Ref #136

Hello! It’s Debbie De Grote and welcome to Debbie’s Daily Tips!

I’m going to answer a question I received this morning: What is the best way to prospect my family and my VIP sphere of influence? So let’s call it something different. Let’s call it prospecting to your AAA’s. So if we think about AAA’s, these are not only your raving fans, but these are also your connectors. Here’s what I mean by that: there may be someone who is a great friend or a relative, and they love you, but they’re just not the type of person that’s going to be out there, proactively connecting you to others that they know. They might even be that person that’s a little hesitant to give a referral because what if something went wrong?

So when you’re putting together your AAA list, these are the people who are the movers and shakers; they would be happy and excited to connect you and assist you in your business in any way that they could. And of course it goes without saying, you’d be absolutely willing to do the same for them. These are people that you might be talking to almost daily or weekly, certainly monthly. These are people that you might be grabbing a cup of coffee with, or a lunch with, or inviting to a holiday get together. So, you like them, you have fun with them, and you’re very supportive of each other in your businesses. Now because you know this group is willing to help you, let’s tell them what you want.

In other words, if you said to them, “You know a lot of people. Would you be willing to do something for me? Over the course of the next 12 months, would you try to find three good people that you could refer and send my way? Would you help me with that?” So think about that. If you had ten people sending you three, that would give you 30 good leads in the year. Now typically on a direct referral like that, the conversion is a little on the low side, 25%, on the high side 50%. But let’s say it only gave you ten transactions. Not bad, right? If you do the math on your average check, ten transactions from a group of ten people that love and respect you and are probably doing a better job of selling you than you could ever do. Because we’d have to be a little, not so blatant, about tooting our own horn, but they can just sell sell sell you away.

In other words if you said to them, “You know a lot of people. Would you be willing to do something for me? Over the course of the next 12 months, would you try to find three good people that you could refer and send my way? Would you help me with that?” So think about that. If you had ten people sending you three, that would give you 30 good leads in the year. Now typically on a direct referral like that, the conversion is a little on the low side, 25%, on the high side 50%. But let’s say it only gave you ten transactions. Not bad, right? If you do the math on your average check, ten transactions from a group of ten people that love and respect you and are probably doing a better job of selling you than you could ever do. Because we’d have to be a little, not so blatant, about tooting our own horn, but they can just sell sell sell you away.

In other words if you said to them, “You know a lot of people. Would you be willing to do something for me? Over the course of the next 12 months, would you try to find three good people that you could refer and send my way? Would you help me with that?” So think about that. If you had ten people sending you three, that would give you 30 good leads in the year. Now typically on a direct referral like that, the conversion is a little on the low side, 25%, on the high side 50%. But let’s say it only gave you ten transactions. Not bad, right? If you do the math on your average check, ten transactions from a group of ten people that love and respect you and are probably doing a better job of selling you than you could ever do. Because we’d have to be a little, not so blatant, about tooting our own horn, but they can just sell sell sell you away.

So this is a great group. I want you to work on it this week: who are your top ten raving fans, great connectors? Let’s do some great things for them. Let’s stay in touch and talk to them often so that we’re top of mind. Let’s tell them how to deliver those referrals to you. Tell them, “If you’ve got a lead for me, certainly, give them my name, give them my card, but please – text me, email me, call me, so that I can reach out and get ahold of them right away.”

So remember, no secret agents! You’ve got to be out there meeting, greeting, and letting people know that you absolutely are available to help their friends or family buy or sell a home.

If you are a real estate agent or broker that is looking to for more insight and direction on how to get more listings, sell more homes to your investors, and work with more buyers, then this podcast is just for you!

Ref # 139

Hello it’s Debbie De Grote and welcome to Debbie’s Daily Tips! The tip for today is: how to hold successful events in your community.

