the project and the competence of the local investor working with them.

Much less people will be able to play in this field, and that will weed out many of the losers.

Roberto Mazzoni

“Nothing sucks like an Electrolux” was the slogan that the Swedish manufacturer used to launch their new series of vacuum cleaners in the US about 25 years ago. The phrase had worked well in other English speaking markets and they were totally convinced it was going to sound appealing also in the US. You figure what happened.

Using catchy phrases in other languages and countries can have painful results.

Pepsi sold their product in China with the typical message “Pepsi brings tyou back to life” eventually translated into “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back from the Grave”. And how about General Motors that failed the launch of Chevy Nova in South America for then discovering that “nova” means “it doesn’t go” and sales didn’t actually go anywhere until they changed the name of the vehicle.

And Parker told to his potential pen buyers in Mexico that their pen was not going to leak in their pockets and make them pregnant. And it just goes on and on. So you need to realize that many Internet Marketing strategies don’t work outside of the US for the added complexity introduced by the language and if you rely on automatic translation tools you are in for some very bad and embarrassing surprises.

There is no substitute for simplicity. They more you avoid cunning slogans and double meaning sentences, and just stick to basic communication with possibly lots of pictures or videos then you are fairly on the safe ground. And again there will still be a majority of people that will misunderstand most of what you say, but at least you will avoid the most embarrassing situations. And again they say that 90% of our marketing efforts produce no results and that we get the majority of our customers from the remaining 10% or 20%.

The point is that it take 90% of mistakes to figure out the 10% that really works for you. So keep trying my friend, but be careful of the language and cultural barrier when it comes to international buyers.

Roberto Mazzoni

Gathering testimonials for your business is one of the key activities in any marketing effort and it is a key ingredient of many selling pages on the web, but the quality of the testimonial is a key factor in its credibility. We have all seen lame videos, recorded by people who were overly enthusiastic or who simply didn’t know much what to say except praising some product or person without telling us why we should consider it.

I have just found two very relevant posts, both written by Sean D’Souza on the site Copyblogger that give valuable advice on how to get a valuable testimonial and how to present it so that it contributes to out credibility, rather than subtracting from it.

The first article is titled: “The Secret Life of Testimonials” and the second: “Six Questions to Ask for Powerful Testimonials”. Sean introduces us to the interesting concept of the “reverse testimonial”, namely “ a testimonial that starts off in reverse” and instead of beginning with praise and ending with even more praise, they begin instead by describing some kind of problem the person was trying to solve, the uncertainty she was going through before deciding on the purchase.

In this way you obtain several benefits: first of all you mimic the state of mind in which your new potential customer is right now, you first emphasize the “pain” or trouble he is trying to solve, could it also be just his inability to take a decision and then to stick with it. I would add that you are not pushing the decision toward your customer or reader, but are initially withdrawing a bit so that HE reaches a bit, lowers her screens that have been developed in listening to overly sugary testimonial that nobody would believe. Also you address and solve, in the testimonials, many of the objections that would come in the mind of your potential customer.

The article suggests to structure the testimonial, which is not a new idea as such, but which is always a good idea because the person delivering the testimonial will have a track to follow and will feel, look and SOUND more natural. It is like when you interview some important person as a journalist: they always want to have the questions in advance, so to be ready to answer properly and intelligently. This also helps getting testimonials from people that are far away and that have bought your product or service much time ago.

The article suggests six questions you can ask as a routine. They are quite good, but you can develop your own. The key factors being addressed are

1.Objections to the purchase (so that you can defuse them with the rest of the testimonial).
2.Reason for buying despite the obstacles.
3.Key benefit received from the product or service (note it is just one).
4.Additional benefits
5.Reasons for recommending it
6.Additional comments

I would personally add a presentation of the customer herself, who she is and what she does. I know it’s kind of understood but it always an important to give further credibility and also offer her the chance of promoting herself or her company during the testimonial.

Roberto Mazzoni