Transcript:
[00:00] Speaker 1: That’s , what’s up Kev, how are you guys doing?
Speaker 2: Everything is going great man, thanks so much for joining us Mike.
Speaker 1: Hey. Thanks for having me man, I’m excited about it, there’s some good stuff to be talked about today, so I’m guessing based on our prior conversation you guys might be having a little trouble in inventory?
Speaker 2: Yeah we are, we’re dealing with multiple offers situations, dealing with no market, competing for listings, not a lot of inventory, so it’s just it’s been a challenge, it’s been a challenge for us in this market, so I love to like just maybe learn a little bit about you, I’ve told everyone about you, your background, twenty years in the business in the top one percent of agents in the United States, you now have very successful programs. So before we jump into the good stuff and all that really cool tips are going to share with us, tell us a little bit about yourself just real quick about your background and we’ll jump right in.
Speaker 1: Yeah man, no problems. So you’re right twenty years in the business, actually no I’ve actually been in the business for one year, I’m only twenty, it does this to you but for real, twenty years in the business, love it it’s a great industry but few years back I got a production to open up a brokerage and like you, I’m kind of a guy that run for brokerage and a team. In that venture I really-really enjoy helping agents and I’m always looking for the Best Practices to bring back to the agent, I travel twice a month to every convention I can find. In fact about how many have we been together?
Speaker 2: I can’t name them all but we’ve been to a lot.
Speaker 1: A lot of stuff right, so my approach is I want to come back with the best information. Actually this is the thing that if I’m going to say anything about myself, I loved to implement. I love to go out there, find the best stuff and go in and implement right away, so that’s sort of my skillset and what I do. It doesn’t always work, nothing works every single time but you just got to keep implementing these things and find out what works for you. So we have the same problem you do our inventory now is down stressing the first time home buyer market, down to sometimes ten days or less in certain zip codes in our area. What are you guys down to right now overall?
Speaker 2: I’m not sure exactly but we’re faced with…
So the average time that an American takes to get to move, like the average is like five to seven years, traditionally speaking like according to solicitation of Realtors, in the Bay area particularly in San Francisco I think it’s at seventeen years now.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 2: So the inventory I mean it’s like people buy in and they’re not moving, they’re not they’re not selling and that’s because we’re…
Like in terms of the Bay Area and in Orange County where we’re based in Southern California, there’s really not a lot places you can go.
Speaker 1: So is part of that because there’s fear of if I list my house and sell it I’m not going to find anything I like to move into?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you’re going to find anything you like and then you’re not going to…
I mean you’re priced out too, I mean you’re basically maxed out, so a lot of people are staying put and we’re dealing also with lots of red back situation because
[03:00] sellers are like well I want to sell my place but what am I going to buy? It’s going to be very competitive, it’s hard for me to get back into property. So we’re dealing with a lot of Redbacks too and so yeah it’s challenging for sure.
Speaker 1: So how far down is your inventory? Are you guys down ten percent, seven percent, what’s your average now in your area?
Speaker 2: I’m not sure what exactly the percentages are but I’ll tell you there’s not a lot of properties on the market. I mean we’re seeing like maybe twenty houses coming on the market per day, I mean it’s like it’s crazy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, what’s your population to get over there?
Speaker 2: I mean we are in Northern California, San Francisco, there’s four million people, five million people and if you talk about southern California, I mean L.A. itself is well liked five million people. So there’s a lot of very big population and there’s a major crisis going on with housing and it’s something that’s real, I mean it’s something that we’re dealing with every single day and we have buyers, we have especially with buyers, you have lots of buyers and the one of the challenges is like of course like trading relationships and building rapport with your buyers and that’s a challenge in itself and then the next level is now how do I get those clients in the properties?
You need to get ten or fifteen other people, and it’s a same listings, there’s not a lot of inventory, so if you have someone or a seller who’s considering putting their home on the market you’re competing against like seventy other agents, how many to park on expired every day like there’s first of all, there’s not that many expires. And so people that are reaching out to expire, they’re one in like one hundred, like the other day I think Tristan was talking about he went to his [inaudible] and there’s twenty two people that went to visit that property.
So that’s why I really want to have you on today because you’ve shared some really cool strategies and tips to sort of hack into a low inventory market and how we can create more opportunities for ourselves as agents struggling to get more deals, get more listings and get more buyers and get more deals under contract.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. So yeah let me ask you a couple things, a few things that you just said kind of hit home for me and one of those things is the expired. So one thing that we found locking isn’t recent expired, recent expires we haven’t had much luck in but we’ve been going back sometimes twelve to eighteen months of when they expired because they couldn’t sell then, likely the prices have risen now to the point that they can. So we’re starting to list quite a few of those right now. So that’s really good for us, so how long how long you guys going back in your expired searches now?