I often have agents reach out to me and say, “You know, I do think it’s a great idea to hold a seminar, or a photo for the family in the park. I want to do some things that will get me connected, either in my geographic farm, or just in my community in general, to the homeowners in a fun, valuable, or interesting way.” But they often tell me that as they plan these events and so much time and energy go into them, and they maybe even invite a huge group of people and yet they have a very small rate of return. Not that many people show.

So let’s thing about this a little bit. First of all, it will take a big group to end up delivering an amount of people that would be substantial enough to make this worth your effort. There actually is a secret to making this happen. It’s joint venture partners. I’m going to give you an example. Recently my husband and daughters, who, as you know, sell real estate, did a family photo day in the park. They set it up at the central park in Huntington Beach and invited their geographic farm and database. So that’s an extensive group of a few thousand people. But it’s not enough to make that event successful.

So what they did is they partnered with a very successful mortgage broker who has a huge list in the Orange County area. They also partnered with a very popular photographer. Because the good news is that the photographer also has their own database. So now you’ve got three successful groups, all marketing this event to three unique and separate databases. So as this joint venture partnership comes together, we drive enough people to the event to make it successful. And if you’re doing an event like this you’re going to want to plan it well in advance. Maybe about 60 days out, do a save the date. About 45 days out, begin to email and market and mail to them. Certainly remember: lots and lots of reminders.

So send your questions in, [email protected], and my marketing team will try to answer them if you have an event that is upcoming and you’re looking for some tips to make it more successful.

If you are a real estate agent or broker that is looking to for more insight and direction on how to get more listings, sell more homes to your investors, and work with more buyers, then this podcast is just for you!

Q: How do I keep my mindset intact when I’m really just kind of struggling, not happy with my results, worried, and anxious? What do I do?

My go to, and it’s not everybody’s answer, is more positive activity. I know if I’m stressed about it and I keep myself so busy with great activity and new opportunity, pushing myself outside my comfort zone then even if I don’t win that day I can go home and sleep well because I know I put forth the activity that I needed and that it’s going to eventually make something happen.

If you are a real estate agent or broker that is looking to for more insight and direction on how to get more listings, sell more homes to your investors, and work with more buyers, then this podcast is just for you!

Q: How many contacts a day do I need to make?

Well, the minimum standard is 20 because 20 contacts a day or 100 contacts a week is way more than most of you would normally do. The average agent I meet and speak to usually tells me they do maybe 3. That’s pretty normal. So when I say “contact” that’s not an email or a text. That’s eye to eye or ear to ear conversation. The statistics right now are it takes about 200 cold calls to equal a listing appointment. So if you look at that and say, “Well, I’ve got some warm stuff I’m working, some database, some referral, that’s going to be a higher return. But I do need some colder stuff, people I don’t know.” Don’t be discouraged when you’re making a lot of contacts to cold stuff and you’re not getting super fast return. That’s just kind of normal right now.

If you are a real estate agent or broker that is looking to for more insight and direction on how to get more listings, sell more homes to your investors, and work with more buyers, then this podcast is just for you!

Q: I had a listing for 30 days with absolutely no showings, no activity, had 2 open houses, had some people come through but not a whole lot. How do I give feedback to the seller?

You don’t hide. You need to make an appointment with the seller. I’ve said this to a lot of agents over the years, if you shy away from any communication that us the worst thing you an do. If there is no activity, if the response from the real estate community, from a broker, open house, or whatever you’ve done is wow you’re never going to sell this at this price then you need to take all those notes and have a conversation with the seller. I’ve even suggested to agents when they take a listing that if you feel it’s somewhat overpriced, but you really want the listing and it’s the only way you’re going to take it then make an appointment to come back and give the seller feedback after 30 days and you say that during your listing presentation.

If you are a real estate agent or broker that is looking to for more insight and direction on how to get more listings, sell more homes to your investors, and work with more buyers, then this podcast is just for you!

Q: How long should a listing presentation be?

