FREE Sales Training Webinar: How To Generate Buyer and Seller Leads 

This webinar will teach you how to generate buyer and seller leads online without having to learn complicated tech programs. This sales training webinar is designed to educate attendees on 3 key steps in the lead generation process. We go through them in depth so that you can come away from the webinar with an actionable strategy to create and convert more prospects in your business. Some of the strategies you can expect to learn on this webinar are:

Lead Generation – How to create a complete online sales Funnel in less than one hour with zero technical skills.
Sales Processes – How to contact and close leads from the internet without being to pushy or overtly aggressive.
Follow up – How to relentlessly follow up with In-bound Leads using text, email, and bi-weekly phone calls.

This training is for high producing real estate agents, mortgage loan officers and insurance agents. If you’re not in the real estate industry, this training is still valuable, you’ll simply need to apply the principles taught, over into your business model. My last webinar was watched over 25,000 times.

Create working real estate funnels (and more)  in less than 30 minutes.

CLICK HERE: LINK TO WEBINAR

Warning: The way we sell our products on the phone is changing. 

Cold calling is dying more and more every day. Matter of fact 86% of all calls go unanswered.  If you’re going to sell via the phone in today’s modern selling marketplace, you’re going to need to master more than just cold calling.

This webinar  addresses and solves the problems facing the modern salesman who uses the phone. It’s FREE! What do you have to lose?

Marketing Tips To Increase Your Real Estate Business!

While the country’s real estate market is slowly working its way back to life, people making a living with a real estate license have had to get creative with marketing strategies to remain successful. There are a number of simple things that you can to do to continue to build your real estate business, regardless of the state of the economy. Just following these three simple tips can make a tremendous difference in who is successful with their real estate license, and who is still struggling in a rebounding real estate market.

Be more than a real estate agent, be a real estate expert.

These days, the first professional that people will consult for their real estate needs does not have a real estate license; it is the internet. Clients have a lot of information before they go looking for a professional with a real estate license.  If you want to be the one who gets the business, then you will need to show potential customers that you have information and expertise that they cannot find on the internet. Not only should you know the area and be able to point out the schools, local shopping, entertainment; you should know everything there is to know about a neighborhood or property. Having knowledge of indirect fields that have little to do with your particular expertise is important to being more than just a real estate agent. From available mortgage programsto knowinga good moving company, the more information you can provide, the more business you will generate.

Really listen to the clients wants, and know what they need

Today’s home buyers and sellers will sign the real estate agent that they feel they can trust. Knowing what your customer needs and providing it quickly and efficiently builds the trust that will get you the commission. To really understand their needs, it takes more than just answering questions;you will need to ask some question as well. Find out what exactly they need and what is important to them in their home. The most important thing to remember is that when they answer, you have to really hear what they are saying. The real estate agent that best meets the customer’s needs will have a customer for life.

Always keep your word.

The largest complaint people have when they are unhappy with a real estate agent is that they did not do what they promised to do. They would say they would call back or take care of something and then not be heard from again. With trust being a crucial part of building your business, keeping your word is necessary to building that trust. If you say you will call, you must call. If you say you will be there, be there on time. If you promise information, you must deliver, and if you cannot, you must let the customer know as soon as possible.

Anyone can earn a real estate license, but it takes a lot of hard work to turn that real estate license into a successful real estate business. Using these simple tips will help you increase your real estate business in any economy.  A real estate license positions you for success, however, it takes hard work to be successful!

Your Own Private Hideaway: Vacation Homes
Being a homeowner is great, but let’s say you’ve finally decided your city is just too cold in the winter and that you’d love to have a second house to escape to – a warm place, maybe a place with a beach nearby. If you’ve decided to pursue buying a second home, where do you start?

Vacation homes are huge in recent years. In 2014 alone, an estimated 1.13 million vacation homes were sold in the US, making up some 21% of residential transactions for the year. You might be wondering, are all of these second homebuyers just fabulously wealthy? Wealth certainly doesn’t hurt when buying a home, but neither does being informed and having a plan.

The appeal of a vacation home is that you would only reside there for a portion of the year – maybe just a month or a week – but the rest of the year it could be accumulating income for you, helping to lower the burden of that mortgage. Renting out the vacation home can be big business, particularly if it’s located in a resort town or other desirable location.