Speaker 2: No, I mean we’re going back…
I mean I remember like 2014 when the market was like really-really hot, still very hot now but looking back even like two three years up, looking at people that had listed their properties and when the market wasn’t as great and
[06:00] they perhaps well weren’t unable to get the number that they wanted and now that the markets change, those are some of those low hanging fruit opportunities for sure, that’s a really good idea.
Speaker 1: So we’ve been doing those have been those and have been stacking with a couple things like reversing the risk because we all know with sellers that one of the reasons they don’t want to put their house in the market in our state might be a little different than yours but what we’re doing is we’re propositioning them almost of the USP, no risk or risk reversal in terms of we can sell your home and if you don’t find one that you like, you don’t have to move. So we’re stacked in that contingency up front where what we’re doing is for advertising it so people that normally would not call us, are calling us only because of that safety net that they feel confident to try but we’re advertising that right now with a call to action extension to it. So we’re throwing that advertisement out there as a USP, list with us in the next sixty days and this will be guarantee.
Speaker 2: Let me work these types questions real quick, as you mentioned a couple things there. So USP first of all for those that maybe don’t know what a USP is, can you just explain what that is and then kind of break down what you just said because there’s some really good info there and it was high level, so if you could just break that down.
Speaker 1: Of course, that’s what we’re going to do, like kind of that thirty thousand foot view and then deep diving. So that U.S.P. Unique sales proposition Okay. So in other words it’s some sort of thing that you’re offering that’s unique, not everybody is doing it and it gives them extra incentive of why they want to call you and generally you want those USP to reverse some risk or give them confidence of some extra benefit of why they want to call.
Speaker 2: So what’s an example of a good U.S.P?
Speaker 1: I’ll tell you, this one actually turned out really weird for me because I got a girl in the office said I suggest this, she ran a billboard for a year and a bill board produce just a little to nothing, so she thought about getting rid of the board I said before you do that let’s just change the messaging once and see if this hits. And which we did, as we created the love it or leave it guarantee, if you buy a house with me if you don’t love it in the next the first one year, I’ll sell it for free. So the risk reversal is; if you don’t love where you move because guess what guys in a low inventory environment that’s a paying point too, people are buying houses just because it’s the only thing available, they’re not even in love with it, they’re like it’s the best or worst, so I’ll buy it.
So anyway, the weird thing, the reason I said it’s weird is because she’s not getting buyers she’s getting listings from it, she’s listed six homes in the last six weeks of that billboard. Now, we have a little bit differently inventory than you do, we have very low inventory but we’ll get a few more opportunities in general but the point is that one U.S.P. provided six solid listing opportunities, now but I want to really point out, I’m sure you guys are feeling this but when you’re talking about environments like, this time management is so crucial. You can have fifteen buyers and you just get bottlenecks, you can’t find anything for them, they all taking up your time, they get frustrated, you get frustrated, they start calling everybody from [inaudible] because they think you can’t find opportunity. So when you’re talking about low inventory,
[09:00] I always go back to what’s most useful and most highest and best use of time?
And it might sound a little counterintuitive but going for the listings right now and really having a great listing campaign is probably one of the most important I can suggest because one buyer…
Last year NAR average I think it was twenty hours in the car with each buyer, I have to say that’s probably higher right now, you’re probably averaging thirty or plus hours in a car, that’s not processing, that’s not TC work if you’re doing your own TC work, that’s literally just searching out the home, investing the same thirty hours really-really just doing a deep dive and trying to find listings, the chances are if I get that one listing, I’m not going to spend time in the car with a listing number, I’m going to be marketing the listing and probably get two or three other additional pieces of business offer if I market it correct. So what I’m saying is the best and highest and best use of your time really is farming listings, that’s how you do it.
Now if you have a buyer, one thing that’s been killing it for us, USPs are great but the Other thing we’ve been doing is circle prospecting the heck out of it we can sell and so if we do sell a listing, we’re circle prospecting that listing because we’re doing massive OPEN HOUSE, we’re doing all kinds of stuff to create a ton of activity on the house and when I say massive open House, if you share this with your group on how to really get a huge open house on a property, we can get one hundred fifteen people in in one day last week.
