Archives – January, 2010
REM Magazine is a print based newspaper focusing on the Canadian Real Estate Business. An article in their latest issue by its publisher Heino Molls spoke of the troubles traditional media such as his paper are having these days. Some of the woes Molls talks about out are:
- “General newspaper readership is down”
- “Some newspapers are looking desperately for new ways to generate revenue that they have lost, mostly from classified ads, but they don’t know how”
- “Producing a good newspaper is simple. Making money on it is hard”
- “To get good writers you have to pay good money. That’s the hard part” (more…)
January 29, 2010
It’s said that more business is done on the golf course than in the board room, so why can’t the same be true for breakfast, lunch or dinner meetings? Breakfast meetings would be particularly good for executives as they’re often known as early risers.
Now things can get even more interesting and fruitful for real estate professionals who use technology to facilitate their meetings. Imagine what you could do with a local online based referral group. This too could be done on a shoestring or non-existent budget. (more…)
January 28, 2010
Referral groups can also help brokers and brokerage owners. Let’s say there are 8 neighborhoods in your region and you have at least one person in your office regularly working and living in each of those neighborhoods. You could assign the most capable people in your office to start their own referral group in their neighborhood. There can be some great synergy to this. When each of these professionals does their 30-45 minute presentation at the meeting, they would make it very clear that they only work that particular neighborhood, but if any of the people there knows of people buying or selling soon in any of the other 7 neighborhoods the office covers, they should contact them and they will pass the referral on to the appropriate person. If that person does business with this referred person then they would have to pay a referral fee to the rep who gave them the referral.
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January 27, 2010
The worst thing you can do is have 2-3 meetings and give up because you haven’t gotten any referrals yet. Remember, you’re not spending any money here, so don’t expect overnight results. Rather, stick at it and change things about the group if you’re not getting the results you want soon enough. If people are giving you referrals but they aren’t turning into customers, re-educate your club’s members during one of your presentations about the exact types of prospects you’re looking for. Give them handouts so they can remember this information better. You want to tell them these are your ideal prospects:
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January 26, 2010
Let’s talk about some of the cons of referral groups. First, there is sometimes a kind of pressure to refer business to people in the group. It’s kind of like the pressure some people get from family. For instance, you might be expected to give your business to cousin Jim because he’s a carpenter, but you don’t want to because the guy’s a train wreck. The same thing applies with these referral groups. As you get to know these people better, see their 30-45 minute presentation and speak with other people in the group who have referred business to them, you’ll get a good sense of whether you can trust these people and how good they are at what they do. By no means should you give into peer pressure and refer business to people in the group you don’t trust because then you risk being the one that looks bad in the end.
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January 25, 2010
BNI started the concept of the referral group and many copy-cat groups have started as well. (Your area may have some right now. The Toronto area has plenty). Each week a BNI chapter meets at the same location and time, usually either for breakfast or lunch at a local establishment. People tend to live near the chapters they attend, so these chapters can be a prime way of getting referrals to prospects in the neighborhood. Each chapter has only one person from each profession to prevent competition between members (a good thing and a bad thing as I’ll explain later). I once looked at some research on BNI chapters in Ontario and real estate professionals were one of the top three most represented professions in Ontario. So you may find it difficult to join a BNI chapter because most already have a real estate professional. Of course, you can always start your own chapter. It’s especially good to start a chapter if your neighborhood or greater area doesn’t have one.
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January 22, 2010
It seems everyone is after our money these days. Of course, we have a finite amount of money (well, most of us anyway), and so we’re very careful about what we spend on our real estate business. We’re especially careful in slower times like the winter where relatively little money is coming in with our businesses. But you don’t necessarily have to spend ANY money to get new prospects coming your way! All you really need is time for a particular strategy I’m going to talk about in this article, and I’m sure you’ve got lots of time on your hands, especially during the winter months. And this strategy can REALLY work well for you with some time, persistence and creativity. In fact, you can very easily even have it making money for you while delivering more listings! And it doesn’t even need to use computers.
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January 21, 2010
These are the people you want to follow up with via a personal email or via telephone. If you find some of your prospects are consistently clicking on links to your emails advertising current listings, you can be pretty sure these people are close to or are actively seeking to buy or sell their home. (more…)
January 20, 2010
These relationships are based on a deal the ESP makes with them. The ESP will say to the ISP, “all of our customers have opt-in, permission based lists, so their emails to these lists are not spam. Therefore, please allow all of the emails sent from us to go directly into your clients’ email accounts, bypassing the spam filtering technologies you use”. This is very important because most people infrequently or never check their spam folders, so you don’t want your emails going there. (more…)
January 19, 2010
An interesting report recently came out on spam and fits well with email church doctrine. The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) released its new spam report which looks at spam budgets, impact of spam and spam management.
The survey targeted email service providers of different types and sizes, and received replies from 100 respondents from 30 different countries, throughout the EU (26/27 EU Member States); and 80 million mailboxes managed. The survey analyzes how e-mail service providers combat spam in their networks, and identifies the state of art in the fight against spam. The report’s biggest claim is less than 5% of all email traffic is delivered to mailboxes. This means the vast majority of all emails (95%) are classified as spam and are either directed into spam folders or blocked (IE the recipient never receives it at all). (more…)
January 18, 2010
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