Well, that depends on so many factors, but if you have a 45-minute listing presentation that may be a tad too long. Within 20-25 minutes you should be able to cover most of the questions in people’s mind about you or your company or the market. But what you need to do every 5 to 8 minutes within a listing presentation is you need to ask people for their feedback. Going back to all the different behavioral styles, there are people who are very quiet and they don’t like to be sold, but they also don’t ask a lot of questions and they’re reading you the whole time that you’re presenting so you need to be conscious of that. It’s important to engage them somehow in conversation. After 10 minutes if no one has asked you a question pause and ask them if they have any questions.

If you are a real estate agent or broker that is looking to for more insight and direction on how to get more listings, sell more homes to your investors, and work with more buyers, then this podcast is just for you!

Q: Are you seeing that across the board deals are getting a little bit stickier?

Is there any common denominator? Alright and here’s what I mean by that. So if it was wow, every time it’s blowing up over physical inspections, then I might look at that and say, well do I need to prepare my clients a little bit better? What kind of expectation am I setting? If it’s my seller, then do I need to actually have my seller maybe even do a pre- inspection. What do I need to do to make sure that I don’t have these issues happening quite so often? If it’s an appraisal issues, well are we preparing our clients for the fact that the comps may just not work and that doesn’t mean it’s a bad house and if you get out of line somebody else will buy it. So that would be my first thing. I would look at your offers. Could we write them any tighter, any better? I would look at how you’re educating and preparing your buyers and sellers, and then I would make sure that you have a really terrific lender and affiliates that really have your back.

Then if they’re not a common denominator and all of that is good, well, you take the lumps and we move on and sell them again.

If you are a real estate agent or broker that is looking to for more insight and direction on how to get more listings, sell more homes to your investors, and work with more buyers, then this podcast is just for you!

Q: I am struggling with time management. I don’t have an assistant so I am it. I get bogged down servicing as opposed to prospecting. It’s got to be my biggest challenge.

Well, I would imagine most people would probably agree it’s a problem for them. And you know, I don’t want to simplify because when you don’t have an assistant, and with the complexity of the deals, and with the seller’s demands, it is difficult to manage it all. Here is what I would suggest though. I want you to think about it this way. If you were on a million dollar listing appointment, would you answer your email, would you answer your text, would you work on anything else but that million dollar listing opportunity? Probably not, right? You’d have the time blocked and be totally focused.

So the first step is if you guys can really look at your day and say…

“I’ve got to time block big chunks where I’m in a sense on a lockdown, where I’m not multitasking, texting, emailing, taking this phone call and that phone call. That’s going to happen in my day but I’ve got to set aside time to 1) grow my business with my lead generation and 2) I’ve got to set aside a little bit of time to work on my business.”

 So listening to this right now, you’re working on your business. You know, developing or implementing something new on your website or your social media, you’re working on your business. So you’ve got to chunk out sometimes. Now, I get it that you can’t be off the reservation for half a day or your clients will go nuts. But you could be busy for an hour. You could change your voicemail and say, “It’s Thursday morning, and I’m with clients this morning, or I’m in a meeting this morning, or I’m on calls this morning. If you need to reach me, please know I’ll be calling you back at 12 o’clock.”

Because see, I find that if they know that you’re not available at the moment, and they know when you’re going to be available, that they’re a lot more likely to be okay with that and to be patient.

So I want you guys to think about this thought…

Multitasking is not a virtue, it is a sin. It does not work well. It creates stress, it causes mistakes, it stretches out the work.

So if you can lock and load and make your contacts, then you can go through your emails and voicemails and do your negotiations, you would be a lot better off.

Now, because you’re all busy, I would do a few other things also. Make sure you stay as organized as you can. And I’ll tell you what I mean by that. If you guys could see my desk right now, I have a table behind my back, where I lay out my projects, and I put sticky notes on them of due dates. Then on my desk right now I have a scratch pad, a calculator, my bottle of water, and my phone and computer. That’s it. So I don’t allow any clutter, because clutter slows me down.

The next thing is really letting your family and your friends know what your schedule is, so they are not distracting you when they don’t need you in a business day.