Speaker 2: Tell us how you do it? We have our campaigns that we use but please.
Speaker 1: Okay. So for open house; what we’re doing is we’re making an absolute circus it would take me an hour to explain it but [inaudible] who you know does a video on You Tube called the massive OPEN HOUSE, it’s a fifty three minute video, if you follow that routine, we’ve been shut down by the police saying there’s so many people that show up. Literally, the cops shut me down, it was crazy but what we’re doing after that that OPEN HOUSE is we’re taking that neighbourhood and we’re going around and we letting people know that we still got tons of buyers out there and there’s buyers ready to write right now. The House’s already sold, it sold in one day or two days time and sold for more than asking price and we’ve got tons of buyers who are finding opportunity in that circle prospecting as well.
Now here’s a great hack that goes along with that. If you have a buyer that you can’t find a house for and this is where I find that most agents in my neck of the woods, it’s probably the same where you guys are, [inaudible] to get into reactive mode, where they just don’t know what to do proactively to create an opportunity, that’s the first thing you’ve got to get out of your head is waiting for something to pop up and then start competing for it, you’ve got a fish way upstream and more than that just don’t wait for to show up at the M.L.S. So one thing that we started doing is buyer videos, literally videos with our buyers, quick one minute videos and what we’re doing with those videos to say hey I really love this XYZ neighbourhood, I’m trying to get in here, I’m willing to move fast, I’m flexible if you’re thinking to sell please call my realtor Mike, because I want to get in here as soon as I can.
And then we’re taking that video and we’re literally blast that all over that zip code, we’re literally showing that video during door knocking and there’s been times when we’ve even brought this buyers to door knocking with us and
[12:00] that’s creating a good opportunity there as well.
Speaker 2: So you take that video and then what do you do? You send out a mass e-mail?
Speaker 1: To be honest with you, I’ve been building custom audiences and retargeting with that video on Facebook and social media. So I can take five hundred houses in a neighbourhood or a thousand in the zip code or whatever you want to do and you just start building an audience over time and you just keep retargeting those people because you want to fish upstream, you don’t want to be waiting for something to hit the market and you’ve got forty seven other showings that you’re trying to deal with at that same day and trying to compete and get your offer and that’s hard, that’s hard to deal with.
We’re all dealing with that and that’s not seen as so successful. So if you catch them prior to that point, you have a little bit higher success rate.
Speaker 2: So let’s go back a quick to the USPs because I think that’s really interesting, so you mentioned a couple of USPs. Well you mentioned one unique selling proposition an then something about using call to action to target people using a unique selling proposition. What are some other unique sells propositions that you think that are good?
Speaker 1: Yeah, the other one I’ve been doing especially in your market with luxury is free home staging with list, so free moving services. Another one we’ve been doing is guaranteed sold, that one is less powerful in today’s market but it still does have weight with people that really want to move, so Guaranteed sold goes like if I don’t sell it in thirty days, I’ll sell it for free. So there’s a heck a lot you can do with it and what I’ve been playing with a lot too especially younger millennial is buy and sell with me and I’ll stack your house with fifteen hundred dollars of smart home tech.
So what we’re doing then is putting in cameras and stuff of that nature, temperature controls, everything that you can control from your i-Pad or I-phone. So that’s been a great U.S.P. to do and it is getting our phone ringing.
Speaker 2: And one thing that I think is another good one you can use for any group of buyers or property, so if you have a listing that just came on the market, you can take…
Like we have a lot of contacts in a particular zip code that have inquired about property in a particular zip code, you can take those contacts, you can see really any set of like buyers and you can take a property and you can say buy this home and I will sell your home for free. So you target sellers with that.
Speaker 1: Yeah [inaudible], so you’re actually controlling that buyer, that’s a great USP.
Speaker 2: Yeah and then, you can actually get a lot of sellers that way. So they will be questioning you that you’re going to sell my home for free. Like that’s what they’re going to look at and then you might get some people to call you. We talked also the other day about like making moves and using some other technology and other avenues to reach out and connect with more people
[15:00] in a low inventory market?
Speaker 1: Yes. So in my party right now, in my zip code, in my offices, I did a [inaudible] and people forget about this, they always seem to forget about this. I’ve said it a thousand times, so did a demo the other day in my zip code, I think it’s the tenth biggest city in my state, I pulled up all the active listening, so there was only eighty eighty listings. Whether it’s a single family home regardless of price, 80 listings. Zillah make the move had eight, so I was ten percent of the market was literally on Make me move and nobody is looking there, they’re all forgetting about it. so I always love going to Zillah make me move and for sale by owner and even coming soon because they’ve got all three of those functions on there that you can look for inventory which is awesome.
