Real Estate Solutions

You are your database.

Bill Gates, in his book called "Business at the Speed of Thought" said "How you gather, manage and use information to serve the needs of your customer will determine whether you win or lose in your business."   I happen to think Bill Gates is a pretty smart guy.  I know he has more money than I do, so I try to pay attention to what he has to say. 

Whether you are a single agent or have a team, whether you use Top Producer, Online Agent, Outlook or something else for contact management, you should spend some time each week on your database.  You’ll need a good system of categorizing your contacts. 

Here are the categories I use in my database:

Clients:  Clients are anyone who I have done business with and as a result, earned a commission.  

     I also include my sphere of influence as part of this category.  My sphere of influence includes people who have given me referrals.  Members of BNI groups, Rotary Members etc. would go here.

Prospects:   Prospects are people I hope to do business with in the future.   This list includes:

     CMA prospects - anyone I have completed a CMA for including those "thinking" about putting their home on the market. 

     Orphans - those people who bought my listings. They will most likely be ignored by their own agent so I adopt them.  When it comes time to sell their home, they will remember me because I will be in touch.

     Movers and Shakers - Political leaders,  organizational leadership like the local Chamber of Commerce.

If you have a team and generate online leads for them, you might want to add an Online Leads category here. I’ve gone back and forth on this.  At this time, due to the volume of lookers on my IDX site, I prefer to keep those leads separate. I can create drip campaigns there so this group is not being ignored.

Family and Friends:   They should be on your mailing list too!  Sometimes they need to be reminded you are in the real estate business.

Out of Area:   These are clients who have moved out of the area.  Because I live in a military community, this category is a great source of referral business and I keep in touch several times a year. 

I have other categories including attorneys, appraisers, mortgage professionals, home inspectors etc. as well as local agents and out of area agents.  I also have a category called vendors, for people like painters, cleaners etc. 

I include the obvious under each contact:  Address, phone numbers, email addresses.  And maybe the not so obvious like birth dates, children’s names, favorite dessert, pets names etc.  How do we get this information?  For all of our clients, we send a VIP form in a self addressed stamped envelope. I’d say we get 95% of these returned.

The notes section under each contact is where I tell each person’s story and comment on recent phone calls or correspondence.  For instance, I like to send my clients articles they may find interesting.  I make a note of it in this section. 

As I develop my business plan, and more specifically my marketing plan each year, I decide what I am going to send to each group in my database.  I plan how often I am going to make contact, whether by mail, phone, email or in person. 

The overall benefits of having a well organized database are many, including efficiency, time savings and continuity in communications. 

My database is my future business.  I try to take good care of it.

Adopt a real estate orphan

The National Association of Realtor’s 2007 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers reports that 23% of home sellers used the agent they previously used to buy or sell a home.  Let’s do the simple math; that means that at least 7 out of 10 sellers did not use the agent who sold them their home.  Uh oh.  That’s not a very good statistic.  It is, however, one you can take advantage of.  By the time most sellers are ready to sell their home, their agent is out of business or didn’t keep in touch.  Regardless of the reason, this is good news if you plan to be successful in the real estate business for the long term.

Orphans have always been an important part of my business.  Last year I was on a listing appointment and as I went through the kitchen with the seller, I noticed one of my calendars on the refrigerator. Mr. Seller had been receiving my "stuff" for 18 years - calendars, magnets, postcards, newsletters.  Mr. Seller was proud of the updates he had made to the house since I sold it to him.  He had me convinced.  When I went back to the office and went through the file from 1989, I realized I hadn’t sold Mr. Seller the house after all. In 1989, I added Mr. Seller as an "orphan" in my database. The agent who had really sold him the house had been out of the business about 10 years.  I get more than a few listings from "orphans" every year.  Most of the time they are convinced I sold them the house.  They say that when they call in to make the listing appointment.  "Remember us? You sold us the house about 10 years ago".

The odds are very high that with the exception of maybe a holiday card for the first couple of years, a client’s own agent will abandon him.  And the odds are just as high that their own agent won’t be in the business after 3 years.  In fact, it is business you can count on it.

Don't Let Your Competition Read This!

If you came here looking for a "Welcome World" post, move along; you can find that sort of stuff in the "about", and "bio" tabs above.  I thought my first blog post should be about farming. Farming propelled me from average to good back in 1980.  (I didn’t get to great until the 90’s.) I started by mailing postcards to 200 houses in a medium priced neighborhood. I added a few more houses until 22 years later, I was reaching all 6300 households in my hometown of Ledyard. 

Here’s a secret: one reason farming works is because most agents think it doesn’t. The agents that do give it a whirl, give up before it starts paying dividends. I’ve lived in the same neighborhood for 30 years and during that time I have received TONS of farming materials from other agents.  The longest any agent continued to farm was one year.  That is the first reason geographic farming doesn’t work for most agents; they are not consistent and don’t think of it as part of a long term business plan. Don’t expect to get results after 3 months or even a year.  The second reason farming doesn’t work is because agents send out boring and/or crappy stuff.  HAVE SOME FUN!!! ( pssst…. No one cares that you are #1 in anything or have a new designation.  That’s booooring.)  If you absolutely can’t bring yourself to have some fun, then provide some useful information like market updates, emergency phone numbers, or refrigerator calendars.

If you are ready to become a farmer, I like the idea of starting out with postcards. I figure most of it ends up in the trash anyway but at least your prospect might glance at a post card between the mailbox and the trash can.  Color For Real Estate is a company I use quite often.  They are a fun company with postcards that are definitely not boring or crappy.  I also design some of my postcards on Microsoft Publisher and have them printed by Express Copy.  Turnaround time is fast, the quality is excellent, and the price is reasonable.

Once farming starts to pay for itself, consider creating a newspaper or newsletter.  I send a customized newspaper to my geographical farm 6 times a year published by Custom House Publishers.  I get oodles of listings from my newspaper. (Oodles means a lot.)  A prospect called me to list his home last year because he enjoys reading my newspaper every week.  He seems to have me mixed up with our local weekly. That’s a good thing.

I was reading a post in Active Rain not too long ago.  A new agent commented that some of the old timers in her office still farmed their neighborhoods. She thought farming was an old-fashioned idea and that it is all about technology now. She figures she is going to out-tech the old farmers.

This old farmer just smiled. I hope my competition thinks exactly like she does.