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.  Continue reading →

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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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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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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