So another thing that we’ve been doing as a sort of an add on to that is we’ve been doing e-mail campaigns and Facebook campaign to agents that do business, so anybody that’s doing more than fifteen transactions in our area which is sort of your top, I’d say ten percent, we’re turned up last buyer needs to and we’re making connections that way as well which has been really good.
Speaker 2: But not an email to the top agents in the area and say I’ve got a buyer that’s thinking about this, I’d like to see if it’s available.
Speaker 1: And we’ve been stacked with buyers that are willing to that have a little bit of cash resource that they’ll pay our commission, so that way you can keep your head five percent or six percent or seven percent, my buyer will take care of me, just talk to me first.
Speaker 2: That’s awesome.
Speaker 1: So that’s been working pretty well too. But the U.S.P. thing, I can’t really sell that enough because that thing’s been getting our phone running, we’ve been doing direct mail too, it’s been a huge hit with our U.S.Ps, so it is sending out a lot of direct mail and targeted geo farms and whatnot even hit, Believe it or not, if you look at why people choose an agent, NAR tracks this every single year; the number one reason is the reputation of the agent, the number two is always the feeling of trustworthy and honesty. Those are the two tops and nothing else comes close. So what I started doing a while back was I started doing video testimonials from actual clients so with call action and direct mail, what you can do is “Hear Kevin’s story of why Kevin love working with Mike.”
Text Kelvin story and boom here comes up a video of Kevin talking about how great it was working with me and I will send out to one thousand homes and I can even have that targeted messaging towards sellers. Mike did such a great job, he did such a great job Marketing the House, great job negotiating the offer, if things got rocky he smoothen things out with the buyers, his perfect, I love him, I will never use body else again, those kind of message you can help control those and you can help control where they go and who they get targeted too.
Speaker 2: That’s actually really-really smart, so you have to take your past clients…
I’m thinking now because I’m going to throw some other ideas based off of this and like a bolt on this, so you got your past clients
[18:00] and you ask they do a testimonial for you, they do the testimonial and you take that video you, put it on a site and you put on the landing page because you’re going to then send out a mass mailers, on that mailer you’ll use call action which is a texting platforms and on that mailer it will say whatever message you just said; learned why Kevin sold this house with me and here’s a story or whatever.
Speaker 1: Text Kevin story.
Speaker 2: Text Kevin story to learn about his experience with me and then they text Kevin story and then right away call action is a software that we’re familiar with, that will send down an immediate text reply with that video.
Speaker 1: Correct.
Speaker 2: Then they click on that video and then they see the story and then what’s cool about it is when they send out that text you now have their phone number.
Speaker 1: You’re now engaged with them, you even know their address and which person it was.
Speaker 2: Because Call action provides that information.
Speaker 1: So the meta data is all there, they know exactly who it was, so you can say your neighbour three doors down, from where this gets really interesting Kelvin is if you can make it where it’s somebody you sold a house that’s in that neighbourhood, if it’s hyper local, if it’s Kevin from X.Y.Z. main street and they can identify with that because they lives four blocks away, that’s where it gets even better.
Speaker 2: Imagine if you’ve got business owners to do something like that for you. Local pizza or corner pizza shop or something that everyone know, the coffee shop, you go to the owner, you connect with the owner and then you ask them to do a testimonial for you, even if they’ve never sold a house for you. You’ve never sold them a house, they can still talk about how great you are.
Speaker 1: Exactly.
Speaker 2: And I think that’s really cool and in terms of the testimonials it doesn’t necessarily have to be, would you agree with Mike? Does it have to be someone you sold a house to or could it be…? [crosstalk]
Speaker 1: No, not necessarily because look man, this is all about social proof. If I say I’m great, who cares? If you see I’m great them I’m going to listen to Kelvin because it’s not Mike talking, so soon as soon as I start talking about how great I am, I would lose the audience but the minute somebody else does, that’s why reviews are so powerful, it really is, it doesn’t matter that if you work with me or not, the fact that you’re talking about me being great built trustworthiness. it builds a great reputation and as I said, number one sided reason why people pick an agent is they want that reputation.
Speaker 2: And that’s awesome, that’s a really-really good tip. So going back to like low inventory and how to kind of hack into a lot inventory market, what are some other things that you’ve done or you’ve seen other people do that work in a low inventory market?
