I can’t embed the newsletter, but here is a link to it if you missed it: http://eepurl.com/lXuKL
And just to be cool, here is a QR code if you like to scan things:
5 Easy Ways Realtors Can Outsource Their Daily Schedule
May 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Most Real Estate Agents are aware of the concept associated with outsourcing. However, they might think that it is only applicable for things such as article writing or maybe some website work. These agents tend to feel that they simply must keep on top of a lot of their routine, everyday work. If they don’t, won’t they lose control of their hard-earned business? It can be difficult to let go, but in reality the right Virtual Assistant is ideally placed to help with so many different elements of your daily schedule.
- Calendar Management: If you feel that you are running around from pillar to post, always seem to be late for appointments, and can never seem to fit in time for meetings with important prospects, then you should outsource your calendar management to a VA. When you’re busy doing other things, meetings can be scheduled and you can be given plenty of advanced notice so that you are in the right place at the right time without feeling flustered.
- Trip Planning: Love all of the great Real Estate seminars but hate the hassle of traveling for them? Have you noticed how long it takes to try and plan a trip these days? Those airline travel consolidator sites may offer you many different choices but you’ve still got to try and sort out your hotel, car and do so within your budget. Before you know it you’ve spent hours trying to arrange just one trip. Outsource this to a virtual assistant. Once you have given them the appropriate parameters they’ll do the rest with maximum efficiency.
- Client Support: Now that Real Estate is finally starting to come back again, you’ve got an increasing number of listing and showing appointments “on the books”, not to mention worrying about getting your transactions managed. You will find that there will be an increasing number of client issues to deal with. Yes, Real Estate is highly relationship based, but well-trained Real Estate VA’s can handle issues that don’t involve negotiations. This is something that you must prioritize, as poor support in this area will quickly gain you a bad reputation, to say nothing of lost or angry clients. The right VA will ensure that everything is handled carefully, professionally and promptly, with your input only required in predetermined circumstances.
- E-Mail Management: Time management and efficiency experts tell us that one of the worst ways that we can waste our time is to constantly drop everything to deal with e-mails as and when they arrive. So many of these e-mails can be time wasters that will veer you off course. Other e-mails represent an attempt by the originator to control your time according to their schedule. By putting a virtual assistant at the gateway, you know that you will only be prompted to deal with emergency situations and all other e-mail can be handled by the VA in the background.
- General Tasks: As there are only so many hours in the day, most Real Estate Agents will invariably find that there will be many calls for their time that may not necessarily be related to business at all. For example, running errands, gift shopping, social event organization, and other things of that nature. All of this can be handled by your VA.
Treat your virtual assistant as an extension of yourself. There’s no need to feel as if you are giving up control when you outsource all of those general administrative tasks that in truth are simply non-productive and holding you back from becoming successful.
Infographic: Anatomy of a Happy Home
May 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Storage space, and plenty of room for a king-size bed top the lists of what men and woman are looking for when buying a home. Agents, are you listening? Original article on Trulia
Download This Free Buyer’s Guide
April 17, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Trulia is offering a free buyer’s guide for you to download and put on your website or offer to buyer’s who need more information before they buy.
Buyers want information, and agents who can offer it quickly are much more likely to win their business.
Download and share this free guide to credit, neighborhoods, and down payments to help you start winning more prospects today.
Become the Expert by Recycling Your Real Estate Articles
April 9, 2012 By 5 Comments
Most Real Estate Agents write a blog post or article, post it and forget it. Doing this creates more work for you and time lost. Instead, focus on writing really good articles and then recycle them over and over again to spread 
your message and get more out of each one.
Start by writing 3 really good articles that answer the questions the people in your target market are asking. Now is the time to position yourself as the expert and really think about the problems that these people face, the issues that you can help them solve (are they facing foreclosure?), what is stopping them from reaching out to you, what is making them angry or upset.
Brainstorm a bit, talk to people in your area about what they think, and then write all of your answers down on paper or a whiteboard.
When you sit down to write your first article, try to be very specific about their problems. Get really detailed about it so that they can feel it; trigger an emotion that says “Yes! This person understands my problem! He’s not just a Real Estate Agent who is after my money, he cares about my community!”
Be authentic, be real, and be genuinely concerned.
Now do it again, two more times. If you need time in between articles, that’s okay, just make sure to schedule some quiet writing time into your calendar so that it will actually get done.
Now here is where the recycling comes in:
- Post it on your blog and tweet it
- Post it on your Facebook Page. If you had any comments, mention an interesting one in the status update.