The big problem with renting out a property without being physically there is that things can go wrong, big things like busted water pipes, and no one will be around to fix them. It’s not necessarily as easy as just owning the property and listing it on AirBNB or VRBO; a property manager is necessary in most cases to maintain a semblance of cleanliness and to ensure that doors properly shut and raccoons haven’t decided to live in the attic.

It’s also important to know the rules of the area. Rental income is taxable, and if you’re doing short-term rentals of six months or less, your state and county could consider you to be an innkeeper – meaning you’d have to pay the same lodging taxes as hotels. In addition, not every home can be used as a rental property. Cities, HOAs, and condo associations might have regulations in place to ensure that their community isn’t solely comprised of short-term renters coming and going. In South Carolina, for instance, beach town property taxes can betwice as high for non-residents as for residents.

As any homeowner knows, maintenance and upkeep costs for a house can quickly add up, and vacation homes are no exception. Beaches in particular are hard on homes with a relentless assault of sun, salt, and wind. Windows, roofs, and A/C units need replacement and can quickly drain that supplemental rental income that at first seemed so attractive.

But hey, it’s not all doom and gloom. The point of a vacation home is to have fun, right? If you approach it with a level head and look beyond the allure of your very own property in that vacation spot you love more than the sun loves the stars, then it’s absolutely possible to make a little money while maintaining your private hideaway. As long as you have a local looking after the place when you’re not around, it sure beats battling other skiers for a room near the slopes each ski season.

Have thoughts on vacation homes? Want to keep the conversation going? Leave a comment below!

Live Tweeting an Open House

It’s common knowledge by now that social media can be enormously helpful in building and growing your business, but there are so many options and possibilities that it’s hard to know where to start.

Live Tweeting

Live tweeting, as defined by Google, is to “post comments about (an event) on Twitter while the event is taking place”. Depending on who you follow on Twitter, live tweeting could involve awards shows, sporting events, movies, or TV shows. In the world of real estate, however, live tweeting becomes an especially interesting option for open houses.

In our hyperconnected society, Twitter’s immediacy and short character limits (each tweet is limited to 140 characters) make it accessible to even the most casual of users. With a huge userbase and the ability to add photos to tweets, Twitter is an ideal way to get the word out about an open house in real time.

This is no secret, of course. There are all kinds of tips for how to get your open house trending on Twitter so that others can easily find mention of the property even if they can’t be there in person. It’s a nice way to show off the house, while also showing that you’re tech-savvy as an agent. More and more often, professionals are judged by their internet presence, and there are plenty of prospective buyers that might be persuaded into working with you if they find a history of successful and informative real estate tweets.

What are the potential downsides, then? Well, most people make pretty goofy faces while they’re tweeting or texting things on their phone, their minds on the formation of words instead of controlling their facial expressions. By posting a series of tweets throughout the lifetime of your open house, you run the risk of alienating those that actually do show up in person. It’s very possible that a potential buyer would be dissuaded from placing an offer on the home if the agent was in the corner squinting at their phone the whole time instead of interacting.

One way around this is to use a platform like Hootsuite or Sprout Social that allows you to schedule social media posts well in advance of posting. This way the pre-scheduled tweets can launch during the open house while you yourself are schmoozing up potential buyers.

When it comes down to it, variety is king in social media. Remember the 60-20-20 rule to dictate post content: 60% educational, 20% motivational, and 20% sales.

Periscope

Useful though it is, Twitter is by no means alone in the wide world of social media. There are the other more obvious players like Facebook and Instagram (both of which can also be enormously helpful for generating leads!), and just a few years ago Twitter launched a new platform called Periscope.

The gist of Periscope is that anyone can start “broadcasting” video from their phone and others can join in, watching events as they happen. I’m sure you can see where this is going, and how game-changing this could be for open houses in particular. Video is the king of content, and a streaming video of a house that a viewer might be interested in is just about the best way to experience an open house short of actually being there.

Social media platforms are merely tools, though, and it’s up to the content creator to decide how to best use each one. The greatest open house tweets or Periscope broadcasts won’t do anything if there isn’t an audience.

Check here for some more ideas on how to spread your social media presence, and good luck on your open houses, however you choose to promote them!

Scents for a Buyer-Friendly Open House

When staging a home to appeal to the most people in the shortest amount of time, it seems obvious that the place should smell good. While hiding away all of the questionable artwork and various clutter, most agents will light a candle or two. Maybe spray some Febreze, give the bathroom its own oil diffuser, and take out the trash.