Speaker 1: Sure, so I can’t stress enough about actually getting on the ground proactively, getting boots on the ground in creating listing opportunities. So I ask a lot of agents how many open houses did you do this week?
[21:00] And overwhelmingly, I hear pretty much none. We’re sitting at my office now and some weeks as low as seven to ten percent penetration rate on open houses and it drives me crazy because the ones that are doing it, are doing fantastic. The ones that are not doing it, I ask them every week, why would you not do this, you’re literally sitting there speed dating for leads and it’s all neighbourhood people.
So I can’t stress it enough that people in the neighbourhood… I was curious to see what’s happening with other people’s listings in the neighbourhood. Again, why I love call action? I can follow up with every single one of those about the open house of the whole neighbourhood, even if I don’t know who is there. I can send messages to that whole neighbourhood when the house sells, when a price has been reduced when anything happens and when I see them engaged with that call action extension, immediately the next thing I’m going to do some it take a personalized report with this or otherwise seem am a drop up at their house.
So anybody that engages with that with that property open house or otherwise. Now how can that low inventory environment [inaudible]? One thing is the sign that we use, I don’t know if I talk to you about this before Kevin but we use three different lead generators on our FOR SALE signs now. So what we’ve got is we’ve got the call action extension, saying techs priced to you. So if they want the price they got to text it. I’ve got Pro question free recorded information, called one eight hundred and it gives the number an extension but here’s the onw I really like, [inaudible] the business elites program; we’ve built a single property lending pages. So single property listing sites are landing pages with a showing widget, they can go in and schedule their own showing.
Speaker 2: Like you mentioned three really powerful tools?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Can we break down each one real quick?
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: And do we have to use them on our for sale site? Because here’s an idea like Omah is using Bus stop signs and we actually have talked about this and it’s a really-really great idea. And I’m going to tell going to tell Omah, because they’re going to see your signs anyway. And it’s slow it’s using a call action number on a bus stop. So it says like text for a list of open houses, text or do this and it’s on a bus and also on the billboard. So couldn’t you use the same info or the same tools on something like a billboard or bus stop in addition to a for sell sign?
Speaker 1: Oh I do. Like I said my U.S.P, that’s a billboard, she got six listings on call action just with that in the last six weeks. So it’s very powerful absolutely. Another one that we’ve been doing with that for neighbourhoods because everyone is always curious what’s happening with their neighbourhood, what’s price is doing, averages in the market.
[24:00] If you’re not familiar RPR really look at our RPR. We did a video and it really was like a minute and a half video just highlight it three or four different pieces of RPR, they get a great map and I love this part about it, it’s what I highlight all the time and it shows within the neighbourhood which part of the neighbourhoods are going up and what percentage.
It breaks it down block to block, this block went down ten percent last year, this one went up thirty five. So your averaging a neighbourhood might be ten but it shows the differential per actual neighbourhood. So we did a video and we kind of explain that and we kicked that video out there, like here’s the three or four highlights of our PR, the first time people that message in are going to get a free RPR report on their new prize, that was safe and well.
And the other thing we’ve been doing even on our listings that are open houses is just won’t get national our P.R.R. Text report too and when they do that call action, then we know that going to give them a personalise RPR Reports from the neighbourhood, that’s been hitting well, so there’s a million ways you can use call action, neighbourhood metrics and reports, testimonials, use these and offerings, price on the House, other houses. You want to see other neighbourhood listings, what’s available right now? Text listings 2.
There’s a million things you can do with that that system to create opportunity. So as you mentioned Kevin, I gave you three different lead generation tools, we’ve got a call action which is a text platform, pro Quest, my personal best is pro quest, I did I think forty transactions on pro quest in one year.
Speaker 2: Okay. Pro Quest; what exaction is Pro-Quest? We’re almost out of time, we have like very short time actually.
Speaker 1: So we’re going to hit this one fast.
Speaker 2: We’re open up for questions.
Speaker 1: Yes, so pro-quest is really nothing more than a call to capture extension, it’s shows when people call for free recorded information, there’s a thirty second commercial about the house service or a product and it captures them and alerts you within ten seconds of them being on the phone with their phone number.
Speaker 2: Nice.
Q&A
Speaker 1: Alright, takeaways questions. What do we got guys?
Speaker 2: So we’ve got some questions here, we got one from Baton here, e-property blast from Core Logic send out to twenty five hundred emails from coal. So I think he’s making a suggestion there. You can do an e-properly blocks from Core Logic which is a Mailer company and then you can send up to twenty five e-mails which you can capture from [inaudible].