- Bookmark it on Digg.com and tweet it again
- Add it to your Linked In stream. (If you’re using HootSuite, schedule this out)
- Remove all links and calls to action, rewrite the first paragraph and change some things around. Submit it to:
- Bookmark it on Delicious and tweet it again
- Start writing your monthly, bi-monthly, or weekly newsletter. Add in an excerpt of this blog post with a link to “read more” back to the blog post
- Bookmark it on Stumble Upon
- Post the picture from your article (or video if you have it!) on Pinterest (if you’re unsure of how to use Pinterest for Real Estate, take my free 5 day email course.)
- Post it on Active Rain
- Add a link to it from a Single Property Website if it is in the community you are writing to in your article.
- Create a video about it, post it on You Tube and link it back to your blog post
Remember to be as definitive as possible. When you are clear about solving someone’s problem, the reader or viewer will be forced to think if it will solve their problem AND if it will help anyone they know.
If you know that this will help you, but you know you’re just too busy to do it all yourself, go to the Work With Me page and schedule a quick phone call to see how we can help you.
The 5 Essentials of Effective Contact Management
April 9, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Effective contact management
Do you know what contact management really entails? Think you’re doing it correctly? In this article I’ll discuss the five essential components of effective contact management. Effective contact management will help you to convert more leads into clients and maximize the amount of referrals and repeat business you get year over year.
Having a consolidated database
I speak with real estate sales professionals daily who have client and prospect contact information scattered in many different areas: Outlook, their iPhone, their website, pieces of paper, etc. Without a consolidated database, these REALTORS® waste far too much time hunting for the information they need to manage their business – often hours a day.
A solid, well-managed database can be worth more than a million dollars in real estate commissions over as little as 10 years. In fact, the only real tangible asset Realtors have is their database. Upon retirement, a well-managed database that produces a six-figure income in referral and repeat business year after year can be sold for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars!
Having a consolidated database is extremely important. It’s actually the foundation of effective contact management and the starting point to building a truly successful business based largely from referrals and repeat clients. Without a consolidated database, it’s hard to stay organized and manage time effectively. Lacking a consolidated database, it’s almost impossible to master the four other “essentials of effective contact management” I’m going to discuss below.
Categorizing and segmenting contacts
Once you’ve consolidated all your contacts into one database, the next step is to categorize them appropriately. At the most basic level, this might entail categorizing people as either Clients, Prospects, Personal, or Business-to-Business. Another popular approach is to apply the 80/20 Rule by segmenting your contacts as either “A List” or “B List.” More advanced segmentation can include creation of community groups such as former work colleagues, church group contacts, people in your baseball league, etc.
The big benefit of segmenting and categorizing your contacts is that it allows you to communicate with specific groups of people in a way that is more personalized, relevant and timely than the dreaded “batch and blast” approach. When your mass communications are relevant to the people receiving them, they are far more likely to be opened and appreciated, and hence far more effective from a marketing perspective.
Keeping in touch with past clients
You may have heard the idiom that it takes seven times the amount of time, money, and energy to acquire a new client then it does to keep an existing one. The saying is very true. It’s your responsibility to stay “top of mind” with past clients and make sure that they don’t forget you. Your clients are likely meeting real estate agents through friends and family members, hearing others recommend Joe Smith’s Realty Services down the road, seeing billboards and posters of Realtors boasting that they’re number one. So, don’t automatically assume that a client who you’ve helped to buy a home five years ago will remember you and call you up again next time they need a real estate agent.
It’s in your best interest to ensure that you have the right technology, such as a contact management system, and a plan in place, so you can keep in touch with past clients effectively.
So, how should you keep in touch? Schedule quarterly keep in touch calls (better yet, try to call one past client each day), send out a monthly e-Newsletter, send direct marketing pieces to your best past clients, plan client appreciation events and various educational seminars, use social media, the possibilities are endless. A good contact management system (my specialty) will make organizing and executing all of this as easy as possible. I recommend that you make contact with your past clients at least 17 times per year.
Make sure that when you reach out to past clients, whether through a phone call, email, or any other method, that it’s all about them, not about you. You don’t want to keep in touch with them by always promoting your services and how great you are. Send out an e-Newsletter with helpful and interesting articles on home decorating, for example. Make a call to ask if they need any recommendations on a business professional such as a Plumber or Landscaper.
Assigning leads to marketing plans
As soon as you get a new lead, enter them in your CRM immediately and then assign them to an “automated lead nurture marketing plan” (also known as a marketing Activity Plan).