But what scent should we be spreading through these homes? Scents are certainly not a one-size-fits-all, and while most people can agree that certain scents are quite nice, there will always be outliers that will have some lovely childhood memory sparked by an otherwise offensive smell.

Don’t worry, because there’s been research into this very question.

In 2010, Washington State University observed 402 people over 18 days in a Swiss home-decor store, and found that, on average, shoppers spent 31.8% more when the store was scented with a simple orange scent over a complex blend of orange, basil, and green tea. Eric Spangenberg, the dean of the college of business at WSU, pointed out that the findings can similarly be applied to open houses since, in both cases, the aromas may affect cognitive functions in the same areas of the brain involved in decision-making.

Complex smells, while sometimes perfectly pleasant on their own, can be a distraction from the house itself. Like ignoring a movie in order to figure out just where it was that you’ve seen that actor before, some people will coast through the open house, their thoughts entirely consumed by trying to place the scent. The smell of freshly-baked cookies, though nearly universally loved, might send the wrong message by awakening a grumbly stomach instead of a wallet.

Welcome scents like cedar and pine might be confusing if featured in a beach house, but would be perfectly suited for a mountain home. In other words, if the scent is not something you might expect to smell in the given setting, it probably won’t accentuate the house itself – which is, after all, the ultimate goal.

The simpler the scent, the better. In addition to orange, Spangenberg and colleagues found that lemon, green tea, basil, and vanilla were the most effective in creating a pleasant environment without being overly distracting. The stronger the aroma, the more likely someone will be pulled away from the charming features of the house. So, in order for people to notice and truly appreciate how charming that handmade Portuguese chandelier really is, you should opt for a subtle scent.

Beyond candles and diffusers, though, make sure the house just generally smells good. This means changing out old air filters, cleaning up pet fur, vacuuming carpets, and maybe even installing a dehumidifier to control those particularly musty smells. No one wants to buy a house if it smells like a disturbing mix of a dog kennel and a crypt.

Your Face on a Bench: Marketing on Bus Stop Benches

Let’s talk bench ads.

We’ve all seen them – maybe you even have a few of your own. Ads on bus stop benches are one of the most popular – and economical – forms of outdoor advertising, a category that also includes billboards and transit vehicles. Just why, though, would someone want their face superimposed and placed on public furniture that people sit on, lay on, and maybe even sleep on?

Advertising comes in many shapes and forms, and anything that might get you noticed or get someone talking about you is considered a win from a marketing perspective – especially in the hypersocial business of real estate. Most people won’t look twice at the face they’re sitting on as they wait for their bus to arrive, but to the person who happens to be looking for a new house but doesn’t have the first idea of where to start, your smiling mug starts to look very much worthy of a phone call.

The average bench ad in America costs $250 per placement per month. As the entrepreneur website Gaebler puts it, bench ads in a big city might have as many as 25,000 vehicles pass by daily. Annually that works out to over 9,000,000 impressions per year. At $250 per month per bench, you’re paying $3,000 per year for 9,000,000 impressions, which is just over three one-hundreds of a penny per impression. That’s a much better ratio than Facebook or a PPC ad can do for you, and while the impressions you’ll receive from a bench ad are vastly different than those to be found or purchased online, the name of the game is to get your brand and face in as many places as possible.

Bench ads are always on and they easily allow you to target specific areas. With online advertising, there’s a possibility that someone in New York will see your ad when your intended market was really Florida, but by sticking your face on a bench, there’s not a chance in the world that your pearly whites will ever shine on an unintended city.

It’s not all gravy, though. One of the big complaints about advertising on benches is that the commercialization of public property isn’t the best use of a public investment. All of our taxes paid for the bench, so how come Joe Schmo gets to slap his face on it? And if we’re willing to stick ads on benches, what’s next? Will our public streets someday look like the planes of a budget airline, plastered with ads for every imaginable thing?

With outdoor ads making their impression for an average of only 2-3 seconds, bench ads have to be straightforward and direct. Since most real estate ads feature a tagline and the face of a dignified though friendly agent, it’s important to present yourself in the best possible light, and in the least confusing way.

Just because your audience is fleeting, though, doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with the medium. From the Calgary Zoo to Kit-Kat, bench ads have been turned into all kinds of conversation pieces. If a bench ad plays a prominent role in your advertising, thinking outside of the box might very well involve thinking beyond the bench itself.