Speaker 1: Yeah, I got the I got the calls [inaudible] myself and that’s something we have we have not done and you’re right, we could do an e-mail campaign. what I’m not crazy about though is the read rate is about thirty percent on email, they don’t open as much, so we’ve been doing the same thing, if you got the email address, you can build in a custom audience on Facebook and that’s where we hit them with retargeting with the same offers.
Speaker 2: So we have another question here, that’s for that Baton, it was a really good suggestion, we actually have a core realty accounts, so if anyone wants to use ours feel free to do it. So here’s one; what’s the most effective way you’re getting stellar
[27:00] leads right now?
Speaker 1: So right now in all honesty, it’s just using your listings you already have and leverage those. So if you don’t have Listings yourself, anybody else in the office has them and you want to leverage those worked that out together or whatever but seller lead gen doesn’t usually happen well if your sphere of influence, it doesn’t usually happen on paid sources but I will tell you that the social proof really is in the way that you’re operating and marketing yourself and marketing that listing in a neighbourhood, that’s where we find our greatest opportunity.
Speaker 2: Okay, so here’s another one. What’s your strategy for competing with buyers in a multiple offer situation? This is a really long time sombo, I can tell you on that the answer on this is there’s a lot to talk about.
Speaker 1: Can I give you the one tip that we just implemented superfast?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: What we’ve been doing is we’ve been providing financial statements and finance deals, so if I’m to go ten percent down to Benson or whatever it is but I’ve got another hundred grants set in the bank, we’ve been supporting those proof of funds because everybody’s worried about low appraisals and stuff like that, so that has been super successful, there’s a million tips we can give on that and that’s a number one that we’ve been having lots of success with.
Speaker 2: And I’ll say another thing is also create relationships with people in the business like listing agents, you want to create a positive relationship with them, build the rapport with them because they’re the gatekeepers of like the property, so you want to build a positive relationship with them, also have a clean-clean packaging when you are submitting offers and have buyer letters and Mike, we’re talking about doing videos, you can do a buyer video, so there’s a lot. We found several talks on this that we can go into it further but it’s a really long answer.
Speaker 1: The best the best advice you can get for your whole brokerage is move together in that piece as a teams. Right now, you are winning about eighty five percent of multiple offers in my office because everyone in the industry knows that we rock in multiple offers and as you look for my companies offers to hit the table, when you build that kind of reputation, that’s huge.
Speaker 2: It is and making sure your buyers understand that in a multiple offer situation, there maybe, they may have to come up in price and there’s a couple other [inaudible].
There’s a really good question here; if you had a thousand dollars to spend marketing, what would you spend your money on?
Speaker 1: Okay. So if you have a thousand dollars to spend your money marketing again what I would do is I’d spend that thousand dollars doing whatever I got to do to get a listing and I probably would when I say that marketing, I’d probably do more, if I got a thousand bucks I got more time than money, so I’m probably not going to spend that thousand dollars to buy leads or anything like that.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to go on and spend my time door knocking, I’m going to end up on the phone, I’m going to do whatever it takes, I’m going to take you out to lunch if you’re an agent with that thousand dollars and say can I market your listing because that’s really where your opportunities is going to come from.
Speaker 2: So you have to pick like we’ve talked about a lot of tools here,
[30:00] Speaker 1: call action all day because you can use that in so many different ways.
Speaker 2: so it doesn’t always on call action and then you would create, like you could do like an e-mail blast and you can say list your home with me and I will sell your home for free.
Speaker 1: you can do so many things with that. So call action means even if you were to take the platform that leads you to leads, with shows like twelve different things to market your listeners for you and your attach call action just that platform, with Facebook and Craigslist and everything else it does, those are cheap ways that you can get your money out there and get it working for you. I think a lot of people want to figure out where to spend money and I get that question but just buying expensive leads and stuff like that in my opinion isn’t necessary, you can do it but really what I’m looking for is the smartest investment, I’m going to go for listings because that’s a rarity, that’s a gem right now. If you get listings you win the day.
Speaker 2: Okay, that’s a good answer. Here’s another question from Caleb, what are the three riders?
Speaker 1: Is that talking about the three different generation tactics right?
Speaker 2: I think so. She said yes.
Speaker 1: So call action; That’s one of them, the next one is pro quest and that’s a call caption number and the last one is what I use for listings to lead; L.T.L. is our single property landing site.