A lead nurture marketing plan consists of a number of emails and phone calls at regular intervals over time. The emails are sent automatically (also called “drip email), which means that you don’t have to worry about remembering to keep in touch with all your new leads. The system will remind you when to make a call, and will send relevant email communications to your prospects in between. By nurturing your new leads in this way, your conversion rate of new leads to clients will improve dramatically.
You can use your contact management system (your CRM) to create your own lead nurture marketing Activity Plan. Alternatively, good CRMs have pre-designed marketing plans created for you, so you don’t have to do a thing.
Tracking sources of business, including referrals
You need to know where your business is coming from. Knowing this information will provide you with insight into where you should be investing time and money. Use your contact management system to run various reports, such as an “Original Source of Contact” report and a “Referral History” report. Don’t waste your time and hard earned dollars guessing about where your business is coming from or about what you could be doing more and less to fully maximize your time.
Matthew Collis
Matthew Collis is the Sales and Marketing Manager at IXACT Contact Solutions Inc., a leading North American real estate CRM firm. In addition to overseeing many of IXACT Contact’s key sales and marketing programs, Matthew works with REALTORS® to help them achieve their real estate goals through effective contact management and relationship marketing. Matthew plays an instrumental role in IXACT Contact’s communication strategy and has written a wide array articles, news releases, and blog posts on contact management strategies and implementation.
How To Use Basecamp for Transaction Management
April 6, 2012 By 1 Comment
Basecamp is one of my favorite business tools. I use it daily to keep track of clients, their projects, my projects, and my team. I even have a project setup for my kids chores, but that’s another post! Today I want to show you how you can easily use Basecamp to organize your transactions, give others access to it, store it for later, and keep all information in one central, cloud-based location.
- Create a Basecamp account if you don’t have one already at http://Basecamp.com. You will get 1 project and 4.95 MB of storage for free, which is plenty to get you started.
- Click Projects and then New Project.
- Use the property address for the project name, add in a description if you wish. I put that it’s a short sale and that escrow should close on April 30, 2012. You can put your clients names or whatever you want here. Also add in your Transaction Coordinators email, your broker’s email, or your clients email; anyone who needs access. If you do decide to add in your clients, you’ll want to make sure that each and every property is its own project.
- Once that is done, I’m going to make sure that all of the important days are on the calendar. Click on Event and start adding in the day that escrow is opened, the day it should close, contingency removal dates, inspections, etc. You will see that the dates are displayed in an Agenda style; click Calendar to view them on a 6-week grid.
- This would be a good time to point out that you can subscribe to this calendar so that you have access to it via Google Calendar to view on your smart phone or tablet.
- Time to make checklists! To jump back to the main page of the project, type the address into the search box, click, and you’re there. Click To-do List, and the title will be Disclosures. Click Save and start adding in each disclosure, the date that it needs to be signed by, and who is responsible for getting it done (you or your TC/VA). I just want to throw in really quickly that New Basecamp does not yet support Checklist Templates like Basecamp Classic does. If you already have a Basecamp Classic account, you may want to do this as a Checklist Template instead.
- My poor husband was just bombarded with all of those emails! Anyhow, at this point you or your TC/VA will then get all of those forms signed by your client with DocuSign, EchoSign, or by that old-fashioned method of signing in person (on an iPad of course).
- Check them off as they are signed, then compress them into a Zip file, and upload that to the File section.
- Once they are all loaded, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the link that says “Loop-in someone who isn’t on the project to share this by email only” Add in the Buyer’s Agent’s email address. If you know their TC/VA’s email, you can add that in as well.
- Alternatively, you can click to add a discussion and address the Buyer’s Agent directly and add the documents in that way as well. This works best when the other agent isn’t as tech savvy as you are.
- Once you receive the fully executed documents, you or your TC/VA should upload each individual file to the file section in Basecamp.
- You can keep up-to-date with what everyone is doing by clicking on the Daily Progress tab.
Keeping an accurate account of every step of a real estate transaction is important. If you’re negotiating a short sale, you can use Basecamp’s Text Documents to keep track of each person you speak with and everything that was said and/or promised during the conversation. If you’ve negotiated them before, you know that they tend to “forget” what was previously said, and this is a good way to remind them.
Having all of the information in one central location is also important. Sure, there are a lot of transaction management programs out there, but most of them are not very intuitive. Basecamp is so easy, I’m sure that my grandmother could use it, so getting people on board with you should be much easier.
If you need help getting this set up, or you are in need of a transaction coordinator, go to my Work With Me Page, fill out the form and schedule a quick chat session with me. You can also check out our TC packages here.
Using Pinterest for Real Estate
April 3, 2012 By 1 Comment
Before you start rolling your eyes at me and commenting to yourself that I’ve jumped on the Pinterest Bandwagon a little late, hang in there.