Then I would encourage you to eliminate anything from your world that isn’t necessary or important to you, okay? So you really want to lean it out, because you’ve got a lot of burden on you in terms of work.

Then I would encourage you guys to educate your clients. When is the best time to reach you? How will you be communicating with them? So that they aren’t quite so demanding and needy.

And again, I know that it’s much more complicated than all of that, but if you could just find a couple of things to fine tune and control it makes a huge difference.

Now the other thought would be leaning on your affiliates and vendors, making sure that you’re utilizing them to their highest and best use for you. And that doesn’t mean taking advantage of them. That just means really utilizing what they can do for you. And then I would encourage all of you to keep a time log. For the next couple of weeks carry a scratch pad around with you and as you change your activities throughout your day just make a note of what you’re doing and that way you’re going to start to be very aware of where the time is being wasted, what’s consuming a lot of your time and where you might be able to make some changes.

If you are a real estate agent or broker that is looking to for more insight and direction on how to get more listings, sell more homes to your investors, and work with more buyers, then this podcast is just for you!

Q: I call my database 3-4 times a year but sometimes it seems to get a little bit old, going through the stats, letting them know what the latest interest rates are, maybe the latest sold in their neighborhood. Do you have some fresh ideas?

 I think really one of the most popular is the annual real estate review because it really doesn’t matter what time of the year that is it just makes sense that whether they’re thinking of buying or selling or not it’s a good idea once a year to have the value of their home updated. Now I’m not saying send comparables out to everyone, I’m saying offer the review. And when they take you up on it dig in a little deeper and find out if there’s something going on.

Also talk to them about investment opportunities. You could say, “You know, I get a lot of clients calling me asking me if this is a good time to buy an investment so I just thought I might reach out to you to see if you have any questions or if you have any friends or family who have an interest. So see, if you actually wrote down every possible thing, and let’s face it, we get bored hearing our own self talk but that doesn’t mean that they’re bored. So I think it’s important to have some themes written down, it could be move up, downsize, someone who’s renting who might like to buy, someone who might like to buy an investment property, the questions they have, the annual real estate review, a listing or sale in the area, an open house to invite them to, an event to invite them to.

That’s enough right there, and if you went through that list and started over they wont remember what you talked to them about 3, 4, 5, 6 months ago. So while I like the idea of having a general theme when you’re calling through on that next cycle, I also think it’s really powerful then to, in addition, customize that theme to what you think they might be interested in. So you know if you sold them that house a long time ago and they must be bursting at the seams, perfect, talk to them about move up. If you know their kids moved out of the home and they’re an empty nester, perfect, talk to them about downsizing with distinction.

So helpful, valuable, relevant information. Make your list, you note on the calendar what you talked about in that cycle, move up to the next and ultimately cycle right back through and repeat those things again. But the most important thing is to make the calls.

If you are a real estate agent or broker that is looking to for more insight and direction on how to get more listings, sell more homes to your investors, and work with more buyers, then this podcast is just for you!

Q: Should I use a sign-up sheet at an open house?

Well, only as a backup. Your goal always should be to won contact information from people and to book an appointment within 48 hours if you can, so use the sign in sheet on the way out the door after they’ve looked at the property. Now, some people are very, very reluctant to sign on or give you their email or phone number, but just do your best effort to guide them and to kind of make it a part of conversation. Then, of course, you could engage them with questions on their way out. How soon are you looking to move into a new home? Some people will answer that. Some people won’t. It happens at open houses every weekend all over the country.

That’s just human behavior, but the more you engage them in conversation the more they will see your professionalism and the more you have an opportunity to get this information. So I encourage you to have a script in your own way, in your own words, as people are exiting. Have a brochure or personal sheet about yourself with your name and contact information and as they’re finished looking at the home just to your best to get to first base with them to get that contact information.

If you are a real estate agent or broker that is looking to for more insight and direction on how to get more listings, sell more homes to your investors, and work with more buyers, then this podcast is just for you!