Speaker 2: Okay, I’m going I’m getting text messages with more questions here. So then we talked about earlier…
Because not all of us have twenty five listings, so if you don’t have a lot of listings you can still use these tools in a different way; [crosstalk]
Speaker 1: Here’s the beauty of listening to leads, you can use anybody’s, anybody that’s connected to that system up any brokerage, you can leverage there’s, believe it or not, it’s set up that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah and we have to follow the MLS rules on that and it just comes down to like their proper presentation of that listing and giving credit to the actual listing agent but like our M.L.S. those are resource for us to leverage those listings to get business from.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: [inaudible] realtor.com, they do that too and we’re no different than them, they are private companies and we’re private individual business owners, so we should be leveraging other listings to get more business from and we can utilize these tools that his talking about by taking other listings and doing the exact thing that Mike’s saving. I’m I right?
Speaker 1: Absolutely because the way it works really is the reciprocity through something like listing the leads and I would call the rep directly but you can pretty much as long as you’re following your MLS roles, take those listings, make them your own and get good opportunity from those because I know everybody’s gone If I don’t have those listings so how do I do this, I mean you’ve got to leverage other opportunity out there.
Speaker 2: Yes. Okay, so here I got a few more. Here’s another one; how often should we follow up with sellers?
Speaker 1: Okay, that’s a good question, that’s a really good question.
[33:00] So you’re talking about how often you should follow up with somebody that hasn’t listed yet. Is that correct like somebody that’s thinking about selling or they’re talking about selling?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you’re from the neighbourhood and let’s say you have someone that’s kind of thinking you talk to them on the phone, it was a positive conversation… [overlapping conversation]
Speaker 1: I’ve never seen anybody lose a listing because they’re too good at follow up, is usually the opposition [laughs]
Speaker 2: You’ve never lost a listing because you followed up?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve never seen anybody that…
You know what? I don’t want to work with you Kevin to say you’re too good at follow up, you’re to get a communication, I’m going to work with somebody else that I never hear from, I’ve never seen that said before. So I think the answer is keep following up but make sure the conversations is relevant, make sure it’s good, if you ask them every single day can I list your home, that probably isn’t going to work, so just make sure you follow up is relevant and hits home, it’s asking good questions, that’s really what it’s about, making sure you’re asking all kinds of good questions, finding out what’s really important about the move, finding out what their pain points are and how you can help remove those, finding out how you can help move things forward, understand nobody likes the move and wants to move, they’re trying to move either away from something that doesn’t work in their home or towards something that they’re excited about but that move itself discomfort, it’s not exciting especially today when they have anxiety about finding a house that doesn’t exist in the marketplace yet.
So when you’re able to talk to them about how you can help with those pain points, how you can protect them with contingencies that if they don’t find a house they don’t need to sell or protect them by we’ve got short term, interim housing for you or whatever it is. Solve their problems and follow up.
Speaker 2: Okay and then a couple more here so we can wrap it up. So Baton mention, I have [inaudible] data going back five years, what years would you start calling first?
Speaker 1: I would say this, if they if they never sold because you can do a quick search of the M.L.S, if they’ve already resold, get it off there, if it’s current information that you have and they’ve never actually resold, I go back five years right now all day long. At some point they had an interest in selling and whatever that reason was, again people don’t just move to move because they feel like I’m super bored and have nothing better to do, either their family is expanding, they need to downsize, whatever the thing might be, maybe they need to get closer work, so that usually doesn’t change year to year, it does sometimes but not all the time. my point is go back if they haven’t resold, find out why they put their house in the market five years ago, ask a question what were you thinking then and does it still apply? Chances are; they just don’t know what the market’s doing. Not everybody pays attention to it like you do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s a good point, we’re looking at things every single day and we kind of know because we’re in the world of real estate and we’re doing that all day long, we kind of expect others to understand what’s happening in the marketplace and they just don’t pay attention on what’s going on.
Speaker 1: And that’s where we make those assumptions, that they should know how hard it is and I’ll tell something, telling somebody how hard the market is
[36:00] doesn’t always connect with them either, you can sell your house super easy, it doesn’t connect with them, find out what their anxiety is, what their pain point is, what they’re worried about. Find out what their challenges is, if they really do want to move, if they’ve got a need to move, you should be the conduit to help them figure out how to make that happen. So ask good questions.
Speaker 2: Here’s another question real quick and then I have one last one and we can end it. So earlier you mentioned sometimes you bring your buyers with you when you go door knocking?