I love Pinterest, and have for the past 9 months or so (I really have no idea) but I hated the idea of using it for real estate. Every time I heard someone try to determine the ROI, I cringed.
All of that aside, I think that using it as a piece of your marketing pie a great idea. Pinterest is so visual, so showing off your really good listings it’s great. You can even post videos now, so pull out your camera and start filming your neighborhood.
There is of course a right way and a wrong way to use it, and there are tons of people who are doing it wrong.
I put together a free 5 day ecourse that walks you through using Pinterest for Real Estate Marketing that you can sign up for at the bottom of this post.
Examples of Agents Who Are Doing it Right:
http://pinterest.com/josetteskilling/
http://pinterest.com/lisaarcher/ (a good mix of business and life)
You Can Follow My Boards Here:
http://pinterest.com/april_sullivan2/
Sign up Here:
Creating A Real Estate Niche
March 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Wanting to work with everyone is common. You’re a Real Estate Agent, and you want to be able to serve as many people as possible, and that’s great, but you want to market to one specific group at a time. When you cast a wider marketing net, you end up diluting your message.
Not only does your message end up getting watered down, but you also become just like everyone else in your field. What are you doing to differentiate yourself? How do you stand out in an overcrowded market that has everyone clamoring for the same business?
You need to speak to people directly. Last week I wrote about getting face to face with expireds, but today is about speaking directly to a lot of people at once. Creating a very specific target market that when they see your advertisement, they feel a connection with you. For example, I was at an epropertysites seminar at the Mission Viejo Country Club last week. As an example, Chris Bates threw out (as a joke) having a poodle niche. That’s right, only marketing to people who have poodles. Silly, yes, but apply it to your business. Horse property, beach-front property, condos, retirement communities, vacation homes, military families. You need to choose something that works with your demographics, your expertise, and your personality.
When you found this article, were you searching for a Virtual Assistant? If you were a lawyer searching for a Virtual Assistant and you read the title “Creating a Real Estate Niche” would you have clicked on it? No, probably not. You clicked on it because I was speaking directly to YOU, the real estate agent.
My challenge for you: The next blog post you write, your next tweet, or status update on your Facebook Page, direct it toward a specific group of people in your target market. Does the house have a huge backyard? Write a post to dog lovers in Huntington Beach, California. Does it have a pool with a swim-up bar and a dance floor on the deck? Call out to the party people. When you write your message for someone specific, they’re much more likely to find it.
Help, I Don’t Have Any Listings!
March 14, 2012 By 2 Comments
Today I want to talk to you about listings. Since I do a lot of online marketing for listings, I work with a lot of Listing Agents, so a lot of my content is written for them. If you’re not a Listing Agent, that’s okay, I have plenty of information for you too!
But today is about listings. In speaking with my clients all over the country, one thing seems to ring true no matter where you’re from: nobody ever has enough listings. They always want more. And that’s great! Home sellers have a lot of choices to make when it comes to finding the right listing agent, so successful agents have found a way to stand up and be seen in the crowd. How do they do this, you ask?
First, let’s look at what they don’t do. They don’t do work that gets in the way of being successful. Did you know that, according to a study done by Active Rain, agents who make more money are 153% more likely to use an assistant to help with their advertising efforts?
Let’s take that a step further. I constantly read in the various Real Estate groups and on blogs about an agent being stuck building their website. About an agent trying to troubleshoot yet another new program. An agent desperately trying to get her newsletter out, but the formatting is wrong. Spending money on this or that, inserting this AwesomeNewFantasticGottaHaveItCauseAGuruSaidIDid plugin. Whatever it is, what you should be doing instead is getting out in front of your market in a really big way.
What you should be doing to get listings is following up with every lead that comes in. Talking to people (FACE TO FACE) whose listing has just expired. Build relationships within your community so that when the time comes for someone to sell their house, they think of you.
It’s all been said before. Of course it’s been said before; it works! It’s effective! Most importantly, it can’t be done by anyone but you. That’s what makes it important, and that’s what makes it your purpose in the real estate world. Everything else can be delegated to your Real Estate Virtual Assistant (and hopefully that’s us) but you need to hone your purpose and be amazing at it.
One of the most important things we do with our clients when we first start working with them, is we create an action plan. An action plan is a process of steps from point A to point B with a “who does what” twist at the end. If you don’t have action plans in your business, then you’re not leveraging your time or your support system the best that you can.
If you need an action plan, fill out my Work With Me form and we’ll schedule some time together to put in place the one tool that makes partnering with a REVA a no-brainer.
