Our aim at Real Estate Leads(.ca) is to supercharge your career and make your average busy day simpler for you.
As a Real Estate Agent, you do quite alot of things… more than can be short-listed, but in short most every successful real estate agent does all these things generate deals:
– Somehow gather potential clients ( buyer, seller & rental properties. )
– Showcase properties to prospective (and best -> pre-qualified) buyers.
– Advise clients on mortgage options, prior and current market conditions & pricing strategy.
– Intermediate negotiations between buyers & sellers.
– Promote properties through advertising, listing services/MLS & open houses.
– Advise sellers on how they can present their homes more attractively to buyers.
– Present to sellers purchase offers for consideration.
– Stay current with real estate laws & trends.
– Provide guidance for buyers and sellers throughout the transaction process.
– Perform property comparison to determine fair & competitive market prices.
– Generate lists of appropriate properties for buyers based on their price range & needs.
– Prepare & submit all required paperwork, including various contracts.
– Work nights and/or weekends to take care of your various client’s needs.
– Put gas in the car, occasionally your car’s change oil, tires, etc….
So how can you do all that already, and expect to do more? Our days are ever so short. We presume that you would wish to add (potentially) many more thousands of dollars to your income as a real estate agent in the next year, or faster?
Here are some tip compiled form some veterans in your field. Then follow these tips. And for new agents, this really goes double for you.
Here they are:
It is a really good idea to periodically touch base with past clients somehow
Believe it or not, many people simply forget the name of their real estate agents over the years, unless you remind them of yourself. They never truly forget though, and if they have you current business card (or a few of them) they might just strike up some more deals for you.
As a reminder of this, walk around your house today, pay attention to the foundation and think about how your home would be without it. Your customers are the equivolent foundation of your real estate business. Contact your current and past clients at least 2-3 times per year. Christmas cards are always welcome.
Automate your advertising process
If you don’t have an assistant that you are quickly going to find out that you have just becaome too busy to get your marketting campaign in full swing. Yes, your time is too valuable (or will become too valuable once you become more successful) to spend doing everything it takes to get your name and image out there abundantly. { If you don’t have an asistant, RealEstateLeads.ca can take care of this for you with 1-2 new fresh leads per day delivered to you every day of the week. }
Publish your own blog
There are actually a suprising percentage of agents out there today who haven’t published a well designed website. Bu these days there is no excuse, even if you have little technical experience. Get your own real estate blog. We recommend 4GoodHosting.com if you need to get a website up fast, especially with their Web Presense sitebuilder. (Blogger is another easy option.)
A good domain name is a critical part of a good marketing plan
It doesn’t matter if you think you’re not ready for a website, or even if you’re not techie at all. Just do this: Go to 4GoodHosting.com, see if your first and last name with .com after the end is available, and buy it. (It’s a measly $12.95/year investment, it’s easy, and you don’t have to have website designed already – you’re just buying the name.) You will need this to soon point to your blog or website.
Study basic SEO ( Search Engine Optimization ) techniques
We recommend searching for Google’s latest recommendations and related articles. Just search for them. Google: “SEO techniques google update”.
Learn basic copywriting
Real Estate is a self-marketing business and most of us dive in without having learned how to persuade someone to buy from you!
Here’s a big hint: Its is mostly about them, not you. People, especially women, buy on emotion first, then justify it all with logic framed around their emotion about a particular property.
Better than asking “How much can you afford?”, instead ask: “Approximately what price range would like to stay within?”
Ask for referrals, really… darnit.
Most people find this most important post-deal task shyfully painful. But it works. No matter how much people grew to love you for what you did for them, oftentimes they will forget to refer you unless they are occasional reminded of you. No matter how badly you feel you screw up when asking, because of the act of asking, they are much more likely to refer you into the future.
Referral tip: add in a referral inquiry at the tail end of your voice mail greeting
You can say something like this, “If you were referred to me by a member of your family or a particular friend, please let me know who that person was so that I can express to them my Thank You.” How this works is that it lets people know that you appreciate referrals. Magic, eh?
Always be aware of real time-wasters.
Find ways to politely guard your productive time. This makes you look better to upper management, unless you are your own boss. If you do work in a office though, there will be lots of times where people will interject conversations regarding personal or trivial issues. There are more of them then there are of you. You will be consumed by them if you let them was most of your time each day. Best to keep your hook in the water sort of speak, trying to find or make your next deal happen.
The key to getting listings in the future… home staging…
Learn what it takes to prepare a home for sale. Over 80% of agents don’t pursue this, or if they do they goof up the photos.
Remember to take “Before” photos. How come? Well, because a ‘Before & After’ photo gallery is one of the most powerful techniques of marketing you can use to get home listings.
Quality of the photos really makes a big difference; possibly hire the task out. Use a wide-angle for interior photos. If the house is really amazing, a 3d 360 degree view shot is often worthwhile.
Be yourself.
People want to get to know the real you. Enough said.
Ask for testimonials, and use them in your brochures and website.
The power that other people have when it comes to selling your services is far greater than your own. Yet most real estate agents have a string of happy clients and no written testimonials they can quote. There’s an easy way to ask for and get testimonials that I only learned a year of so ago, and it’s in my post “How to Get Better Testimonials”.
Stay the course…
One of my real Estate Agent friends that I have had for as long as he has been in Real Estate, as she help my parents in finding a perfect place as her first deal, told me about her initial struggles as an Agent. At the end of her 4th year in in real estate, right before she become a client of RealEstateLeads.ca (and having done pretty well during her 2nd and 3rd years) she became despondent.
She told me she went five straight months without a paycheck, working and working and she thought her luck ran dry. She was about to get out of Real Estate when we happened to touch base again. She went from from October through April without a deal. But by December, with leads automatically flowing in through RealEstateLeads.ca, she had made twice what shr had made the year before.
So, no need to ever give up!
The Bottom Line
Making a good living as a Real Estate Agent has many challenges and you don’t get paid unless you sell… you can work long hours and weeks and still have a zero paycheck — and you always have to adapt to changing market conditions. Utilizing today’s technology, real estate tools, and perfect services, such as RealEstateLeads.ca, can help you cultivate a successful and boundless career as an Agent.