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: That’s a committed buyer right there. So what do you say? What does the conversation look like and do you introduce your buyer? How does that work?
Speaker 1: Yes. So we don’t want to put the seller on the spot to say, “Oh would you sell your home?” hey, this is a Kelvin would you like to sell Kevin you’re home right now? That’s not going to work so well, so we will knock at the door and say hey this is a Kelvins, his in the area, he’s really just loves this area and he wants to learn more about it, he want to move into the area, you’re the neighbourhood expert, you live here, what can you tell me and Kelvin about the neighbourhood?
Oh Thanks for the advice, that’s awesome. By the way of all your neighbours, do you know anybody that’s kicking around the idea of selling to hurt? Any chatter we love to go knock on their door. So really it’s more of a soft approach but if they’re thinking about selling, they’re going to go well, I’ve been thinking about it, what do you want to offer me? Do you want to take a look at it?
Speaker 2: Yeah. What I really like about that is first of all you’ve got a super committed buyer. But what I think you can do there as well is what you mentioned earlier and it doesn’t have to…
Like say you have a buyer, just keep it that keep it there. Have them do a video and sellers through like Vulcan seven [inaudible] or get a neighbourhood or like if you’re farming or almost farming in a particular area, you can take that entire farm, have your buyer do the quick video, send out the email with like a U.S.P. or like watch kelvins story about who wants to buy in your neighbourhood, text Kevin story to this number, they watch the story, they see the video and now you’ve got their contact information and you can pick up the phone and call.
Speaker 1: And dude, I even say to stack it, [inaudible] and see, if you’re going to do the e-mail, sent drack mail, if they don’t read the e-mail they’re going to read the drack mail. I mean make sure you hit them from different angles but the reality is guys if you’re just waiting to do the same thing everybody else is, you’re going to the same results, so just that extra piece of having your buyer with you or even a video is different than what people have seen. That’s was going to help you stand apart.
Speaker 2: Okay. And then here’s one last one so that we can end it. So what’s your strategy on getting buyers motivated to keep looking for property when they feel out priced by the market?
Speaker 1: I’ll tell you, that plays in exactly what Kevin said about having a motivated buyer, if you’re motivated to write thirty, forty, fifty, one hundred thousand dollars over asking price, how would you like to maybe just come with me for a couple afternoons and knock on doors and see if we can avoid that? Because that’s really the messaging is let’s try to figure out something out of the box versus being in the cattle call with everybody else. [crosstalk]
Speaker 2: And then…
[39:00] Speaker 1: So really to answer your question even better, when you’re winning multiple offers at a high level and you’ve got a great super razor sharp strategy to do so, that’s going to help as long as you have a buyer that while they might fail on the first ones, they don’t want to listen, when they see what happens and they’ll adjust and they’ll let you take the reins and they’ll just follow, that’s going to help a lot.
Speaker 2: And one thing one last thing again to point out what you just mentioned in terms of having a motivated buyer, how if you have someone that just losing. I would think it would be fairly easy to say hey let’s shot a quick video and I’m going to use this video to send out a blast all the homeowners in the area, would you mind just thirty seconds real quick and do it right now. Like just do it there in front of them, like there’s no need to be fancy or anything, it doesn’t have any major fancy crazy production, grab your i Phone, like let’s do it real quick, just give me a video tell me real quick, right now real quick why you want to buy in this neighbourhood and do it.
Speaker 1: That’s all you need to do.
Speaker 2: Now you’ve got that content, you can start repurposing it and then you can put it on Facebook and put it anywhere.
Speaker 1: By the way, think about this for your own business, if you’re the person that does that, the man or woman that does that and you’re known to go that far out of the box, guess where you’re going to getting a return for that, so when you find a buyer for the house that nobody else could or you get the listing that the sellers is like I’ve never seen people do this kind of stuff before, you start building yourself a referral base and believe it or not people actually start sending you referrals without you even ask for them. Like you got to work Kelvin, Kelvin’s got such cool idea.
Speaker 2: At the end of the day you need to be visible, you need to be connecting with people and you’ll get yourself out there. So that’s what it comes down to.
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 2: Thanks so much Mike, this is such a great call, so much great info. I know you’re like really-really busy guy, operating a brokerage and you’re traveling all over, coaching and speaking everywhere, for you to take the time like this it really means a lot. Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: I love it man. If any you just need any more info or whatever, let Kevin know, hit me up on Facebook I’d be happy to talk. So thanks guys.
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